Quizzes to Gauge Your Political Philosophy, and 2016 Candidates

As far as I’m concerned, a key gateway test of whether someone might be a libertarian is whether they get upset when ordinary people are mistreated or brutalized by government.

• Such as the case of an elderly couple who had their hotel stolen by government.
• Such as the case of the family grocer who had his bank account stolen by government.
• Such as when the government wanted to steal someone’s truck because a different person was arrested for drunk driving.

Though admittedly any decent person should get upset by those examples.

So perhaps we need something more detailed to identify supporters of limited government, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. So, when one of my friends sent me the “definitive political orientation test,” I immediately was tempted to see my score.

I don’t know if this or others are the “definitive” quizzes they claim to be, but it seems reasonably accurate. As you can see, I’m about as libertarian as you can be without being an anarchist who wants zero government.

Though I should point out that there aren’t any questions on anarchism. I think the test probably assumes anarchism if your answers are both anti-welfare state and anti-defense.

This “circle test” is probably a simpler way of determining where you are on the big government-some government-no government spectrum.

But the most more sophisticated measure of libertarianism is Professor Bryan Caplan’s test. I only got a 94 out of a possible 160, which sounds bad, but that was still enough for my views to be considered “hard-core.”

And since we’re looking at online surveys, here are my results from the “I Side With” quiz. I don’t endorse candidates (as if anyone would care), but this quiz suggests that Rand Paul is closest to my views, followed by Scott Walker and Marco Rubio.

For what it’s worth, I’m not exactly shocked to see Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders at the bottom. By the way, since we’ve shifted to a discussion of the 2016 race, I was the warm-up speaker for Governor Jeb Bush at a recent “Road to Reform” event in New Hampshire sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. Here’s what I said about fixing the budget mess in Washington. You can watch the entire event and also see what the governor said by clicking here. And for folks in Nevada, I’ll be the warm-up speaker for a similar event with Ted Cruz on August 14.

P.S. The most inaccurate political quiz was the one that classified me as a “moderate” with “few strong opinions.”