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Where Do You Actually Stand?

Most political quizzes ask two questions and call the answer a map. Three come apart here, and the third is the one that does the work: how the economy should be arranged, how much of the settled order is up for renegotiation, and whether anybody may be compelled at all. That last one cuts across the other two, which is why the person who wants collective ownership without a state and the person who wants free markets without one stop being the same dot.

Thirty-eight statements, about seven minutes, and a point inside a cube. Answer for what you actually think, not for what the side you usually agree with is supposed to think.

38 questions

Answered 0 of 38

  1. 1 Letting people trade freely is how most of what is worth having got made.
  2. 2 Expertise is a real thing and deferring to it is not weakness.
  3. 3 Institutions drift toward serving themselves unless something outside them intervenes.
  4. 4 Things everybody needs should not be sold at whatever price they will fetch.
  5. 5 Force is what an argument reaches for when it has run out.
  6. 6 People keeping what they earn is the arrangement that has produced the most.
  7. 7 The way people are expected to live has changed for the better in my lifetime.
  8. 8 Most of what makes life bearable was built by requiring things of people who would not have volunteered.
  9. 9 When the public and the professionals disagree, the professionals are usually protecting something.
  10. 10 I would take a smaller economy that shared more over a larger one that shared less.
  11. 11 The people a settled arrangement leaves out are the reason to change it.
  12. 12 Arrangements that have been in place a long time are due for examination rather than deference.
  13. 13 Some things work better when nobody is trying to make money from them.
  14. 14 When somebody builds something, most of what it earns should be theirs.
  15. 15 A question is better settled by people who have studied it than by a vote.
  16. 16 A rule that cannot be justified now should not survive on the grounds that it is old.
  17. 17 A group of people living together has to be able to require things of its members.
  18. 18 A process with rules and records produces better answers than a public mood does.
  19. 19 Reformers routinely underestimate what a working arrangement was doing.
  20. 20 Continuity is worth something in itself, separate from whether each rule is right.
  21. 21 Slowness in an institution is often care rather than obstruction.
  22. 22 Evening out what people end up with costs more than it delivers.
  23. 23 When something goes badly wrong, the people in charge are rarely the ones who pay for it.
  24. 24 I would rather a good outcome went unachieved than have it imposed.
  25. 25 What a society produces is a common product before it is anybody's income.
  26. 26 The right to opt out matters more to me than what most people want.
  27. 27 Ordinary people's judgment about what should happen is worth more than a specialist's.
  28. 28 Changing settled expectations quickly costs more than the change is usually worth.
  29. 29 Something that has held up for generations has been tested in ways an argument cannot test it.
  30. 30 Consent is not available at the scale a society actually runs at.
  31. 31 Somebody has to be able to settle a question when people disagree.
  32. 32 A decision everybody has to live with is better made by somebody than by nobody.
  33. 33 Most of what gets called common sense is a habit that went unexamined.
  34. 34 Being able to leave is what makes a rule legitimate.
  35. 35 An arrangement I did not agree to has no claim on me.
  36. 36 I have backed something that would have cost me money.
  37. 37 I would rather repair an old arrangement than replace it.
  38. 38 Prices carry information that cannot be gathered any other way.