I mentioned the "Political Compass" website in my post from the other day about coming back from "the brink" of left extremism. I've done this test several times before now, and as I mentioned have usually come out way in the bottom left of the chart - in the anarcho-syndicalist area I suppose.

I still think some of the questions are a little awkward. My main concern is that, like many of this sort of questionnaire it assumes to an extent that "private" equals "corporate". I think that there are many models of business and social support and some of them are collectivist, but that such collectivism should be voluntary and not coercive by governments.

So, while I am quite happy saying that, for example, I strongly agree that the sole social duty of a corporation is to return profit to their shareholders" I don't necessarily believe that a corporation is the only way of successfully organizing production. Is that too much of a contradiction?

Anyway - these quandaries, I would suspect, pull me back from being on the very far right of the economic scale, but I am quite surprised (and not entirely unpleasantly), to be, for the first time, to the right of the origin in the left-right economic axis. And definitely pleased to remain in the near anarchist area of the authoritarian-libertarian axis:

Economic Left/Right: 1.63

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69



Interestingly, from their analysis of contemporary politicians and such like, there is nobody in this whole quadrant. They do put Friedman in this area, much further to the right but also much closer to neutral on liberatarian/authoritarian issues, which I suspect misunderstands him by painting him solely as an economic ideologist. And just as interestingly they feel Tony Blair is further right and more authoritarian than the supposedly right wing Angela Merkel.