In response to Leanne’s politics test result:

Economic Conservative/Social Liberal

I think there is (possibly naive) optimism at the heart of all Libertarian’s world view. We believe that people aren’t so stupid that they should have decisions made for them by the state. We believe that private enterprise, on the whole, does a better job of running services to the satisfaction of its customers if it is lightly- or un-regulated and that people should understand that what they choose to spend their money on is their responsibility.

In the UK there has been a lot of discussion in the media about the mis-selling of Endowment mortgages. Many thousands of families are discovering, to their cost, that the mortgage that they thought guaranteed their house would be paid for after a certain period will not do that. This problem is a result of a regulated industry actively telling customers not to worry or find out anything about what they are buying and to rely entirely on an ‘independent’ financial adviser (IFAs) working on commission. That’s not to suggest that all IFAs, or even any, were not working in the customer’s interests, only that customers who were told to purchase something cannot simultaneously be expected to make a responsible decision about the risk involved.

Equally, the government should not tax people and then give them tax credits, it should not tax them and then spend that money on government self-advertisement and it should not tax them and then spend it on charity. In the US charitable donations are higher than in the UK. That’s not because Americans are more generous, just that they are taxed less and know that the state provides less support to the needy.

I would rather pay a proportion of my wages to charities than be told by the government to give it to them and for them to decide what is a deserving charity. Again, the Chancellor gives tax relief to charitable donations – 28% of your donation will be added by the Chancellor so that the charity gets more… This requires paperwork and must, therefore, incure some extra cost. Wouldn’t it make sense to reduce the income tax rate by whatever percentage that would account for the tax relief generated by charitable giving in the previous year so that people could donate that amount plus the reduction in tax due to the reduction in commiserate costs if they wished?

Economic Socialist and Social Conservative

What your beliefs suggest is that you are more realistic (or pessimistic) about the ability of people to carry on their own life without instruction. It suggests you wish the government to provide health care and education in a monopolistic way so that private providers do not introduce the vagaries of market capitalism. I would expect you to be uncomfortable with a school sponsored by Coca Cola for example (though, bizarrely, the UK has schools being built by supermarket chains and schools being run by apparently benevolent private sponsors).

The Social Conservative part of your attitude has probably more to do with your religion that with any political ideology. Subjugation is a feature (I’m not judging here) of religion and it would be incompatible with religious belief to believe in absolute freedom – God has ultimate power in a theistic world.