I find myself retaking this quiz once a year or so. The results seem to vary, though I seem to pretty consistently find myself two blocks away or so from the center. First I was in the center economically but libertarian socially. Then I was two in both ways, and now I've shifted to the right economically but in an anti-libertarian direction.

I find it a little bit funky because if anything I feel like I've shifted slightly back in to the libertarian direction from where I was two years ago (though I'm a whole lot less a libertarian than I was in college). If I created an index with a rating of 10 being completely conservative or libertarian and -10 representing being completely liberal or authoritarian, it would look something like the graph to the right

The red represents conservative/liberal and the blue libertarian/authoritarian. This probably lakes me look quite fickle, but the issues of the day change from year to year and a lot of it has as much to do with current events and the issues on the forefront than it does with an actual change in underlying philosophy. That said, my views on specific issues have changed as well. Living out here has given me a new appreciation to the notion of separation of church and state, for instance. Thrifthaven gave me a different view of the poor than I had recieved at the Bingham Barrios back in Houston. I'm sure that once I have children, things will shift again in one way or another.

But all in all, I think the underpinnings of my political philosophy (limited tax and regulation, market-oriented solutions to social problems, and a self-interested foreign policy) have remained relatively constant - much moreso than my personal philosophy and outlook on life. One of the interesting things about the graph - and I didn't intend it - is that the sum of my libertarian and conservative values actually remained 6 for the last few years, meaning that a lot of my shift towards conservatism came at the expense of libertarianism and my shift towards libertarianism came at the expense of conservatism.

By-and-large I tread about halfway between libertarian and conservative political philosophy. There's a little more liberal influence than there was a couple years ago, but even that gets bent in the prism of economic libertarianism and the conservative guarding of moral norms through which I see the world.

UPDATE: Then there's this quiz that Kevin pointed out, according to which I am somewhere between being a centrist and a libertarian. Most of the people who took the quiz and landed where I did apparently voted for Kerry. As Kevin notes, one must be a bit suspicious of a quiz that places John Kerry smack dab in the center. Like the first test, this one seems to lead the taker in a certain direction (some feel like "Do you believe that AIDS is wiping out Africa because god hates gays and blacks? No? Score one for liberal/libertarian").

You are a Social Liberal (60% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (66% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian

I find a couple things interesting here. First that the anarchists seemed somewhat divided between Bush and Kerry. One would suspect that they would lean in favor of the challenger whomever it was. It's extremely difficult for one to be socially conservative and have voted for Kerry, but a fair number of people that registered as socially liberal voted for Bush. This can probably be chalked up to Internet-libertarian bias, wherein most avid Internet users are more socially liberal than the general population at large. Totalitarians leaned towards Bush in the ballot-box, which is kinda goofy to consider that someone that voted for Bush could find their little box landed on Osama bin Laden. I'm not sure whether that was an oversight or whether the author(s) of the test thought that they were being clever.