Last night, I posted a message here from Barry Short, candidate of the Libertarian Party for a seat in the Utah House of Representatives. I accidentally typoed and gave his name as Barry Pearl, who's another fellow I know. I've corrected that and I thought by way of apology to Barry S., I'd link you to the website for his candidacy, in case you want to know more about him or are inclined to donate.
Short's site contains a link to this brief quiz…one of those "where do you fall on the political spectrum?" deals. This one was crafted by a Libertarian group so it's perhaps skewed to try and convince you that whatever else you think you may be, you're a Libertarian. It gave me a "personal" issues score of 90% and an "economic" issues score of 40% and placed me on the graph within the area marked Liberal but darn close to the dividing line into Libertarian. That feels about right to me but I don't particularly vouch for this test. I probably did not score high on their "economic" measure because I think "privatizing" Social Security is largely a scheme for Goldman Sachs to get their mitts on folks' retirement money. I also would not say (and would think it irresponsible to say) that government spending should be cut by 50% without knowing which 50% would get cut.
On the "personal" side, I guess I lost 10% because I answered "Maybe" to the question about not having a National I.D. card. In raw theory, I suppose I'm afraid that such a thing would abuse rights…but I'm more afraid of the labyrinth we now have of identifying everyone by their Drivers License, credit card numbers, date of birth and/or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Seems to me that carries all the risks of a National I.D. card and is a sloppier way to go about it. What I think I'd like to see is a voluntary National I.D. card — something you could sign up for if you wanted it. I assume Libertarians would have no problem with that. And if it turned out that businesses would insist on it or they wouldn't take your checks or make certain services available to you…well, that's the Free Market at work, right?