The Nolan Chart vs. The Political Compass

Most modern American individualist laissez-faire free market libertarians are familiar with the Nolan chart, which asks a few simple questions about your political proclivities and then plots your answers on a two-axis grid rather than the traditional left-right linear scale.

The Nolan Chart as shown on the Nolan Chart
website. (image courtesy of The Nolan Chart)

But The Political Compass becomes a real head-scratcher in its attempt to map the entirety of the world's socio-politico-economic thought.

You're asked to "choose the response that best describes your feeling." (Note "feeling," which suggests the quiz isn't really about beliefs, but emotions.) You can respond to 62 sometimes confusing and incomprehensible questions in six different categories with Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, or Strongly Agree.

The website admits that most of its questions are slanted, and the big giveaway as to the direction of the slant is right there on the About The Political Compass page.

In referring to the old left-right linear scale as "essentially an economic line" the website acknowledges that it's proper to place Stalin on the far left, socialists on the near left, Margaret Thatcher on the near right and, on the far hard right, "that ultimate free marketeer..."

Who did they chose as an example? Adam Smith? Bastiat? Mises? Hayek? Rothbard? Ayn Rand? Singapore? Hong Kong under the Brits? No, their idea of "that ultimate free marketeer" is General Pinochet, the vicious dictator of Chile whose military regime allegedly "killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000." (Wikipedia).

The World's Smallest Political Quiz features
questions and chart on a business card.
(available free + shipping from Advocates For
Self-Government)
 

Here are a few quiz questions and some observations on them.

Question: "People are ultimately divided more by class than by nationality." Actually, people are ultimately divided by governments. In a free world, everyone could move from class to class and nation to nation, so this question would be moot.

Question: "Controlling inflation is more important than controlling unemployment." If you are employed but inflation makes eggs cost $10 apiece you're screwed, but if you're unemployed you're pretty much screwed even if the egg costs a nickel. Good luck with your answer.

Question: "Because corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily protect the environment, they require regulation." If "regulation" means "government regulation" there's a problem. In the libertarian socialist world, "libertarian" means "anarchist." Thus, the anarchist side of a libertarian socialist would be against government regulation because anarchists don't believe in government, but the socialist side of a libertarian socialist doesn't believe in corporations. Libertarian socialists are so screwed by this question.

The Political Compass, showing the ideology
of the three main UK parties as defined by an
article on the Political Chart website (image
from Wikimedia Commons).

Question: "There are no savage and civilised peoples; there are only different cultures." Multiculturalists love to agree with this. But if Hitler and Stalin and Mao Tse-tung were not savages who created savage cultures of mass murder, what would you call them?

Question: "Land shouldn't be a commodity to be bought and sold." Since socialists agree with this they'll score a "libertarian" point, but since American individualist libertarians don't agree you can bet they'll be scored as an "authoritarian."

But apparently not everyone associated with The Compass is a collectivist. On the Certificates page, cartoonist Ralph Izzard will sell you a caricature of "your most loved and loathed political figures" for around $9.00.

So apparently Izzard is a capitalist in the modern American individualist libertarian laissez-faire free market sense of the word. Otherwise, he would be creating his caricatures "according to his ability" and giving them away free "to each according to his need"