Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Coming clean for my readers: “What kind of conservative are you?”

After writing the prior post, I decided to have some fun. (It was either that or go tackle the ton of decorative rocks the good wife wants placed decoratively in the backyard.) So I Googled the following phrase: "what kind of conservative are you?" It kicked up a British online quiz for Tories:

My #1 result for the SelectSmart.com selector, What kind of Conservative are you?, is Libertarian Conservative.

Oh to have been a Tory in England when Lady Thatcher was in charge! Turning to the US, on the well-known Kamber and O'Leary scale, I scored a 34, which slots me between Jack Kemp (30) and Bob Dole (35), but well-short of Ronald Reagan (maxing out the scale at 40). Bummer. On the other hand, at the World's Smallest Political Quiz I scored as a "Centrist" and am told "Centrists favor selective government intervention and emphasize practical solutions to current problems. They tend to keep an open mind on new issues. Many centrists feel that government serves as a check on excessive liberty." On yet another hand, however, at the distributive justice site (link via The Yin Blog), it was back to being a "right libertarian," which they describe as:

Right Libertarianism: "Theory that defends unlimited laissez-faire capitalism as the only morally justified regime. The main assumptions of this doctrine are twofold: the right of every individual to unlimited utilisation of his own person (self-ownership); and the right to unrestricted, or relatively mildly limited, appropriation of external resources. The first means that an individual has exclusive right to all the goods that are product of use of his talents and efforts. The second means that he has either the right to appropriate all natural resources which he finds and takes before others, or that such an appropriation is limited only by the fact that he must not put others in the position which is worse than the one in which they were before his acquisition of the resources. Furthermore, everything that an individual acquires with the help of his abilities, efforts, and use of thus appropriated resources, he can also freely exchange for the goods of others. If such a trade was voluntary, its results are just. This theory is interested only in this that the above procedures are satisfied and that nobody has used violence to take some goods from others. If things go that way, a distribution of resources is just regardless of its outcome, i.e. it is morally right no matter how much someone possesses at the end, and even if somebody does not have anything at all. Forceful intervention of the state for the sake of helping the poor is not allowed. The main representatives of this position are: F.A. Hayek, Jan Narveson, Robert Nozick."

Hmmm. Why no option for Tory with streaks of Catholic libertarian neo-conservative? With Russell Kirk and Michael Novak as "main representatives"? (One answer may be that the two strains co-exist only uneasily. Kirk had some very nasty things to say about neo-cons like Novak.) Just in case my favorite corp law blawger Mike O'Sullivan gets worried again, I hasten to reassure my regular readers that this is still mostly a corporate law and economics blog, with a sideline in wine tasting. But, what the heck, its the weekend.