When you compare governments (modern or historic), it looks like good governments are those that do several foundational things very well, and that almost all the benefits of good governance flow from these things. These foundational things are often those that reduce the incentive to make personal investments in political outcomes. Unfortunately, this means people living under good government tend to become blind the reasons why their government is actually good.

For example, not having to bribe low-level officials is worth at least 10000 correct decisions on the latest gun-control proposal. Some other examples would be avoiding patron-client patterns, having a meritocratic bureaucracy, being able to collect taxes from everyone, having a non-political military and an independent judiciary, keeping kinship away from politics, not having civil/religious/ethic violence, having some sort of consensus that markets are okay, and so on.

My country (USA) does a pretty decent of most of the foundational issues. However, when I look at the distribution of my fellow citizens strategies, I still think it would be good if more people just patterned matched political issues against something like corruption or balance of power, and cared less about things like gay marriage, gun rights, abortion, etc.

I generally call myself a quasi-libertarian. I am in favor of basic income. That seems to be something libertarians would be against, but I feel like it's the most libertarian way of helping the poor. They talk about how giving money to the poor is just paying them to be poor, and how minimum wage introduces deadweight costs. Basic income does neither of these. I also think no taxes and subsidies is a good schelling point, but when externalities get strong enough, it's worth while to let the government tax or subsidize it.

by which I mean that I want the government to hurt people less

What makes this a specifically libertarian position? I imagine pretty much every political faction wants the government to hurt people less. They often disagree on whether particular government actions are hurting people on balance, though.

Do you think the right way to get the government to hurt people less is to significantly reduce the government's interaction with people (as opposed to, say, simply changing the nature of the interaction)? That might make you something like a libertarian.

I put 'other' and wrote 'technocracy', by which I mean rule of experts/replacement of elections with standardised tests. And I don't mean that the country should be run by someone with an IQ of 180 and no social skills, the tests should also measure aspects such as ability to detect lies/lie, emotional control, credence calibration and so forth. The tests and criteria would also be non-uniform, so a foreign minister would require more social skills then the health minister.

I could go on, but suffice to say this should solve all the problems the NRx people identify with democracy, without putting all power in a single point of failure who is chose on the basis of being inbred.

I'm a pro-U.S. military libertarian. I have the standard free market libertarian beliefs but think that the world is a vastly better place because of U.S. military power which has done much to reduce the harm that governments cause. Basically, I find it historically exceptional that the United States doesn't use its military dominance to rule or extract tribute from rich but relatively weak nations such as Canada, Japan, and much of Western Europe. I attribute the post-WWII peace in Western Europe and South America mostly to the fact that the U.S. would slap down an attempt by one country to invade another.

The possibility that the government is giving too much to poor people is low on my list of concerns. I also believe that harm-causing processes should be shut down before support systems

Harm causing is endemic to the government "support" systems for the poor, who face the highest effective marginal tax rates of anyone, often exceeding 100%, and huge penalties for marriage and cohabitation.

Both Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, who are about as canonically libertarian as it gets, favor social welfare policies that are approximately geolibert... (read more)

I generally call myself a "technical libertarian," by which I mean I am libertarian for technical reasons, not because I 'technically' fit the definition. I think a lot about systems and designing them, and Hayek's concept of 'information cost' seems fundamental to designing any economic or political system. I typically contrast myself with "moral libertarians," who reason from rights to policy, because I think most rights get ludicrous when taken to extremes. (Rothbard claims, at one point, that the principled libertarian position on p... (read more)

I'm a traditional leftist/tax-and-spend liberal but anti-abortion. It could be my catholic upbringing, but it just seems incredibly obvious to me, a "you must be this rational to ride" line, that killing the same entity inside someone else is just as bad as killing it outside.

(Pro-abortion is coherent if you are pro-infanticide - really pro it, not just the "lol yeah delicious babies" kind we sometimes see on LW. And there's a coherent position of "the line needs to be somewhere and birth is the Schnelling point, so I'm contingently pro-abortion but anti-infanticide, pro tem". But I don't think many pro-abortion folk would endorse that position. )

I'm honestly not sure what my political views are. When I vote I am left to far-left by default, but if I can find a candidate that is against corruption I will vote for them regardless of their other political views. However, I harbor substantial sympathy towards anarcho-communism/OWS/etc. even though I know it likely wouldn't work in practice. Keeping in contact with idealists is good for my mental health.

I seem to be one of the tiny number of people on LW who are conservative but not a "neo-reactionary." I'm socially conservative in the sense that I think the classical virtues are real virtues--I would like to live in a society that supports the classical virtues in its people.

I don't fit into ordinary US-conservatism on most levels. I'm very anti-interventionist and I think the US has had a profoundly destructive role in the world since the cold war era began. I'm not against "big government" as long as it isn't wasteful or overly complex. I'm also a transhumanist, but I don't really think transhumanism is inherently anti-conservative.

I wrote in "Federalist". I believe Texas should be governed by Texan values and California should be governed by Californian values.

I wouldn't suggest that this principle is the highest principle, but it seems obvious that it should be somewhere high up in the ranking of principles (say, #3). People often try to argue that because we can't make federalism the highest principle, it shouldn't be a principle at all. That seems totally wrong to me.

I consider pluralism to be important. Very often having good governance and organisations you check and balance each other is more important the specific "issues".

Liberal here, I think my major heresy is being pro-free trade.

Also, I'm not sure if there's actually a standard liberal view of zoning policy, but it often feels like the standard view is that we need to keep restrictive zoning laws in place to keep out those evil gentrifiers, in which case my support for loser zoning regulations is another major heresy.

You could argue I should call myself a libertarian, because I agree the main thrust of Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom. However, I suspect a politician running on Friedman's platform today wou... (read more)

Sounds like 'Left-Libertarian', which is what I put in on the last survey.

I believe that society should be organized so that people work collectively in a society focused on its own survival and power. My views are extremely collectivist, in that, the relationship between the society and its people would be a lot like the relationship between a body and its cells.

I would have to say: consequentialist, reflectively-coherent socialist. Marx's critiques of capitalism are mostly correct, the Soviet Union is entirely wrong, and for God's sakes, you don't get a correct politics by a priori political philosophy, you get one by looking at what makes a society people actually prefer to live in.

I don't have a "preferred label" to start with. I always have major difficulties with fitting into pigeonholes X-)