Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it.

You don't take what isn't yours. You don't lie to get your way. You don't push people around. You make your case and let people choose. Most people hold to that, then make exceptions for government and elected officials. Libertarians broadly reject these exceptions.

In one sentence: Libertarians would rather persuade you than force you, and would rather be persuaded than forced.

The idea in three steps

It starts with something you can see in your own life.

1People do better when they are persuadedFamilies, friendships, congregations, markets and neighborhoods all work this way. Everywhere, in every age, people flourish less when they are coerced, robbed, or defrauded, and more when they are persuaded and left to cooperate freely.

2So ask, don't forceSettle things by persuasion and voluntary agreement. Make your case, accept that the other person can say no, and be ready to be persuaded yourself. That is the whole method, and it works on any question.

3No title makes it rightTaking someone's money, closing their shop, or jailing them for what they put in their own body is force. It would be wrong if a neighbor did it, and an office or an election does not change what the act is. So when the quiz asks how much the government should run your life and your livelihood, a libertarian mostly answers less.

The quiz scores two things separately: how much freedom you want in your personal life, and how much in how you earn and spend. The gold region is every cell where someone answered "less" more often than not on both. Each dot is thirty people.

You don't have to agree about everything

You can be strong on personal freedom and middling on the economy, or the other way round, and still land in the gold. You can disagree with everyone else there about a hundred things. You do not have to join anything, read anything, or agree with anyone else who uses the word. What the region shares is a direction: less government in your life and your livelihood.

Drawn that way, the region holds 27% of the people who take the quiz.

Among 146,944 people who completed the quiz, July 1 to October 26, 2026. They chose to take it, so they are a self-selected sample of quiz takers. A national survey of American adults will sit beside them in the report.

Same train, different stops

You don't have to want the smallest possible government to belong here.

Libertarians have an old image for this, the freedom train. Everyone who wants less government is aboard, headed the same way, and the stations along the line are degrees of smaller government. Some passengers get off early, at lower taxes and fewer rules. Some ride to constitutional limits, strictly kept. Some stay on to the end of the line. While the train is barely out of the station, every stop it passes is progress for everyone aboard, so the argument about where to get off can wait.

Gene Burns, the talk radio host, made it a stump speech in 1983, and Murray Rothbard borrowed it from him. In 1987 David Bergland put it to a room of high school students, with Marshall Fritz, who founded Advocates for Self-Government, in the room. Bergland placed himself at 100 on both scales, then said plenty of good people who call themselves libertarian would not ride all the way. The quiz measures which way you lean, and every cell in the gold is a stop on the same line.

The image has one weakness: a train that never leaves the station carries no one anywhere. That is why this site keeps a ledger of what moved, and why it asks you to come aboard at whichever stop you choose.

The line runs up the middle of the gold, from the first stop past the moderate border to the end of the line at 100 and 100. Every dot along it is a passenger who got on.

Most people who hold these views have never used the word

Before the quiz shows a result, it asks what you call yourself. Put that answer next to where people land and they fall into three groups.

23.9%Hold the positions, never used the wordThe largest group by far: 28,138 people who answered "less" on both counts and call themselves something else, or nothing. If you have felt politically homeless, you may be one of them, and you are in large company. 3.4%Use the word, and hold the positionsThey call themselves libertarian and the quiz agrees: 3,998 of the 117,938 people who answered. Rarer than the word's reputation suggests. 1.8%Use the word, land somewhere else2,161 people call themselves libertarian and score in another region. The word means different things to different people, which is why the count goes by the answers.

Of everyone who holds the positions, 12% use the word. For every person who calls themselves libertarian, there are 5.2 who answer like one. If your answers land in the gold, the word is yours to use.

What the questions are

Ten statements. Agree, maybe or disagree. Two minutes.

Your life

Adults should be free to use recreational drugs without criminal penalties.
Government should not regulate private sexual conduct between consenting adults.
Government should not ban books from libraries or schools because of the ideas they contain.
People should be free to move across borders to live and work.
Citizens should be free to burn their own country's flag in protest.

Your livelihood

Taxes and government spending should both be cut significantly.
People should be able to start a business without government licenses or permits.
Prices and wages should be set by the market, not the government.
Businesses should face far fewer government regulations.
Parents should control their children's education, with tax money following the child.

Agree always means less government, so there is nothing to decode. Each answer is worth 20, 10 or 0, each set of five adds up to a score from 0 to 100, and the pair of scores lands on one of 121 cells. The method page has the matrix.

Which group are you in?Answer the ten questions

Go further

Where to read next, at Advocates for Self-Government and on this site.

Where this account comes from

Advocates for Self-Government has used the two-axis chart since 1985, the quiz since 1987, and the online quiz on its website since 1994. The account of the idea on this page is theirs: begin with how people flourish, and the method follows. The ten questions are that method, applied to the ordinary business of a government.