Many people derive great satisfaction from calling themselves either a liberal or a conservative. If you’re a liberal, you probably get a warm, fuzzy feeling from thinking that government can solve a myriad of social problems. If you’re a conservative, you probably are sure that all the world’s problems would be solved if the government would stop meddling in people’s economic lives.

If we take a step back from these reactionary positions, we can probably see that both economic and personal freedom are essential to human progress and required by a sense of justice.

Freedom, rightly understood, means both economic and personal freedom. Without either one, individuals cannot truly be free.

Economic freedom increases the living standards of all productive members of society. When we are free to do with ourselves and our labor as we choose, everybody benefits.

The "invisible hand," as Adam Smith put it, guides the self-interest of unrelated individuals so that our interests join for our mutual benefit. Economic order, prosperity, and freedom arise when individuals are allowed to pursue their enlightened self-interest.

Economic freedom, rather than being the source of oppression and alienation as Marx thought, is the true wellspring of freedom and material prosperity for all. However, economic freedom alone is not sufficient to ensure the justice of society. Personal freedom is a necessary component of justice and a means to human self-improvement and self-respect.

Personal freedom makes meaningful our autonomy as persons. Without respect for the autonomy of persons, individuals become cogs in a machine, subject to the arbitrary whims of others and subject to coercion by many institutions, including businesses and the state. Advocates of personal freedom rightly understand that without the freedom to think, speak, act, and express oneself as one likes, one is not truly free.

So, it seems as though both liberals and conservatives must be backwards in their thinking. They both say that they endorse freedom, when at best they only endorse limited forms of one kind of freedom or the other. Well, if that is true, both liberals and conservatives must be wrong, or freedom broadly construed must not be important.

So, liberals like personal freedom and conservatives like economic freedom, right? If you think that you’re either a liberal or a conservative, take the following political quiz created by Advocates for Self-Government (http://www.self-gov.org). Add up your points for each category (economic and personal freedom) and find where you stand on the accompanying graph.

So now that you know where you score, what do your rankings mean? The personal freedom scale measures your tolerance for the values, ideals, and lifestyles of others.

If you scored low on the personal freedom scale, you believe that your standards of morality, safety, and other social concerns should be enforced by the government. If you scored high on the personal freedom scale, you believe that people should be generally free to do as they choose, provided that they do not harm or force their ideas on others.

The economic freedom scale measures your personal responsibility as a part of the economy and the degree of responsibility that you think that others ought to take for their economic lives.

If you scored low on the economic freedom scale, you think that it is the job of the government to enforce certain distributions of wealth and economic power, as a good society cannot be achieved without such distributions. If you scored high on the economic freedom scale, on the other hand, you believe that people should be generally responsible for their own economic lives, and that free transactions are preferable to government planning.

As this quiz should make clear, the terms liberal and conservative do not adequately describe the whole of the political debate. They are inadequate measures of the complexity of political problems and the great variety of human beliefs and concerns. Similarly, and importantly, the questions asked in this political quiz are inadequate measures as well.

However, they compel one to think that perhaps our traditional ways of thinking about right and left are without foundation and dangerous if we use those conceptions as the basis for public policy.