More importantly, as someone pointed out earlier in the comments, this is about education. This graph (and my earlier attempts at better ways to explain politics) were about better depicting things, not about perfect placement of people on graphs.

As usual, libertarian folks are so busy nitpicking fine points …..

Frankly, I don’t consider myself either one, because I couldn’t give a damn who owns the means of production as long as the Lockean rules are followed.

Hey, Dan Clore, welcome from the bowels of Usenet. You’ll find Constantinople at Distributed Republic. Jim Donald and G*rd*n are AWOL, I think. I haven’t seen Ron Allen either, thankfully.

The main reason I suspect Obama would be relatively pro-free market as President is from his relationships with a lot of people at the University of Chicago, all of whom describe someone who is willing to really listen to opposing viewpoints and absorb some of those points.

Fair enough. I, however, would still never vote for him or McCain. He’s still too far left for my tastes.

I’d move Roosevelt farther left and up also. Honestly, think about FDR’s legacy.

Are we judging people by the intent behind their actions or by the consequences of their actions?

his ultmate vision was for a society that required no government at all.

Admittedly, I’ve not read Marx. Is his vision for society something akin to what many smaller Native American tribes had, where each family looked after each other family, if only for no other reason than for survival?

Keep in mind that Obama’s truly anti-market rhetoric occured at a time when Hillary was doing everything she could to paint him as a free market elitist (remember the Goolsbee flap?). Now that he no longer has to pander to the Hillary Clinton totalitarians, he’s brought back a lot of his comparatively pro-market rhetoric (look at his speech last week for an example).

Only time will tell. How can anyone be sure whether his Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde persona is the real him?

In any event, for those who want to call Obama a Marxist, etc. I would suggest looking at where the Political Compass actually places him on the scale.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008

Now that Al Gore is giving Obama his approval and the two seem to be teaming up, its clear that Obama is going to campaign on an environmental and anti big-business platform and eventually implement a full-scale command economy. These guys want living standards and population brought back to 1930s levels, and they mean it.

I do agree with U.C.’s opinion about the tests limitations though (but all tests like this have limitations; it’s far more comprehensive than the Nolan Quiz).

I’m aware of the compass. I fit +7.88 on the economic scale, and -6.21 on the social scale as of the last time I took the test.

I took the Political Compass test and came out at almost exactly the same spot as Milton Friedman. However I thought a lot of those questions were guilty of the fallacy of the excluded middle (and a definite note of anti-corporate bias) in the questions asked and their possible answers, so I’m not really sure how accurate that was. For example, I’m of the opinion that companies should not be heavily regulated by the government and I don’t think they have a “duty” to do things for “the good of humanity” instead of themselves, but not to the point where I think they should be able to do whatever they want (i.e. engaging in theft or defrauding their customers) so I’ll concede that some level of regulation is probably necessary. I didn’t feel that subtlety was caught in the questions dealing with that particular topic. The Q & A came off as fairly either-or even though they gave two variations on the yes-no answers.

So far as Marx goes, he’s a slippery character, not only because he kept changing his positions, but because his best-known system involves more than one step: first the establishment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the stage between capitalism and socialism/communism, which will be quite statist, then the withering away of the state (uh-huh), and finally the stateless, communist society. (Also note that in response to the Paris Commune he seems to have started to believe that the transition to socialism/communism would be much more direct.)

You’re likely more attuned to Obama’s platform than I am, so I can’t necessarily dispute your placement.

I do agree with your account of GWB, as well. I think this graph was created a few years ago, before we realized how horrendous he was.