For example:

“If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.”

If you accept the premise of this question, that you have to choose between the wellbeing of corporations and of “humanity” then you have already conceded to a point of left-wing dogma (that trade is to a large extent zero-sum). Economic liberals would argue that the success of trans-national corporations and “humanity” are complementary and thus we do not have to choose between them.

“Those with the ability to pay should have the right to higher standards of medical care.”

Describing medical care as a “right” so the question of differential amounts of care becomes a question of unequal rights automatically concedes the leftist belief that health care is a right. If the statement was written: “Rich people should be allowed to spend their money on purchasing medical care” then I suspect many more people would agree with it.

“A genuine free market requires restrictions on the ability of predator multinationals to create monopolies.”

The issue of competition policy is one that certainly does divide conservatives from libertarians. However, the use of the words “multinational” (evil foreigners) and “predator” seem designed to make the statement non-neutral. Anyone in favour of “predators”? I thought not.

“It’s natural for children to keep some secrets from their parents.”

There are some odd ones like this. I’m not sure if agreeing with it is supposed to make you authoritarian, libertarian, conservative, leftist. Strange.

On the whole it is a decent quiz, although a few improvements wouldn’t go amiss.

Now financier George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of “free-market fundamentalism,” among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees.

So that’s the developers of a simple model of unemployment, a model of used car sales, simple signalling models and models of production based on completely insane and inane assumptions. Count me out: I don’t believe a man’s ability to manipulate simple algebra means I should listen to his opinions on the structure of the state whether that algebra won him a Nobel Prize or not.

The problem with a lot of old school economics and economists is this: they were taught that free markets were good for the wrong reasons. Those reasons don’t hold up in the real world so they conclude that free markets aren’t good. This logic is obviously flawed, the form: A implies B. Not A therefore not B.

One of the main benefits of a free market is its role in transmitting information. This role is completely ignored in many of the models whose falsehood Stiglitz et al. believe provides an argument against the free market.