Five questions for council candidates

The City Beat spent last week interviewing candidates for Grand Forks City Council and, frankly, they're all starting to sound alike.

I knew this would happen. Who doesn't want to cut property taxes this year?

So, to set these candidates apart, I decided to throw in a little political philosophy. All the candidates were given five statements, which they had to rank from 1 to 6, 1 being complete disagreement and 6 being complete agreement.

The statements are as follows:

1) The city should not provide services that the private sector can provide.
2) More mills must be cut even if that means reducing services.
3) The answer to a social problem is new laws.
4) Charging fees for services ("pay-to-play") is more fair than using tax dollars.
5) The current city government is open and transparent.

Here's how the candidates replied.

Just to amuse myself, I divided the statements into "conservative" and "liberal," ignoring the fifth one, which is neither. Then I graphed the candidates' answers and named the graph "Who's most conservative?" Don't take it seriously, I was just fooling around. Labels are stupid.

The idea came from some political orientation tests I'd taken in the past. The tests are supposed demonstrate that "conservative" and "liberal" aren't nuanced enough to describe a person's true political leanings. One example is the test at the Political Compass Web site. I took the test and it says I'm a Commie, just like Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.