As an ideology, libertarianism rests on the premise that the only credible and just agent of choice and personal direction is the unfettered individual. Thus, any effort by an external agent (such as a government or other political institution) to shape an individual’s life beyond the individual’s consent not only harms individual liberty, but also deprives the person of opportunities to assume personal responsibility and thereby compromises the person’s human potential. Libertarians thus regard the political world as the use of power at the expense of personal liberty, and they seek to significantly limit the scope of government activities.
Within the legitimate realm of government action, libertarianism generally permits (with some variation) the government to engage in the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts between private persons, the arrest and prosecution of criminal activity (which primarily includes acts of violence against persons and the theft or damage of property), and the defense of national sovereign borders and coastline. Beyond these limited ends, libertarians see little role for the state. Rather, libertarians universally envision a social order that encourages and protects the full exercise of individual liberty, guided primarily by personal conscience.
In general, the libertarian creed can be summed up in the famous affirmation by Henry David Thoreau, “That government is best which governs least, and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—That government is best which governs not at all and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.” More recently, political theorist Robert Nozick aptly captured the libertarian sentiment: “The minimal state is the most extensive state than can be justified. Any state more extensive violates people’s rights.” Similarly, the Libertarian Party platform affirms, “Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.”
Libertarians generally object to all but the most minimal of taxes, and they are particularly opposed to any form of taxation beyond the local level or any tax that is progressive or graduated, in that these coercively redistribute wealth and thus violate the individual’s right to freely manage one’s own private property. Libertarians bristle at laws that regulate industry or impede free commerce, and they ardently oppose entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid), welfare assistance, sumptuary laws, mandatory insurance, the use of military intervention overseas, publicly funded education, and other publicly funded programs that require increased tax revenues. Privatization is a basic tenet of the libertarian creed (although, as one would expect, some libertarians dissent on this and other topics). By and large, though, libertarians generally agree that most of the services currently provided by the government are better delivered by the private sector, whether for profit in the free market or communally by individuals who volunteer to help supply a public need.
While it is tempting to conclude that libertarians are motivated egoistically (and some libertarians do, in fact, celebrate the pursuit of unrestrained self-interest and even a kind of “selfishness” as praiseworthy ideals), libertarianism in and of itself is not an intrinsically selfish moral or political position. Rather, it is best understood as one view of the most suitable relationship between the government and the individual, with the latter regarded as the sole legitimate agent of personal choice. Some libertarians do indeed flaunt a seemingly selfish ethic, but to generalize this attitude to include all libertarians is both inaccurate and unrealistic. It is also a mistake to define libertarianism as a solely right-wing ideology. Certainly, many libertarians are politically “to the right,” particularly on matters regarding taxation and economic policy. However, many libertarians embrace social and moral perspectives that are more closely aligned with liberals (such as privacy rights, opposition to the death penalty, and drug legalization), making it difficult to pigeonhole this ideology into a single location on the liberal–conservative spectrum—a spectrum that is limited by its own oversimplifications and generalizations. Some political observers split libertarianism into “left” and “right” positions, with the latter arguing, for example, that natural resources can be extracted and consumed without restraint (save the legal ownership of another party), while the former supports the need to obtain the consent of the community to properly use, allocate, conserve, and manage such resources.
Libertarianism in the United States has been historically expressed in three ways: (1) through the laissez-faire wings within the two major parties (most elements of the Democrats in the Age of Jackson through Reconstruction, and a faction of the Republican Party since the end of Reconstruction); (2) through the Libertarian Party since its formation in the early 1970s; and (3) within disparate fringe movements loosely associated with libertarian principles. Libertarian strains within the Republican Party have been pronounced; Arizona senator and Republican nominee for president Barry Goldwater is perhaps the most familiar example of this group. However, during the 1960s and early 1970s, more doctrinaire libertarians, disaffected by the Vietnam War and influenced by the counterculture movements of the time, split from the GOP and offered their own view of the ideal society. By 1971, these GOP outcasts had formed their own political party, and since the Campaign of 1972, the Libertarian Party has run candidates for the presidency in every election. While Jon Hospers, their first candidate, won scarcely more than 3,000 total votes, the party demonstrated some growth, its nominee Edward Clark winning just around 921,000 votes in the Campaign of 1980; but in the following general election, Libertarian nominee David Bergland barely received a quarter of a million votes, a number that was increased to over 430,000 four years later when Ron Paul of Texas temporarily resigned from the Republican Party to serve as the Libertarian standard-bearer in the general election. From 1984 through 2008, the best showing for a Libertarian candidate for president was Bob Barr’s 523,433 votes in the Campaign of 2008. In 2012 the Libertarian Party, with Gary Johnson as its nominee, exceeded a million votes for the first time, winning 1,275,923, which amounted to 0.99 percent of the popular vote, and while it was the most total votes enjoyed by the party since its inception, it still fell below the 1.06 percent won by Clark in 1980. The numbers reinforce the reality that the Libertarian Party, while well known throughout the electorate, remains at best a decidedly marginal party with little influence in the outcome of presidential elections. Even so, Libertarians have run for office at the state and local levels, and through the Free State Project, the brain child of Yale graduate student Jason Sorens (now an assistant professor of political science at SUNY-Buffalo) and established in 2001, they have been actively recruiting like-minded individuals to migrate to the state of New Hampshire in, ironically, a collective effort to carve out a libertarian stronghold, to the consternation of some residents of the Granite State.
A current misconception associates the Tea Party movement with libertarianism, primarily due to the Tea Party’s shared dislike of the federal income tax and its faith in free markets. There are, however, many notable differences. Many Tea Partyers hold views on social policies that would not be entertained by most libertarians. While both groups are suspicious of public education, libertarians do not share the Tea Party’s belief that religion should have a more central role in government. As a whole, libertarians tend to be isolationists in the realm of foreign policy, whereas many Tea Partyers support U.S. military intervention overseas. Tea Partyers also hold a view of American political culture that is more traditional, and more homogenous, than most libertarians would permit. Most significantly, the Tea Party movement is animated by a strong pulse of populism, a characteristic to which libertarians across the board would react with discomfort.
Currently there are six announced candidates competing for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination, with two more possible candidates, including 2012 nominee Gary Johnson, showing some support. Beyond the party some libertarian influence can be detected within the GOP, but the predominance of social conservatism among the current GOP pool dampens the libertarian effect. At times real estate mogul and GOP front-runner Donald Trump sounds libertarian tones, particularly in his celebration of personal initiative and free enterprise, but other aspects of his campaign, especially his nationalist proclivities and willingness to undertake expensive projects to regulate cross-border migration, are noticeably anti-libertarian in both substance and style. Kentucky senator Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, who shares at least in part some libertarian attitudes with his father, is currently running for the Republican nomination for president, but there are those who argue that the younger Paul’s libertarian credentials are somewhat mixed. At this point—that is, as of late summer 2015—Sen. Paul’s campaign has yet to show evidence of broad support, and it remains scarcely noticed amid the ongoing Trump phenomenon.
See also Isolationism
Boaz, David. Libertarianism: A Primer. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Hammond, Scott John. Political Theory: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary and Classic Terms. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009.
Huebert, Jacob H. Libertarianism Today. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2010.
“Libertarianism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism. Accessed September 1, 2015.
Murray, Charles. What It Means to Be a Libertarian. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and, Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.