Libertarianism involves the unyielding belief in liberty.

Libertarians hold that individuals have the rights over their own lives, property, speech, bodies and actions first, and that nobody may infringe on those rights, ever, including the government. In a libertarian society, the only instance in which force may be used against somebody is if that person has initiated force against someone else. To put it another way, libertarians believe you should be free to do whatever you like with your own life and property, as long as you don’t harm the person or property of anyone else. Live and let live.

For such a simple idea, it’s perhaps the only one never to have been implemented fully in a real society. Freedom turns out to be quite elusive: there have almost always been agents of some government or other who will use force against people to infringe on their freedoms. So, if it’s never been tried, how do we know it will work? Well, the good news is that almost all of its individual ideas have been tried and their results observed, and in every case those ideas have been met with success. For this reason, the more ‘libertarian’ a society is, the more successful it is.  How does it happen that the most peaceful and prosperous nations on earth are also the freest? On a practical level, libertarian ideas produce the best results.

But even more important than this practical success is the question: should human beings be free or should they not? As Ayn Rand asked, “Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work, and it’s products - or is he the property of the tribe … that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products?”  If we conclude that human beings should be free then no other form of political system is justified except libertarianism. And anyone who says that human beings should not be free is making an irrational and unjustifiable claim. No one rightly - that is, rationally and justifiably - enslaves another man.

Libertarianism embodies some rational philosophy (summarised below). It is the only political philosophy (1) which adequately honours the rational, moral nature of humankind, and, (2) which is derived from the facts of reality as embodied in (1). Libertarians believe that government interference beyond a certain “libertarian minimalism” is rationally unjustifiable. This libertarian minimalism is defined by the aforementioned rights, which means that governments can only justifiably interfere to uphold those rights (to take action against criminals or foreign aggressors who threaten the rights of the free citizen). Court systems, police agencies and a sufficient military are therefore among the only responsibilities of governments.

So what would change in a libertarian society? Well, one answer is that you would pay much less in sales tax, and almost all other taxes would likely disappear. Charities and private organisations would take the place of the plethora of government programs which currently exist. Schools, libraries, parks and much more would cease to be funded by taxes and would be funded in other ways which maximise individual choice and freedom. You would not be able to legislate your morality to everyone else. If you believe it is wrong to look at pornography or visit a prostitute or take recreational drugs or shoot guns or marry someone of the same sex or smoke or eat junk food, you would not be able to make those things illegal for others to do. But it would be your right to persuade others of your case, and of course to refrain from doing them yourself if you feel them wrong. The consequences of their actions would be their own responsibility: as P.J. O’Rourke pointed out, “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” Communities would be free to come together to voluntarily fund the things those people feel are important, rather than those things being dictated universally by government, often to people who don’t want them.

The philosophy, in layman’s terms:

We are individuals with a certain nature. More specifically, we are individuals with the capacity to reason. Even moreso, we are individuals with rights, rights derived from the type of beings we are. In order to support one’s own life as an individual a person must use his or her rational faculties to make choices about how best to live. This in turn requires freedom. As rational beings we value our freedom, and crucially this freedom is only guaranteed by extending the same freedom to others. Any ethic or political position that runs contrary to this principle is rationally unjustified and unjustifiable, largely because to claim freedom for oneself without extending that same freedom to another is an arbitrary move with no rational basis. For instance, the mixed-economy system we have in the West is irrational, because it fails to extend freedom equally to each individual (ironic considering socialists claim to champion egalitarianism). It treats individuals as sacrificial animals to be disposed of at the whim of some greater undefined (because indefinable) “collective.” It thus bypasses individual rationality and opts primarily for brute force to bend dissenters to the collective will. It robs men of the produce of their efforts, and thus, by extension, of their choices as rational beings, and ultimately of their lives. It is no coincidence that every single tyranny in the history of humanity was justified on the same collectivist grounds as socialism rests. Respect for all individual rights and freedom is the only possible rational starting point for political philosophy.

There is a Libertarian Party in the United States, but many libertarians wish to pursue libertarian ideas by other means (such as ourselves).  We therefore differentiate between Capital-L Libertarians who are members of the LP and small-l libertarians like us.  A good example of a small-l libertarian in politics is Ron Paul, a 2008 U.S. Republican presidential candidate.

For more information, a wide resource exists on the internet. If you still don’t quite understand libertarianism, see here. For policies on individual issues, see this list. You might also do no better than to observe the positions we take in response to current affairs on this blog. If you don’t see the particular issue here, send us an email.

John Wright & Stephen Graham