Libertarians are the truest conservatives and advocate liberty, not liberalism. Libertarians are governmental minimalists, politically more conservative than Republicans, socially more tolerant than Democrats. The Libertarian mantra sums, “as much liberty as possible” and “as little government as necessary.”
There are four officially recognized practical descriptors for Libertarian:
- One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state.
- Liberals favor government action to promote equality, whereas conservatives favor government action to promote order. Libertarians favor freedom and oppose government action to promote either equality or order.
- The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish.
- Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property-rights that people have naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should be voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force-actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.
To this I would add my own view that morality cannot be legislated and that localized individual agency is a foundational underpinning to American democracy. As an example, the citizen who passionately believes in a particular definition of marriage should work to change state law or should relocate to a state with the desired laws. It is a local matter not a national issue.
In this line, I think Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), got it very wrong. Marriage is a social, cultural, and religious institution over which the government lacks a regulatory justification. My libertarian take is that government-issued marriage licenses are abhorrant, that SCOTUS should have abolished government recognition of marriage, and that SCOTUS should have decided that all persons establish civil unions for civil purposes (taxes, social security, etc). People may also marry if they wish, before a religious officiant or before a secular officiant.