You could just as easily say libertarians are just liberals who aren't generous with other people's money and you'd be just as accurate - I myself am a pro-free market left-libertarian, and could easily be described as a hardcore liberal who is also a hardcore believer in economic freedom.
The bottom line that everyone needs to understand is: Libertarianism is the political philosophy that is for a radical redistribution of power from the state to the individual.
By the definitions of left and right that have been current since the 20th century it is neither of the left nor of the right. Libertarians support all of your freedom all of the time, whether that be in the social realm (which people associate with the left) or the economic realm (which people associate with the right). This is where the phrase "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" comes in. Libertarians stand against the institutionalized initiation of violence (government control) in the boardroom or in the bedroom.
Excepting some overlap in principle with economic and fiscal policy this has nothing to do with conservatism, and even then conservatives traditionally stood for (many still do) government control over the economy, only directed for the benefit of established entities such as large incumbent businesses. In this way the economy is rigged (or regulated) to eliminate their competition, enhance the power of government, and enrich favored corporations; one such example is the intersection of occupational licensing and regulatory capture that's currently under discussion, another is zoning. This is why lobbying money from corporations very commonly lobbies for more regulations rather than less - the lightbulb industry lobbied to ban incandescent bulbs because they weren't as profitable, the drug industry lobbies to restrict importation of any competing medicines from abroad, the medical industry lobbies to restrict the supply of doctors, incumbent hospitals lobby for certificate of need laws to strangle competition, taxi companies lobby to ban Uber, and the health insurance industry lobbies to mandate people to purchase their products.
Why do they do this? Because without the coercive machinery of government on their side* they are powerless to rig the market in their favor - they must persuade potential customers to make a free choice to purchase their product (at a price that renders the product a net benefit to them), and there are no barriers to entry for potential competitors aside from those intrinsic to the industry itself. With government on their side they need not do that, which is much better business...for them (everyone else doing business suffers).
This goes back further than many people realize, because originally in the 18th century conservatives and reactionaries stood for the exact same approach, only back then post-feudal agricultural interests (roughly the nobility) were the ruling class they rigged the economy to enrich and entrench. With the advent of the industrial revolution and the relative elimination of the landed aristocracy as a major productive force the ruling class had to expand to include large incumbent industrial firms, which brings us roughly to our modern situation**. This is true far more in Europe than in the New World including America; in large part because a feudal nobility never existed, liberalism was more widespread and more radical, and "conservatives" in America were far more moderate, being like European moderate liberals than the real European conservatives. So from a European perspective American politics for the first century of its existence was a battle between radical leftists and less-radical leftists, surprisingly like more-modern perceptions of the Soviet Union. Still, it's telling that Hamilton's crowd was pro-British and Jefferson's crowd was pro-French in terms of their relative positions.
Incidentally in this era the radical workingmen's parties were all out in the streets demanding complete laissez-faire, because they believed the state was their enemy and exploiter; this was due to them seeing what was going on in the above paragraph, as well as their experience from pre-revolutionary Europe. It is for this reason that the whole idea of the state being in your favor as a counterweight to big business wasn't even credible to most common men until around (or in many cases well after) 1900, and even then I believe that had more to do with classical liberalism losing than conservatism and socialism winning. Liberal thought decayed after the mid 19th century, acquiescing to a status quo where the revolution and its promise were still very incomplete, abandoning the masses who yearned for more than that to the ideology of socialism and communism, promising liberal ends (revolutionary paradise) by conservative means (state control).
During this time period you also have the emergence of what David D'Amato calls
political modernism, which is more or less the social-democratic/progressive/fascist/communist collection that took the 20th century by storm and battled for supremacy***. In the United States progressivism won, implementing the New Deal, which redrew the political map - from the 1930s onward New Dealers were liberals, their opposition conservatives. Since both libertarians (the classical liberal remnant regrouping armed with Austrian economics and a restored radical spirit) and American conservatives had a common enemy in both the New Deal and Communism they formed a collection later known as the Old Right. Conservatives, desperate for a coherent argument against what they saw as wrongness of political modernism, then picked up the rhetoric of freedom from libertarians; they also picked up much policy, but for the most part it was much more rhetorical than substantive. Libertarians in turn picked up a blind spot for anti-progressive corporatist policies, such as 2000-page treaties managing trade and erecting global bureaucracies masquerading as the enactment of free trade, while ignoring
unilateral free trade, which is the true enactment of free trade; this is what later would be called conflationism or vulgar libertarianism.
"Fusionism" became a thing during the early Cold War, a doomed effort to meld libertarianism and conservatism (as opposed to forming coalitions on specific issues which virtually all libertarians agree can be useful), and within a few decades libertarianism broke off as its own movement, by the 1970s even having a political party to call its own again. Popular concerns in the 1970s led to rapid growth, which was arrested in the 1980s when the modern conservatives patched up the post-WWII world order, then resumed with a vengeance starting in the mid 2000s when their patch basically failed, continuing as of now in 2017.
I believe this is due mostly to the Bush-era transformation of modern conservatism, by this time defined by the intersection of neoconservatism and the religious right, into something more resembling fascism in policy (NSA snooping, abolition of civil liberties, perpetual war, TARP, etc.), and Obama-era progressivism accepting and expanding upon those policies with the entirety of official Progressivism going along. This is a convergence of the political-modernist ideologies that survived WWII and defined the post-WWII world order, which has reconstructed fascism. This institutionalized and seemingly unalterable abuse of the populace is concomitant with debt, decay, civic dysfunction, a perpetually depressed economy, and institutionalized corruption. In other words, excepting the post-9/11 euphoria wore off the course our rulers have embarked on was never popular to start with, and has become despised after it has completely failed. Furthermore what would traditionally comprise the opposition to this despised system is impotent or has stabbed the people in the back.
Under such circumstances it's no surprise that a movement that is more trustworthy (having consistently spoken out) and that supports comprehensive freedom would gain strength.
*Although in a state of affairs where the rule of law breaks down businesses could go coercing people themselves (much like the Mafia or terrorist groups); even then they'd have to pay the whole cost out of pocket rather than hosing the whole population for it (as in a tax system), so their abilities would be more limited.
**We may be on the brink of another similar situation; the culture born of the Internet, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry is rapidly gaining strength and once again a new elite class (the Populares)
has emerged with
a different value system and social network than the old elite class (the Brahmins). There is virtually no flow of people between the Populares and the current ruling elite; for example, no computer programmers are in Congress despite them being 1% of the workforce. It's very common for people to move to and from academia, government, and old-economy big business, but very rare for anyone from Silicon Valley to move to any of those three, or vice versa. This is a large potential power center that has no role in running the country and is gaining strength; historically such situations are unstable and are usually resolved by displacement of the old elite with the new elite. This has some implications, considering that most of the tech industry is not Populares (yet) but carries over to the industry whatever culture they were raised in; much like the earliest industrial barons, this state of affairs is only temporary and the culture born of that industry will take it over. The people you see on the Internet that
fit this description of the Grey Tribe (as opposed to red and blue) are Populares; more famous exponents are Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the rest of the PayPal mafia (the group's earliest members), and (by all appearances) Travis Kalanick and
Cody Wilson. These people are part of the emerging new elite, and 50 years from now people like them may well form the recruitment pool for running the Western world (not Gates and Zuckerberg; they'll go the way of the early industrialists that had pre-industrial values). Considering that the Populares look like radical libertarians next to the current elite (albeit in an unconventional way) that potentially has very large implications, especially since a distaste for political modernism is nearly universal in this set. This is demonstrated by the two ideologies that have been born of that milieu so far:
neoreaction, and
crypto-anarchy. Tellingly, both of them have much more in common with anarcho-capitalism than contemporary "centrism".
***Fascism was defeated by 1945, Communism collapsed by 1990, and Progressivism and Social Democracy otherwise dominated the post-WWII world order. They were joined by Christian Democracy and modern conservatism (including "neoliberalism", the religious right, neocons etc). These are the "centrists" as contrasted to the "extremists", including Libertarians and some right-wing and (to a lesser extent) left-wing populists; these have surged in recent years. Additionally as Jeffrey Tucker points out
here and
here we are currently in the early stages of the unwinding of Social Democracy, where the welfare state will either end or suffer capture by right-wing authoritarians. I additionally suggest that the supporters of the social democratic project have themselves been succumbing to authoritarianism for years now, most prominently with New Labour in Britain and (less prominently until recently) their Tory successors.
EDIT: This post is long enough as it is but I feel some replies are appropriate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gladhands
Whenever someone describes themselves as libertarian, aren't they usually just conservatives who support the legalization of drugs and prostitution?
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Think through that: if one of them is a conservative that's a social liberal
and anti-war
and fights for free markets rather than rigged markets
against many conservatives, then how conservative are they really? Yes, you might say they are conservative in some ways, but in all fairness at that point you're not dealing with the same beast at all. Not all opposition to the kind of ideology you adhere to is conservative. In all fairness conservatives often lump in all opposition under "liberal" and even libertarians can lump in all opposition under "statist" (although that's much less common among libertarians than the equivalents among the right and the left).
Quote:
Originally Posted by jacqueg
There is also a very strong theme of social darwinism - most poor people are poor because they are defective, and defective people should be weeded out by natural selection.
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For the record
Social Darwinism has nothing to do with Libertarianism; they are completely independent of each other, only a very small minority of libertarians could even be categorized as such, and the most prominent Social Darwinists were the "Darwinian collectivist" Nazis, which were exponents of big-government authoritarianism. It's ironic that Social Darwinism is deployed as a smear against small government when the claimed destructive effects of it came from big government (e.g. forcible eugenics). In fact Mises and Rothbard both spoke out against Social Darwinism:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Ludwig von Mises
The notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus is to be understood in a metaphorical sense.… It need not always be a war of extermination such as the relation between man and morbific microbes. Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Murray Rothbard
The theory is originally based on an unwarranted extension of Darwinism to the history of man. Supposedly, man develops continually struggling against nature — i.e., struggling to adapt himself to natural conditions. As generations develop, the "fit" or "the fittest" survive, and the "unfit" die. The progeny of the "fit" are also "fit," while the unfit get no chance to reproduce. In this way the human race supposedly improves. As Dr. Cutten puts it, "The strong won, the weak lost; the strong left progeny, the weak died early and childless. It worked out pretty well too." [...]
It is therefore evident that there is no moral or ethical value attaching to a survivor. Sheer luck plays the biggest part in history in determining who has survived. The Rugged Individualist suffers from the delusion that survival — sheer survival — is ipso facto evidence of high moral qualities.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by irish_bob
libertarians view selfishness as a great virtue , their entire idealogy and philosophy is based on the self
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It is Objectivism, which is only one of many schools of libertarian thought (most libertarians are not Objectivists), that values selfishness. Even then, "selfishness" in Ayn Rand's usage is defined to mean what is more commonly known as "enlightened self-interest", and she explicitly disapproved of what most people would describe as selfish behavior in the undesirable sense of the phrase.
Quote:
Originally Posted by irish_bob
its impossible on a personal - practical level to be libertarian unless you are extremely well off , most millionaires could not afford their own private army akin to a russian oligarch
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The kind of places where you need to be well off enough to afford your own army to protect your rights tend to have a government with a perfectly secure monopoly (with competitors prohibited) in legal jurisdiction over a certain territory, which is exactly what anarcho-capitalists oppose. In addition the rule of law is weak in such places, which is exactly what anarchists oppose when it comes from government.
In fact if one looks at how many places with government monopolies suffer from such maladies, which is certainly not much less than in real-world examples of polycentric law such as medieval Iceland or the 19th century American frontier, one might just as easily conclude that "its impossible on a personal - practical level to be statist unless you are extremely well off , most millionaires could not afford their own private army akin to a russian oligarch". In other words, merely having a geographical monopoly in government doesn't produce good governance. I'm not necessarily calling for abolition of the state here, merely for fairness to be applied such that states in general are demanded to meet the same high standards that is demanded of proposals for abolition of the state.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jburress
Yep. Most of them are just republicans who want less taxes. They still favor big government as long as it leaves them alone but hurts people whose lifestyles they disagree with.
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I believe you're describing Republicans here, since they already believe in less taxes and suppressing undesirable lifestyles.
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