How do libertarians differ from “conservatives”?
For starters, by not being conservative. Most libertarians have no interest in returning to an idealized past; we’ve been there, and it had a lot of problems. More generally, libertarians hold no brief for the right wing’s rather overt militarist, racist, sexist, and authoritarian tendencies and reject conservative attempts to “legislate morality” with censorship, drug laws, and vario us bits of Bible-thumping. Though libertarians believe in free-enterprise capitalism, we refuse to defend the military-industrial complex as conservatives tend to do; instead the military that we’d like to see would be a tiny fraction of its present size.
In general, libertarians emphasize limited government more than conservatives and believe the sole legitimate purpose of government is the protection of property rights against force and fraud. Thus, they usually consider legal restrictions on such things as immigration, drug use, and prostitution to be illegitimate violations of personal liberty. Some but not all libertarians hold a position that might be described as economically Right (anti- socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to what are called cultural repressiveness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on), and tend to attribute to state intervention the survival of things the cultural Left dislikes. Speaking more abstractly, the libertarian perspective assigns to the market the position conservatives assign to tradition as the great accumulator and integrator of the implicit knowledge of society. Some writers, such as F.A. Hayek, attempt to bridge the two perspectives on that issue. In addition, libertarians tend to believe i
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