 Libertarianism is the view that all people have the right to live their own lives as they choose so long as they respect the equal rights of others. As long as I've known what the word libertarian meant, I've considered myself a libertarian. People like Adam Smith, John Locke, all the way back to the Enlightenment, they tend to believe in a very simple set of things. I've been involved in promotion of the ideas of liberty or libertarianism for a long, long time since I was in high school. I wrote a libertarian column for my high school newspaper, for example, and most of that was based on what I would just call general skepticism. What really captivated me was one, opposition to dictatorship, and there were more dictatorships around the world then. There still are some. And then second, when I was introduced to economics, the best system I thought for organizing people was to let them organize their own lives within a common framework of the rule of law, rather than having a master plan for society. Basically the idea that people should be pretty much free to do what they want as long as it doesn't impinge too much upon other people. It seems like skepticism and libertarianism go very hand in hand together, being skeptical of claims to power, being skeptical of claims of truth made by powerful people, being skeptical that there's only one way of doing things, being skeptical that someone can tell you, we're all going to have to do it this way and this is the only way it can work, and then realizing that that person has a vested interest. Libertarianism is the notion that individuals are best suited to run their own lives without interference or coercion from outside forces. Libertarians defend the rights to life, liberty, and property of each person, rights that we have naturally before governments are instituted. Libertarian thought emphasizes the dignity of each individual, which entails both rights and responsibilities. When people say the government decided this or the people decided that, that the government or the people are not persons, they're not like you and me. They're made up of lots of people. When people casually say we decided, the people decided, the government decided to do this or that, Libertarians ask, what does that mean? It means some people were deciding for other people. It turns out government isn't some powerful big person making decisions. There's nothing special about people in government. There's nothing particularly worse about them. There's nothing particularly better about them. When you go from the private side of the public center, you don't grow wings. You don't ditch devil horns and suddenly get a halo. You don't become more intelligent. You don't suddenly become an expert on economics. None of those things happen. You just move from an area where you're in private life to an area where you suddenly have control over people. The progressive extension of dignity to more people, to women, to people of different races, religions and sexual orientations is one of the great triumphs for liberty in the Western world and increasingly the entire world. Because individuals are moral agents, they have a right to be secure in their life, liberty and property. These rights are not granted by any government or society. They're inherent in our nature as human beings. One of the central pillars of the whole Libertarian approach to the world is the idea that individual human beings have the right to manage their own affairs. They have rights to govern their own lives. Respecting individual rights means respecting people's autonomy. It means respecting their dignity. In particular, it means treating them in the same way that you would like to be treated. A great Libertarian abolitionist, someone who worked to abolish slavery in Brazil, Joaquim Nebuco, put it very neatly. He said, we should love the freedom of other people and only if we love the freedom of other people will we truly appreciate and treasure our own. It is intuitively right, we might even say it's self-evident, that individuals should enjoy the security of these rights. The burden of proof should lie with people who would take those rights away. A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish. And it's pretty understandable that we think order has to be imposed the way we would impose order on a stamp collection or on a business that we might create or a project. What we have trouble understanding is that the greatest degree of order in society actually arises spontaneously. It turns out that you don't need a commanding power or a dictator to create order. Most of us are hardwired to think that when there's order, someone must have created the order. Think of the most important institutions in society. Language wasn't designed and written down by anybody. It evolves spontaneously. Same thing with law. And perhaps most importantly for our purposes, the free market. The market is not planned. The market is not designed by anyone. The market is the product of thousands or millions, even billions of people making choices every day based on what will make them and their families better off. That's the order of a free society. It's unpredictable. You can't predict the details of it. But it's nonetheless orderly and harmonious. That's what libertarianism is about. The rule of law means that individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously developed legal rules, not by arbitrary commands from some authority. A good legal system should solve more problems than it creates, for example. You can't have a justice ID with laws that are capriciously enforced, unpredictable, and impossible to plan your life around. Those rules should protect the freedom of individuals to live their lives as they choose, so long as they respect everybody else's equal rights. To protect our rights, individuals form governments. But governments are dangerous institutions. Libertarians have a deep skepticism about concentrated power because they understand what Lord Acton said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So we want to divide and limit power, and that means especially to limit government, generally through a written constitution that spells out the powers of government and limits it to those powers. Limited government is the basic political implication of libertarianism. The constitution grants powers only explicitly. It assumes no powers are going to be in government. It says there are 18 things the government is allowed to do. And insofar as those 18 things are followed, you'd get a pretty good constitutionally limited government. To survive and to flourish, individuals need to engage in economic activity. The right to property entails the right to exchange property by mutual agreement. Free markets are the economic system of free individuals and they're necessary to create wealth. There's more opportunity in the United States simply because we have a freer political system and freer markets here. People are allowed to engage in more mutually beneficial and voluntary economic exchanges. As a result, people are able to take more risks, reap those rewards, bear the cost themselves. And over time, this means that we accumulate capital, skills, and that culture which produces consistently an increasing economy and more job opportunities. Not just for Americans, but for people from other places as well. And people who come here recognize that, recognize the opportunities, and they want to be part of that. So one of the most effective ways that we can promote peaceful coexistence with other nations is actually to trade with them. Free trade is a great leveling force. When countries trade with one another, research shows they are far less likely to fight one another. Libertarians believe that people will be freer and more prosperous if government intervention in their economic choices is minimized. Much of the impetus for libertarianism in the 17th century was a reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the productive labor of other people. Libertarians defended the right of all people to the fruits of their labor. This effort developed into a respect for the dignity of work and production, and especially for the growing middle class who were looked down upon by aristocrats. Libertarians developed a pre-Marxist class analysis that divided society into two basic classes, those who worked by their own labor and those who took wealth by force from others. Thomas Paine, for instance, wrote, There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon the taxes. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. Modern libertarians defend the right of people to keep what they produce against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize it to transfer to their clients and cronies. Libertarians have always battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war brings death and destruction on a massive scale, destroys family and economic life, and puts more power in the hands of the ruling class, which just might explain why the rulers haven't always shared the people's sentiment for peace. Henry Kissinger once said that no foreign policy, no matter how ingenious, can be successful if it is thought of in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none. And what he really meant by that is the idea that foreign policy has to be a decision made by the people, not just by a few elites. So foreign policy will never be successful unless it's supported by the population at large. People around the world have come to see each other as other individual human beings, to think abstractly that that person may look different, speak differently, worship differently, have a different language, that nonetheless they're people like me. And if we have a common nature, as the great Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero put it, then certainly we are obliged by the law of nature not to act violently against each other. Personally, and I think many people would agree with me, just don't think that we will ever reach a state where war is impossible. But the good news is that political science research tells us that war should be rare, very uncommon. Free men and women, of course, have often had to defend their societies against foreign threats. But throughout history, war has usually been the common enemy of peaceful, productive people on both sides of the conflict. For societies to remain free has to be at least a critical match to the population of some understanding of what it means to be a free person. But some people in every social order take it as a personal mission, a calling. I think of William Wilberforce who spent over 50 years of his life in Britain and the parliament and agitating in public and the media all over for a simple goal, the elimination of slavery in Britain. We might still have that monstrous institution if there were not people like Frederick Douglass and William Wilberforce and Liza Andrew Spooner working to eliminate it. Those struggles for freedom are with us today. I've dedicated a large portion of my life to advancing liberty because it is a rare and precious institution that has existed in few places for short periods of human history. And if I can just push the cord in a way to preserving those individual liberties in a very real sense, if I can just do that once, I will have purchased my life. I will have made my life more worth living because I have fought for someone else's liberty and of course in fighting for their liberty, I'm fighting for my liberty. To be a libertarian means that in some sense it hurts you to see that happen when people suffer violence, they're murdered because of their political opinions, because of their religion, because of their sexuality, because they engaged in some behavior that wasn't harmful to anyone else. And yet, violence is visited upon them. For me personally, I hate it when I see that and every time I see someone suffering, some form of oppression, I want to do something about it. That's what moves my life and I think it's what moves the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to loving the freedom of other people.