What is a libertarian? Well, without getting confused a mish-mosh of political history, science, and philosophy, the best question to ask is: "What is a libertarian in the modern world?"

In order to answer that, we have to say what a libertarian is not. One of the common models of political association is this: Split people's beliefs up into two categories, social and economic. Social has to do with civil liberties and rights; economic has to do with the government's fiscal policies, national economic plans, and policies on the environment and things that affect the nation's business. Conservative economic policies are against government control of business and is trying to reduce government spending on social programs and the like; liberal economic policies are ones for putting restrictions on businesses, spending lots of money on socialist programs. Liberal on rights means to be for allowing individuals a broad range of rights and civil liberties; conservative usually limits those rights.


Pure Liberal: liberal on social and economic issues
Pure conservative: conservative on social and economic issues
Libertarian: liberal on rights, conservative on economics
Populist: conservative on rights, liberal on economics


Libertarians at large tend to favor other policies not usually held by other liberals, for example anti-gun control, pro ending the drug prohibition, and anti-banning of public smoking. So it wouldn't be untypical of a libertarian to have these basic beliefs:

Pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, pro appointing strict-constructionist judges (Reading the Constitution literally), anti-business regulations, pro-free trade, pro-lowering taxes, anti-national health care, pro-welfare reform, and things of the like.