Ron Paul is the most prominent libertarian in the USA
What does it mean to be a libertarian? Dr. Jeffrey Miron offers one answer. He is the director of undergraduate studies at the Harvard University’s Department of Economics.
According to Miron, libertarians have enormodiesus respect for individual decisions. While other ideologies attempt to use government force to advance their ideas of how people should act or behave, libertarians think that individuals should be able to live their own lives as they see fit.
Wikipedia defines libertarianism as a political philosophy which upholds individual liberty, especially freedom of expression and action. Libertarianism includes diverse philosophies and organizations; all advocate either minimization or elimination of the state, and a goal of maximizing individual liberty and freedom.
One thing that used to confuse me was my misconception that libertarian is a specific political position, much like communism or fascism or social democracy. I could never really place what libertarians stand for in particular issues.
Not sure if I understand it correctly now, but libertarianism is a political spectrum that contains the idea of a small government. An anarchist is a libertarian, and a socially-conservative Tea Party supporter is also a libertarian; the difference is that one is left-wing (socially progressive) and the other is right-wring (socially conservative).
Hi Jackson Tan,
Libertarianism is indeed a political spectrum just as you had described. There are many sub-flavours such as left-winged libertarianism, right-winged libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, Austrian economics, etc. Heck, there is even libertarian socialism. Note each sub-flavour is not necessarily coherent with each other.