There is a decades-old conversation within the libertarian movement which you might or might not be familiar with. The conversation is one between minarchists and anarchists. They often go by different names, but the sides are pretty clear.
Minarchists are those who believe that the state should exist, but in an extremely small and limited form. Minarchists believe the only role of the state should be the "protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud." Some, mainly Constitutionalists, would also add limited infrastructure (roads, etc.), money, and Intellectual Property protection to the list. This basically means that the "only legitimate governmental institutions are the military, police, and courts."
Anarchists, known in libertarian thought as Anarcho-Capitalists or Voluntaryists, hold that any form of state is contrary to libertarian principles and advocate for a completely free-market. This would mean that all services currently offered by government and funded by taxation would be gone, and people would be free to then purchase these products and services (police, courts/arbitration, money, etc.) on the free market.
Both the anarchist and minarchist streams of thought flow from the most basic libertarian concept, which is that of self-ownership.
Who Owns You?
This is the most basic question any human could ask. Who owns you? Who has the right to your body? Who decides what you can and cannot do? Who decides what you do with your time and the property you have?
Whether they will admit it openly or not, the governments of today are based off of the idea that you are theirs, that simply by being born you become part of their collective and are under their rule. As such, they decide how much of your income you should be allowed to keep. They decide what substances you should and should not be allowed to put in your body. They decide who you should and should not marry. In more oppressive societies, they might tell you what you can and cannot believe, or what you can and cannot eat.
Libertarianism rejects this idea completely. Libertarians hold that the only correct answer to the question is YOU. You own your body, therefore only you should decide what you do with it. You decide what to do with your income. You decide what to do with your time, who you marry, what you eat, what you believe, etc.
This leads to some conclusions which should be apparent to any reasonable person.
The Non-Aggression Principle
If you own your own body, then the only rational conclusion is that it is morally wrong for someone else to deprive you of that. Put simply, it is wrong for a person to hurt or kill you. This is not some amazing philosophical concept, it is built into our own consciences. The vast majority of us do not spend our days physically assaulting and killing our friends, family, co-workers, and the other people we meet. We just know that it is wrong.
But while we can see this truth by looking inward to our consciences, we can also see it by looking outward at history. In the libertarian classic, Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard explained that if you look at history, those people who are most happy and the most at peace are those who most respect the lives of those around them.
Included in this concept of self-ownership is the concept of property rights. Like it or not, the time we each have on this earth is a precious, limited resource. If we own our lives, then our time is ours to spend. When we work for pay, we are exchanging time for money or goods. Those physical goods are the physical manifestation of our time investment. So, for one to deprive us of our justly-earned property is to deprive us of hours or days or even years of our lives.
And so we come to the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP simply states that it is wrong to initiate "physical force against persons or property" including "the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property."
This is not a law to be enforced, but it is a principle to live by. It is a principle both written into our consciences and whose effects are observable throughout history. The libertarian system is not a political system, instead it is an ethical system that affects how we see the world and interact with each other. This NAP is at the heart of libertarianism, just as it is the heart of every voluntary, mutually-beneficial interaction between human beings.
Classical Liberalism
But modern libertarianism did not just appear out of nowhere in the late 20th century. It is the philosophical child of classical liberalism. You might be familiar with some of the more famous classical liberals, including John Locke, Frédéric Bastiat, and many of the American founding fathers. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke wrote:
"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."
Similarly, in his classic, The Law, Bastiat wrote:
"Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
These great thinkers understood that one's natural state is a state of freedom, where an individual has sole rights to his or her own life and property. This right to one's self is a natural right, a human right, and therefore higher than any human government. Samuel Adams echoed this sentiment when he wrote:
"The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule."
Classical Liberalism In Practice
Classical Liberalism provided the philosophical basis for the conversations between those of us who believe in natural law and the basic principle of self-ownership. But where we differ is in how we apply those basic principles.
Classical liberals believed the best way to ensure that our rights were best protected was by having a tiny government who would "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." This was the philosophical basis of the Articles of Confederation and later the Constitution of the United States.
But while the classical liberals held that a small government was an asset, not a hindrance, to one's liberty, there were those who carried classical liberal thought to its logical conclusion. One such thinker was Albert Jay Nock, who described himself as a philosophical anarchist and was known as a libertarian.
Modern Libertarianism
In the twentieth century, the term libertarian came to mean those who took classical liberalism to its logical conclusion, namely, that if you own your own life, nobody has the right to initiate violent force against you or your property, including the government. Throughout the century, this line of thought was carried on by many people, including Frank Chodorov, Ayn Rand, and the great Murray Rothbard.
Rothbard approached libertarianism from his unique perspective as a celebrated economist, historian, and philosopher, all-in-one. This put him in the perfect position to present a well-rounded intellectual basis for the growing libertarian movement.
Murray Rothbard was known as "Mr. Libertarian" and is considered "the creator and one of the principal agents of the contemporary libertarian movement." He "not only helped found the Cato Institute, but also was heavily involved in the Libertarian Party in the 1970s and ’80s." Knowing this, it is no surprise that Rothbard wrote the original libertarian manifesto.
For A New Liberty
For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto was the "result of the only contract Rothbard ever received from a mainstream commercial publisher. He was asked to sum up the whole of the libertarian creed."
In the first chapter, Rothbard wrote:
While opposing any and all private or group aggression against the rights of person and property, the libertarian sees that throughout history and into the present day, there has been one central, dominant, and overriding aggressor upon all of these rights: the State. In contrast to all other thinkers, left, right, or in-between, the libertarian refuses to give the State the moral sanction to commit actions that almost everyone agrees would be immoral, illegal, and criminal if committed by any person or group in society. The libertarian, in short, insists on applying the general moral law to everyone, and makes no special exemptions for any person or group... regardless of popular sanction, War is Mass Murder, Conscription is Slavery, and Taxation is Robbery. The libertarian, in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes.
So, by Murray Rothbard's definition, a libertarian is one who consistently applies the principles of natural law to everybody, including the government. But how, you might ask, could a government even exist under such constraints? How could a government exist if it could not get revenue from its citizens through taxation? How could it pay the salaries of its officials and arm the military? How could it enforce laws if it is under the same constraints as any individual in its citizenry?
The whole point of For a New Liberty was to present a new and better way. In it, Murray Rothbard talks about voluntary, mutually-beneficial interactions between people as the basis for societal order, not the coercive power of a government. In a libertarian system as described by him, the services forced on us by the government today could instead be purchased as services on the free market. And unlike the monopoly of government-based services, in a free market there would be multiple businesses vying for customers to buy these services from them (protection services, arbitration services, etc.) and the market pressure would be to provide the best services at the best prices.
Libertarianism was, and is, a radical ideology, based on a consistent application of natural law or more specifically the non-aggression principle.
Modern Libertarianism
But, as always happens in this world, times change, people change, and even words change. While many in the modern Libertarian party and countless others who identify as "libertarian" know and respect Rothbard, they no longer accept his animosity toward the state as an institution. While identifying as libertarian, they align more with eighteenth and nineteenth century classical liberals than with mid-to-late twentieth century libertarians.
Yet, oddly enough, many of these modern classical liberals are in the habit of describing those of us who follow traditional libertarian thought as as offshoot, or fringe group. These same people insist that libertarianism is the same as classical liberalism.
I will heartily and happily admit that all of us who call ourselves libertarian today are the philosophical children of the great classical liberals, but I can not sit by when people describe Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalism as a branch or an offshoot of libertarianism. Anarchism is not an offshoot of modern libertarianism. Instead, it is at the very heart of modern libertarianism. Libertarinism as advocated in the twentieth century was necessarily an anarchic system of thinking because it left no room for the coercive organization known as the state, whether a large socialist state or a tiny constitutional state.
And so the conversation continues between the minarchist libertarians of today and the anarchist libertarians of the twentieth century. Should the non-aggression principle be consistently applied to all individuals and groups? Or should an exception be made for a small government? Chances are that we will never all agree on what is best, and that's OK for now, because regardless of where we differ in terms of our destination, all of us today who are known as libertarian are hopefully heading in the same direction, which is away from coercive government and toward more liberty for all. But somewhere along the way, I hope that even the most staunch minarchist will come to realize that anarchism is not an offshoot of the libertarian movement. Instead, it is actually the very heart and soul of libertarianism.