The key concepts of libertarianism have developed over many
centuries. The first inklings of them can be found in ancient
China, Greece, and Israel; they began to be developed into
something resembling modern libertarian philosophy in the work of
such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers as John Locke,
David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

Individualism. Libertarians see the
individual as the basic unit of social analysis. Only individuals
make choices and are responsible for their actions. Libertarian
thought emphasizes the dignity of each individual, which entails
both rights and responsibility. The progressive extension of
dignity to more people — to women, to people of different
religions and different races — is one of the great libertarian
triumphs of the Western world.

Individual Rights. Because individuals
are moral agents, they have a right to be secure in their life,
liberty, and property. These rights are not granted by government
or by society; they are inherent in the nature of human beings. It
is intuitively right that individuals enjoy the security of such
rights; the burden of explanation should lie with those who would
take rights away.

Spontaneous Order. A great degree of
order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and
flourish. It’s easy to assume that order must be imposed by a
central authority, the way we impose order on a stamp collection or
a football team. The great insight of libertarian social analysis
is that order in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions
of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their
actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.
Over human history, we have gradually opted for more freedom and
yet managed to develop a complex society with intricate
organization. The most important institutions in human society —
language, law, money, and markets — all developed spontaneously,
without central direction. Civil society — the complex network of
associations and connections among people — is another example of
spontaneous order; the associations within civil society are formed
for a purpose, but civil society itself is not an organization and
does not have a purpose of its own.

The Rule of Law. Libertarianism is not
libertinism or hedonism. It is not a claim that “people can do
anything they want to, and nobody else can say anything.” Rather,
libertarianism proposes a society of liberty under law, in which
individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they
respect the equal rights of others. The rule of law means that
individuals are governed by generally applicable and spontaneously
developed legal rules, not by arbitrary commands; and that those
rules should protect the freedom of individuals to pursue happiness
in their own ways, not aim at any particular result or outcome.

Limited Government. To protect rights,
individuals form governments. But government is a dangerous
institution. Libertarians have a great antipathy to concentrated
power, for as Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.” Thus they want to divide and limit
power, and that means especially to limit government, generally
through a written constitution enumerating and limiting the powers
that the people delegate to government. Limited government is the
basic political implication of libertarianism, and
libertarians point to the historical fact that it was the
dispersion of power in Europe — more than other parts of the world
— that led to individual liberty and sustained economic
growth.

Free Markets. 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 are necessary to create wealth. Libertarians
believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if
government intervention in people’s economic choices is
minimized.

The Virtue of Production. Much of the
impetus for libertarianism in the seventeenth century was a
reaction against monarchs and aristocrats who lived off the
productive labor of other people. Libertarians defended the right
of people to keep 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 produced
wealth and those who took it 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, 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 productive people to keep what they earn, against a
new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their
earnings to transfer them to political clients and cronies.

Natural Harmony of Interests.
Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of interests
among peaceful, productive people in a just society. One person’s
individual plans — which may involve getting a job, starting a
business, buying a house, and so on — may conflict with the plans
of others, so the market makes many of us change our plans. But we
all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no
necessary conflicts between farmers and merchants, manufacturers
and importers. Only when government begins to hand out rewards on
the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in
group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups
for a piece of political power.

Peace. Libertarians have always
battled the age-old scourge of war. They understood that war
brought death and destruction on a grand scale, disrupted family
and economic life, and put more power in the hands of the ruling
class — which might explain why the rulers did not always share
the popular sentiment for peace. Free men and women, of course,
have often had to defend their own societies against foreign
threats; but throughout history, war has usually been the common
enemy of peaceful, productive people on all sides of the
conflict.

… It may be appropriate to acknowledge at this point the
reader’s likely suspicion that libertarianism seems to be just the
standard framework of modern thought — individualism, private
property, capitalism, equality under the law. Indeed, after
centuries of intellectual, political, and sometimes violent
struggle, these core libertarian principles have become the basic
structure of modern political thought and of modern government, at
least in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world.

However, three additional points need to be made: first,
libertarianism is not just these broad liberal principles.
Libertarianism applies these principles fully and
consistently, far more so than most modern thinkers and certainly
more so than any modern government. Second, while our society
remains generally based on equal rights and capitalism, every day
new exceptions to those principles are carved out in Washington and
in Albany, Sacramento, and Austin (not to mention London, Bonn,
Tokyo, and elsewhere). Each new government directive takes a little
bit of our freedom, and we should think carefully before giving up
any liberty. Third, liberal society is resilient; it can withstand
many burdens and continue to flourish; but it is not infinitely
resilient. Those who claim to believe in liberal principles but
advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by
productive people, more and more restrictions on voluntary
interaction, more and more exceptions to property rights and the
rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state,
are unwittingly engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of
civilization.

From Chapter 1, “The Coming Libertarian Age,” The Libertarian
Mind, by David Boaz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
See also www.libertarianism.org.