If you're grappling with gray areas, then congrats! You now have a more nuanced understanding that brings you closer to center, and you're not libertarian anymore.
Liberals want to take care of people (more generous welfare state -- universal health care etc.), but still believe in the market.
I'm curious why you don't consider yourself a liberal, or what ideology you think is mixed up in it that you reject?
The big difference is positive versus negative rights. Libertarians and classical liberals believe in the latter (the right to be left alone, to live your life as you please, to marry who you want, to be gay, to be straight, etc)
Liberalism today, is all about positive rights, entitlements.
But the objection libertarians have against positive rights is that a) the state itself produces nothing, so b) everything the state gives to somebody has to be taken away from somebody else.
It gets more pernicious today in that "Conservative" and "Liberal" as delineated by the 2-party system in the US is perceived to be largely farcical bickering over very narrowly constrained policy tracks. Both parties are pro-war, anti-civil liberties, Big Government oligarchs.
Hope this helps.
Of course it is. But that's not what "liberal" means anymore in everyday speech in America.
I'm well aware of Isaiah Berlin's delineation of negative and positive rights, of Robert Nozick's defense of property rights, and so on. I'm extremely well-versed in libertarianism.
That doesn't make it any less extreme. Governments have redistributed in one form or another since time immemorial through taxation. Nobody succeeds solely on their own -- we benefit from roads and schools and libraries and hospitals. So of course we take things from others (through taxes) to help everyone out, for the greater good. We're all in this together.
And here's the thing libertarians ignore: neither Locke nor Nozick ever produced any convincing justification for a natural right to property, because there isn't one. A general idea of property rights is a useful thing, but not an absolutist one. My labor is at least 1,000x more productive than it would otherwise be without society around me. Surely then I don't deserve to keep the full extra 999x just for myself? Surely I owe some of it back to the society that helps me? One way of framing this is social contract theory, from Plato to Hobbes to Rawls.
In addition, the way you characterize the modern conservative/liberal divide is inaccurate. It is abundantly clear that modern liberals are far less hawkish and far more in support of civil liberties (free speech, right to vote, equal treatment, etc.) than modern conservatives. To characterize the differences between the two as "farcical bickering" is a hugely irresponsible, counterfactual, and I would argue ultimately immoral position to take. You have to be blind to modern American to say otherwise.
Hmm, one wonders if this isn't why the Framers switched out property for pursuit of happiness at the last moment.
Full-on anarchism, or anarcho-capitalism, ok, that's a hard sell.
Libertarianism? It's basically "never initiate aggression" and "live and let live". That's about it. I don't know what's extreme about that.
You don't? Live and let live means, in practice, let die. Libertarianism says, if you had bad luck and are poor and you get a disease you can't pay to cure, you die.
Libertarianism is the extreme of selfishness. "Live and let live" means "I've got no obligation to anybody else, screw 'em." In modern society, that's incredibly extreme.
What libertarians are against is coercion and force. They don't want to be forced to do what somebody else thinks is morally proper, in most cases for yet another person. That way lies tyranny.
The concept of selfishness in the libertarian sense is "put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others".
Most libertarians are pretty generous givers in terms of both charity, emotional support, helping hands and community. They just dislike having a gun to their heads to be that way.
There's just no plausible evidence that people in general are charitable enough to fund all the necessary hospitals and schools and so on that society requires. It's just not human nature.
So to the children who will go uneducated and die of sickness, that insufficient charity isn't going to mean much.
I don't follow your logic.
The non-aggression principle is what's at the core of libertarianism. It's to never initiate violence against peaceful people.
Helping others voluntarily is certainly in keeping with the philosophy.
> Libertarianism says, if you had bad luck and are poor and you get a disease you can't pay to cure, you die.
No it doesn't. It says we're going to help that person who is poor or in need, but we're doing it voluntarily.
Experience shows that not only is voluntary assistance deeply insufficient, but that it's also often extremely biased and prejudiced.