The basic views of libertarians are that the government should interfere with peoples’ lives as little as possible, and that individual liberty is more important than the good of the state. From there, libertarianism gets pretty hairy. There are right-libertarians, left-libertarians, green-libertarians and libertarian socialists.

As of now, the Libertarian Party has 157 members holding office in the United States, which, in the grand scale of things, isn’t very many. The libertarian public figure with the most weight in  American politics is Congressman Ron Paul, who runs as a Republican. Paul is generally known as the only “nay” in 434-1 votes in Congress, and regularly runs for the Republican nomination for president. He is the biggest dissenter in politics.

Before discovering the virtues of libertarianism, I floated unknowingly between liberal social views and slightly more conservative economic views. However, the more I read about the libertarian point of view, the more sense it made. They believe in as little government influence on the lives of citizens as possible, and an extremely weak (and in some cases, nonexistent) central government. That means libertarians are against everything from welfare, to social security to government regulation of business. But that also means that they support gay marriage, abortion rights and freedom of speech.

While this seems shocking at first, it makes a lot of sense. Libertarians, first and foremost, believe in liberty and are against government involvement in basically everything because they believe that more government means more repression and injustice. Libertarianism can get a little extreme at times, especially considering that many of its followers think that the government shouldn’t even be involved in education, but the basic principles of the party and movement is something that more people should consider.