In the upcoming U.S. election on November 8, the Libertarian Party is likely to receive more votes than any other third (neither Democratic nor Republican) party in the country, and its presidential candidate, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, is likely to receive more votes than any other Libertarian candidate since the party’s founding in 1971. (Johnson also headed the Libertarian Party ticket in the election of 2012, in which he polled about 1.3 million votes, or roughly 1% of the total.) His party’s increasing strength comes despite his exclusion from televised debates and his near-total absence from major media coverage. In this election, Libertarians are hoping to make their party and their movement more visible and more relevant than ever before, in part by appealing to younger voters and others who may be disenchanted with the two major-party candidates—Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump—and to sympathizers of the antigovernment Tea Party movement, which always contained a strong libertarian current.
The Libertarian Party seeks in its platform to implement the principles of libertarianism, a political philosophy that places the greatest value on the freedom (or liberty) of individuals and of private associations of individuals, especially in the economic realm. Philosophical libertarians believe in a natural right to property, which entails the freedom to do whatever one wishes with what one legitimately owns (including one’s body), as long as the property rights of others are not violated in certain ways, including through violence, coercion (the threat of violence), fraud, theft, and extortion. Accordingly, libertarians hold that governments may not violate the property rights of individuals in any of these ways; more generally, the powers of government, which inevitably restrict individual freedoms, should be limited to those necessary to protect the property rights of individuals from violation by others.
It follows from these principles that many of the common powers of present-day governments are unjust. For example, the imposition of taxes designed to redistribute income or to fund social services amounts to the coerced confiscation of money, in violation of the property rights of more-affluent taxpayers. On the same principles, libertarians advocate laissez-faire capitalism and oppose most common forms of economic regulation, including those designed to protect the environment or to ensure worker health and safety. They also reject most public services (notably excepting the police and the military), public education, public health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid), and government-provided unemployment assistance and retirement benefits (Social Security). In other areas, libertarians oppose all forms of censorship and any government regulation of private activities that do not entail harm to others, including sexual relationships and drug use.
The current platform of the Libertarian Party generally reflects these principles and policies through its call for elimination of the income tax and abolition of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the phasing out of Social Security and government aid to the poor, the ending of government environmental regulation in favor of a system based on civil suits for environmental injuries, and the repeal of legal restrictions on abortion.
Critics of libertarianism have argued that under-regulated markets lead to a host of socially undesirable outcomes, including increased poverty and extreme disparities of wealth and income. Such inequalities in turn tend to undermine democratic institutions, because the wealthy minority is better able than the rest of the population to influence government policy in its own interests, especially in the absence of meaningful campaign-finance laws, which libertarians reject as unjust restrictions on freedom of speech.
Other critics have alleged that the libertarian conception of individual freedom is unrealistic or impoverished because it fails to recognize forms of nonviolent coercion that are often exercised by private economic actors, such as corporations. Libertarian principles, according to these critics, are perfectly consistent with real-world situations in which the disparity of power between a corporation and its workers is extreme, as in the case of workers who are forced to accept paltry wages or unsafe working conditions because there are no other jobs available to them. In the libertarian worldview, such workers are “free” because they are not coerced to work through the threat of violence. They possess a perfect liberty to choose between economic slavery and starvation.