| I see libertarianism as more like armour than a cage. One is free to move about freely in an environment of opportunity. The armour stops individuals from violating other individuals who also wander the same environment. We are free to develop or act on opportunities both individually or collectively. The collective efforts are all done voluntarily, but even they cannot penetrate any individual's armour. Minarchy grants authority of the smallest government necessary to maintain the strength of the armour. Even though the source of the ideology was intelligentsia, the application into reality requires the will of people that subscribe to it. When the people who subscribe to minarchy detect the presence of voluntary collective efforts penetrating armour by force, they have no problem with granting government enough power to disperse or put down the violating group, after which the extra power terminates.
So one could consider libertarianism as a subset of populism because it takes a populism controlled by a majority of libertarians to allow the state of minarchy to be established and defended. An unpopular minorty of libertarians cannot exert enough power politically to establish it. |