If you don't pay your taxes, men with guns will show up at your house, initiate force and put you in jail.

Modern libertarianism has multiple roots. Perhaps the oldest is the minimal-government republicanism of the U.S.'s founding revolutionaries, especially Thomas Jefferson and the Anti-Federalists. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the "classical liberals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were another key influence. More recently, Ayn Rand's philosophy of "ethical egoism" and the Austrian School of free-market capitalist economics have both contributed important ideas.

There are a number of standard questions about libertarianism that have been periodically resurfacing in the politics groups for years. This posting attempts to answer some of them. I make no claim that the answers are complete, nor that they reflect a (nonexistent) unanimity among libertarians; the issues touched on here are tremendously complex.

This is actually a complicated question, because the term "libertarianism" itself has two very different meanings. In Europe in the 19th-century, libertarianism was a popular euphemism for left-anarchism. However, the term did not really catch on in the United States. After World War II, many American-based pro-free-market intellectuals opposed to traditional conservatism were seeking for a label to describe their position, and eventually picked "libertarianism.