Libertarians are kooks? Reagan didn’t think so......
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.”
So guess Ronald Reagan was a left wing kook too, wow I’ve been fooled all these years.
Did you somehow miss that right after your quoted comment from Reagan, he went on to say,
“Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy.”
As someone has wisely pointed out, the critical difference between libertarians and what I will call constitutional conservatives (CC) is simply this: The libertarian believes in the rule of the autonomous self, whereas the CC believes in the rule of law. This explains why libertarians are more conflicted over abortion than CCs. For the CC, there is a natural law that obligates all people to a certain standard of behavior; thus, you can make a case for legal norms for the group that override the short-term interests of the individual. Libertarians seem to chafe at such universal norms being encoded into law. And that is why, although I do respect much of what Ron Paul does for conservatism, to me, libertarianism is an unreliable support, as much subject to the changing tides of relative morality as liberalism, just with a different emphasis.