Here’s how I feel. 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.
I agree with some of that, but I have a few caveats.
Many libertarians cannot understand the concept that liberty is NOT license, and that there can be no liberty in societies of chaos.
I would also say that conservative and liberal mean what they mean…TODAY. What they used to mean, what ‘classical liberal’ used to mean, is really just a point of interest. It is what it is now. That horse done left the barn.
But as a conservative, I consider myself in agreement with about 80% of libertarianism. But a lot of libertarian claimers, including Rand Paul and Neil Boortz, are NOT libertarian at all in many ways. Same with a lot of young paul bots.