“The state acts like a band of thieves and killers,” explains Lew Rockwell, the best-known exponent of this strain. Libertarianism might be a simple ideology, an aversion to big government in all its forms, but don’t tell that to libertarians: “Like any movement of any size,” says Nick Gillespie, editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, “it is an endless operation of trying to figure out more and more ways in which people who agree on 99.9 percent of everything can really hate each other’s guts.”Īnarcho-Capitalists: The most radical of the lot, they want to abolish government entirely (though, unlike regular anarchists, they do support private property rights).