Libertarianism starts from a premise most people share and few follow to the end: you own yourself. Your body, your labor, and what you acquire without force or fraud are yours, and no one — not a neighbor, not a majority, not the state — may take them without consent.
From that seed grows the whole plant. If self-ownership is real, then the one clear wrong is aggression — initiating force or fraud against another person or their property. This is the non-aggression principle, and many libertarians treat it as the movement's moral spine: do as you please, so long as you don't aggress, and the state is bound by exactly the same rule. Voluntary exchange between consenting adults is therefore presumptively legitimate, which makes libertarianism a strong defender of free markets — not merely because markets are efficient, but because trade is what free people do when no one is forcing them.
The obvious question is how much government survives this. Libertarians answer along a spectrum. Minarchists keep a “night-watchman” state — police, courts, and defense to protect rights, and little else. Anarcho-capitalists go further, arguing even those can be provided by voluntary means, so the state should vanish entirely. What unites the family is the direction of travel: the burden of proof always sits on coercion, never on freedom.
Michael Paycer