Today, especially in capitialist cultures, the term libertarian is often wrongly associated with a pro-corporate agenda more correctly defined by the term fascism. Libertarian values are concerned with the rights of individuals to live their lives without the interference of authorites provided that they do not interfere with those same rights for others.
All this would work smoothly in a perfect world, but of course we don't. In this world how we percieve and exercise our individual rights often comes into conflict with the rights of others. Down through history the imbalance of power between those individuals who have more material wealth and those who have less has been so skewed in favor of the wealthy that the very institutions originally created by our ancestors to adjudicate those inevitable conflicts between the rights of individuals that laws now allow the wealthy and their zombie like corporations the right to pollute our air, poison our water, fill our food with crap and wage aggressive wars to dominate the resources of others that our liberty to live freely is all but gone.
The state and its laws originally came into existance to protect the personal liberty of each of us to live freely but now serve only the wealthy who can corrupt those original good intentions with the power derived by the inequities that have grown out of this corruption down through time.
How then, in our less than perfect world, can individuals recapture their personal liberty to enjoy clean air, pure water, real food and peace? As the state and its laws, as i see it, can't or won't protect us, we must each take back those most basic rights by responsibily living them. Living your values isn't easy in this twisted sister of a modern world but we must if are to live free. The cost of exercising our liberty is often the living of a difficult life, but that cost much be paid because only by living our values, living morally in an immoral world, can we truely be liberated.
