Libertarianism
The philosophy that individual freedom is the supreme political value and government should be as small as possible.
The Smallest Possible Government
Libertarianism holds that individual liberty is the foundational political value and that government's only legitimate function is protecting people from force and fraud. Everything else, from education to healthcare to retirement savings, should be left to voluntary exchange between free individuals. The state is not a benefactor; it is, at best, a necessary evil.
The intellectual roots run deep. John Locke's natural rights theory, Adam Smith's invisible hand, and John Stuart Mill's harm principle all feed into modern libertarianism. But the movement as a distinct political force emerged in the 20th century, largely in the United States, as a reaction to the expansion of the welfare state under FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Ayn Rand's novels became foundational texts, arguing that centralized planning inevitably leads to tyranny.