Choices

Liberals want to be your Mommy, feeding you, tucking you in, and wiping your nose.
Conservatives want to be your Daddy, telling you what to do and what not to do.
Libertarians want to treat you like an adult.

(David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer)


Aside:  Boaz rejects the unidimensional liberal-conservative continuum as too simple to represent reality, which it surely is. Hayek used a triangle, with liberal, conservative, and libertarian at the corners.

Here's another depiction, a 2 x 2 table with four cells, each cell representing a different ideological position. Better might be a square with the positions at the four corners. A particular person's ideological position would be a point somewhere inside the square, the perfect moderate at dead center. It's interesting to set that up and try to decide where you'd put the dot representing yourself.

		Government Intervention in Economic Affairs
		For	Against
Expansion of personal freedoms	For	Liberal	Libertarian
	Against	Authoritarian	Conservative