Libertarians believe in ‘limited government, individual liberty, free markets, and peace.” Limited government means less spending (and so fewer taxes, and a lower public debt). That doesn’t mean there should be no spending. People have a right to defend themselves (defense, policing) even if we may spend too much in those areas (influential defense contractors or equipment vendors being among the causes of over-spending).

There’s a second area – beyond personal safety – that’s worthy of consideration: limited, necessary aid to the poor and disabled. The best way to alleviate poverty is to unleash the power of free markets to improve everyone’s standard of living. Still, not everyone feels that uplifting power (in part because the state wrongly restrains and restricts markets).

Although one would prefer private charitable solutions for those mired in poverty, traditionally libertarians are not opposed to this kind of public spending. That may seem contrary to what many have heard about libertarians, but that’s because they haven’t heard the straight story about libertarians.

Over a year ago, Edward Glasser, at the New York Times’s Economix Blog, correctly noted the libertarian willingness to consider public aid to the poor:

Libertarianism rests on two bedrock beliefs: human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up. The first belief is based more on faith than empirical result; the second derives from millennia of human experience. The increased appeal of libertarianism today reflects a nonpartisan view that the public sector has been deeply problematic under either party. It is a backlash against President Bush as well as President Obama. (Ron Paul was, after all, the only Republican to vote against the 2002 Iraq war resolution). Libertarians tend to think that the Bush years taught that all governments were flawed, not that everything would be better with a new leader who would expand the public sector….

Libertarians are rarely anarchists. Almost all of them believe in some form of state power, at the very least the protection of private property and the enforcement of contracts. Many of them, including Milton Friedman, are quite comfortable with larger exercises of state power, including the redistribution of resources to those who have less. Professor [Jeffrey] Miron writes that “antipoverty spending is the most defensible kind of redistribution,” because “the goal of this redistribution – helping the poor – is reasonable and the costs of a well-designed limited antipoverty program (e.g., a negative income tax set on a state-by-state basis) are modest.”

See, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/the-economics-of-libertarianism-revealed.

That’s a fair assessment, all around. Of all the kinds of objectionable public spending — and that’s most public spending — spending on the poor remains an exception: it’s not objectionable. By contrast, spending is worst when it benefits established people, who use the state to tax others to divert others’ earnings toward themselves. For successful people, government acts as a shakedown artist, or a reverse Robin Hood, taking from common people to feed the appetites and egos of established ones.