THE EVOLUTION OF NORMS. At Econ Log, Arnold Kling poses a fundamental question for libertarian belief systems.

I think that most people resent being told what to do, and yet such people are not libertarians when it comes to other people being told what to do. I have a stronger criterion for natural libertarianism. When you see other people doing something that really offends you, are you willing to see the state allow that behavior to continue? Only if you can answer "yes" are you a natural libertarian. I think that there are very few natural libertarians.

It would take an extremely principled person to see something obnoxious and resist the temptation to say "there oughta be a law." To provoke students I propose equivalences between sodomy laws and smoking bans. Sometimes it's the items mentioned, rather than the principle or lack thereof, that gets into the student grapevine, but teaching has in common with farming a long germination season.

A Lee Harris article in The American extends.

In order to encourage a population rich in internals—i.e., natural libertarians—a society needs cultural traditions that emphasize the value of independence and ethical agency. It must teach the young that they are responsible for their own actions, and to never regard themselves as victims of circumstance. Anthropologists who have studied the huge variety of human cultures have encountered quite primitive societies, such as the Nuer of the Sudan, which raise children to be feisty and independent. They are taught from an early age to resist being bullied by others and to fight back at the first attempt at dominating them. But wherever it may be found, at the heart of the tradition of independence lives a set of imperatives. Be self-reliant. Don’t take other people’s word for something; think for yourself. Never become anyone’s follower. Bow down before no one. Stand up for your rights. Don’t let bullies intimidate you. Don’t permit yourself to become the slave of an addiction and thereby forfeit your all-important self-control. And do whatever you can to make sure that other members of your community uphold and cherish the same tradition of independence.

All of that is hard work, and when your independence comes into conflict with mine, the resolution is not necessarily simple, as the article explains. (That "same tradition" is the seed-bed of all sorts of troubles. You interpret the tradition as a horse-and-buggy, somebody else as a butt-ugly SUV, someone else as an outrageous haircut.)

“Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you. Things that make you go “ick”, or that conflict with strong intuitions on proper behavior. Once upon a time, the idea of gay sex made most folks quite uncomfortable, and yet many of those folks still advocated tolerance for gay sex. Their argument was not that gay sex isn’t icky, but that a broad society should be reluctant to ban apparently victimless activities merely because many find them icky.

Or to find, in the ick, an externality, and let slip the Welfare Economics Paradigm.