Kenny Johnsson interviews Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., for The Liberal Post:

Johnsson: Do you consider yourself a libertarian?

Rockwell: Most certainly. What are the choices? Conservative is obviously out, even though the media describe us this way. The term's heritage dates to the Tory party in Britain, the very mercantilist-landowners who resisted change in the Corn Laws. This group opposed capitalism as socially destabilizing. They didn't like the merchant class to making more money than the old families — meaning that they didn't want to lose their privileges. In the US, the term conservative came about after World War II. It had no meaning, really, other than to refer to the general desire to be prudent in public affairs, in contrast to the revolutionary tendencies on the left. The problem is that it amounted to a defense of the status quo, and, after Buckley, it was irretrievably wrapped up with the Cold War cause.

I like the term liberal since genuine liberalism is our heritage. It was their insight that society is self-managing, and this is the greatest political idea ever advanced in human history. But there are two problems here. The first is that the term was hijacked by socialists during the Progressive Era and especially after the New Deal, when the liberals finally sold out to the state. The second is more obscure but it is important: even the good kind of liberalism was very much bound up with republican theory, that you could have a government made up of the people rather than the elites. This error, which is really utopian, led to a commitment to government as an essential institution. Advances in economics and political philosophy since that time have shown that this is a misnomer. There is no way to keep government in check, since by definition it is guilty of committing the very aggressions it is supposedly designed to keep at bay: namely, theft, murder, counterfeiting, kidnapping, and the like. So the liberal critique of the state just wasn't radical enough.

There are other options, such as the term I once used, "paleolibertarian," which refers to libertarianism before the movement emerged to institutionalize it as an ideological wing of the state's political apparatus. This term was designed to address a very serious problem that libertarians in Washington had come to see themselves as a pleading pressure group hoping to find "market-based" solutions to public policy problems but within public policy, and thus do they support school vouchers, limited wars, managed trade, forced savings as an alternative to social security, and the like. Unfortunately, the term paleolibertarian became confused because of its association with paleoconservative, so it came to mean some sort of socially conservative libertarian, which wasn't the point at all — though the attempted definition of libertarian as necessarily socially leftist is a problem too.

There are other strange terms bandied about from time to time, but in the end, I think we have to be happy with the term libertarian, while knowing that politics tends to taint all word usage issues. What is a libertarian? It is a person who believes in the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition.

FULL INTERVIEW at Mises.org