To be honest, there are large aspects of libertarian ideologies that I like. There are others that I do not like.

THere are a lot of different kinds of libertarians -- and it's really important to understand these differences.

For example, there are libertarians who do believe that there should be a federal government and that the federal government should manage a lot of things because some communities are simply not capable of managing it on their own due to circumstance (natural disasters are a great example).

There are other libertarians who believe in a more socialized aspect to things. For example, the power company would be owned by the people, the power going to the people, and any power sold to other states/countries/whatever would then go into a fund spread among the people. It's pretty much pure socialism. Noam Chomsky talks a lot about this sort of libertarianism (btw, I find old Noam really interesting, but often quite confusing).

Anarcho-libertarians tend to be considered the "most extreme" -- who basically believe that there should be no government and focus on individual sovereignty as the starting point for everything (which is great concept, honestly), and that we will all just be good people and figure it out without the need for any sort of government at all. I'm not quite sure how that would work. A lot of folks in this camp like to talk about "family" -- but my family doesn't work that great, so I"m not so enamored. LOL

From there, though, I would say that I do find some libertarian ideas really interesting and valuable. The more "mainstream" libertarians (such as the Cato Institute) is really a form of economic liberalism (which we then call conservative -- so confusing). And they leave the social aspects simply to the given states -- not a federal issue or whatever. But, I don't know if civil rights quite work that way -- or they don't seem to anyway.

It seems to me that Rand falls much closer to the anarcho-libertarian camp than his father does, but I can't say so much what Ron Paul is up to. He's been consistent in his politics, and he seems to be economically liberal (which is to say conservative in our common language), and he's also socially liberal, but would prefer all of that stay out of politics as far as I can tell (which means to not legislate on anything such as abortion, legal marriage, etc) and that everyone would just have natural legal rights.

And, our country is a social experiment. It has been from the very beginning. IN a way, all countries are social experiments. We get together and we try things and some things work and some things don't. That's just life.