Hospers position on "what libertarianism is" takes on two fundamental ideas of the libertarian. From what "freewill" should be to the role that governments should play in a society.
No one may take another individual and make them into that persons slave, even if they had the power to do so. Nobody can dominate over the life of a person and make them do something against their will. But, according to Hospers, that is exactly what the government does.
Hospers implies that governments have been nothing but trouble in the past. They have enslaved thousands of people, and made them work, against their will. They have put millions of people in concentration camps and sent them to their deaths. The only business the government has in people's lives is the protection of a person's basic rights. A person has no right to hold you against your will. A person has no right to do bodily harm to you and you have no right to do the same. If a person comes on to your property without invitation and robs you of items that you have worked for, then the government has an obligation to protect you. This is the law, and only law that a government should be able to enforce, to protect you from having you basic rights violated. .
Governments, however, should have no right to enforce laws to dispose of men's lives as they see fit. Of course this is not to be taken in the literal text, but they have no right to dispose of what a man has worked for and to give a man no choice in the decision. In no way should the government have the power to commence an intrusion into ones privacy or act in aggression against ones will, providing that he is doing no harm to another.
The government should have no right to tell a person how to run his business. From what the prices should be on certain goods, to who he must hire as employees without racial discrimination. The government maintains that there should be positions available to those who may only be able to perform certain task, even when there is no need for the job.
