I would tend to agree with you that honest libertarianism is anarchism. This is how my views are evolving, anyway. "Pursuit of Liberty" taught me that minarchism is not grounded in any particular principle. The moment we accept that the government should exist to protect individual rights, we have accepted in principle the entire lumbering apparatus of modern government: taxes, regulations, foreign wars, you name it, as part of an amorphous "social contract". Libertarianism is the nice-sounding continuum between anarchism and the GOP, everybody makes what he wants out of it. Culturally it offers many attractions of liberalism, so as you say, both camps end up in the same place despite differences in rationalization.
On liberty Vs. values I still think that you confuse "enabling freedom" with "being free". Thus freedom is enabled by virtue but it is not a virtue. In a related way, along with Who_would_fardels_bear you confuse moral imperative and law.
Let's return to these topics when I come back.
I'm a minarchist and I don't believe in any kind of social contract.
I've gotten through Anarchy and State and am just now getting into Utopia, and I know that Nozick is not the be-all-and-end-all of libertarian philosophy, but I have these comments to add to this thread so far:
1. Regarding freedom, either we truly have free will or we don't. This is not merely a "poetic" question. If it turns out we don't have free will, then this would be truly a tragic result. Whether or not I would be depressed upon learning of this, would be a matter of whether or not I had been preprogrammed to become so.
2. Separating "legal" freedom from all other freedoms seems rather arbitrary. If you believe that only the state is capable of enforcing its edicts and thus of truly limiting your freedom, then I guess "legal freedom" would be distinctively different from all others. However, it seems that criminals, traditions, social institutions, etc. can cause people on occasion, or over long periods of time, to be essentially prevented from doing certain things. Thus Fleming's claim that libertarians who favor limited legal restrictions tend to also lobby for limited social restrictions is essentially correct. The fact that there are a few paleolibertarians who insist that social institutions be allowed to beef up their enforcement arms to offset the minimal enforcement of a limited state is the exception that proves the rule.
3. At no point in Nozick's book does he fully define a human being or reasoning agent or even an individual. It would seem this would be essential to a political theory. Fleming has pointed out that at least one libertarian ideologue does not include fetuses, and that he would also exclude small children. The fact that the Libertarian Party has also gone on record to exclude fetuses from protected status, suggests once again that Fleming is right: even the average every day libertarian has a limited concept of what an individual human is.
4. Nowhere in Nozick's book does he fully flesh out what a child is under a minimal state. Is it completely the property of its parents? Is it a complete individual free of all control from the time of birth? Or is it somewhere in between? Ideologues, libertarian and otherwise, will tend to want to lean toward one extreme or the other: the child is a possession or the child is a free agent. Conservatives don't have to do this because conservatives aren't, or at least shouldn't be, ideologues. If libertarians can't properly define what a child is and how it interacts with its family under a minimal government (especially when the child wants to do something that the parents do not want it to) then I believe they will tend in the direction that Fleming warns them about: the child will be perceived as an independent agent which can then be exploited, killed, or neglected unless someone happens to take an interest in it.
5. Fleming's prediction that anyone who doesn't support ideologically pure libertarianism will be labeled a statist or worse has been proved by replies to conservative comments in this thread.
6. There are a number of unstated requirements that Nozick hints at for his minimal state to remain in tact. One of those unstated implications is that the majority of citizens retain a minimal level of reasoning ability. If huge sections of the citizenry behave irresponsibly, then they can either choose to vote themselves into a socialist state or they can impoverish themselves so that they beg for a savior to help them out of their mess. Something like this happened in Albania where bunches of people freely chose to enter into pyramid schemes and thus impoverished themselves. Albania is certainly not on the road to becoming a free market capitalist nation, if it ever was.
7. Conservatives wish to add something to the minimal state, not to perform any kind of leveling or human engineering as the liberals want, but to create a stable and free state in a real world. Nozick's primary arguments against additions to a minimal state are against liberal notions of equality and social leveling. He doesn't really address the things that conservatives ask for above and beyond the libertarian ideal. Conservatives want people to grow up to be by and large independent individuals capable of rational thought. This might entail limiting access to drugs, prostitution, gambling, etc. It might entail some sort of support for traditional careers such as farming, ranching, etc.
Yes, it is possible that any minimal limitation of rights or minimal support of certain "protected" lifestyles will eventually result in the creation of a welfare state. However, it is also possible (and this is another point that Fleming makes) that eliminating all restrictions and supports too quickly might result in people irrationally choosing to put themselves into a welfare state. This Fleming argues is exactly what happened in the late 1800's.
If everyone drove their cars with perfect skill, then there would be no need for seatbelts or bumpers. The money saved could be reallocated in the marketplace for more productive endeavors. However, people don't drive perfectly, and even if the government didn't require them, most people would want their cars to come with seatbelts and bumpers. Conservatives by and large (I exclude the rabid fundamentalist theocrats) want to add some bumpers and seatbelts to the minimal libertarian state so that it will chug along in its imperfect state a lot longer than the pristine libertarian seatbelt and bumper-free Porsche when it merges into real traffic on the highway of life.
P.S.: I hope this is sufficiently screed-free for you all! ;-)