I think Libertarians and Communists are just 2 sides of the same coin. Many people in their 20s tend to lean towards one of these ideologies or something equally idealistic and then as they grow up and experience the world they realize that communism leads to starvation and owning nothing and libertarianism leads to the Congo.
The way I've heard this put many years ago, when I was sitting in class with a non-totally-insane prof that actually encouraged some healthy debate among us students, was something along the lines of 'Ayn Rand & Objectivism (basically turbo-libertarianism) were anti-Communist not only in the sense that they opposed Communism generally, but in the sense of antimatter's relationship with matter'. Basically the opposite end on a horseshoe of insanity, and the further away you get from the middle on that one, the more insane and impractical for real-life application your ideology was. (Rand herself was a refugee from the early USSR where her dad's business was nationalized - bluntly, seized at gunpoint by the commies - and she got purged from the university she tried to study at because she came from a 'bourgeois' background, so her being autistically determined to take every single polar opposite position to Communism she could find, no matter how illogical, at least makes some sense with that context. Many of her American disciples, obviously, do not have such an excuse.)
Looking at the bigger picture of how conservative ideologies evolved over time, pretty much none of them actually ever supported the social atomization and hyper-individualism intrinsic to libertarian thought. Despite their many differences, basically all conservatives in every country and through all time since the American/French Revolutions believed in the necessity of a hierarchic social order where people couldn't just do whatever the fuck they wanted all the time - in other words, they were fundamentally anti-anarchistic - and acknowledged a need for occasional personal sacrifices in the service of a greater good, whether it was European throne-and-altar conservatism or the American nationalism of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt & Nixon. None of those three presidents would approve of most, if any, modern libertarian positions & values and I suspect the feeling is mutual, if what online lolbert types like Razorfist think about them is any indicator.
The sort of 'fuck society, fuck all governments, fuck anything resembling a common good and fuck you, I've got mine (including my stash of CP and hard drugs) and that's all that matters to me' attitude usually associated with anarchists and lolberts of both the left and right-wing varieties evolved out of the more extreme/solipsistic schools of liberal and leftist thought over time, pretty much always in opposition to conservative thought. Even the most pro-'small government' conservative/trad sorts like Tolkien still envisioned there being hard limits on social behavior and the enforcement of those limits, just on a smaller scale - basically that it'd be your neighbors and local sheriff's department that kept you from sitting around getting high all day or abducting schoolchildren for your harem, rather than the Army imposing martial law or a totalitarian state security apparatus. And yeah, while 'total freedom, dude let's smoke weed & fuck all day lmao' might've been something that sounded cool to my younger and dumber self, nowadays it's difficult not to look at the absolute state of the West and not come to the conclusion that that line of thinking and its predecessors is actually societal cancer. Perhaps it is time for the modern right to acknowledge that Rand and her ilk were no less deluded and toxic than Lenin, Trotsky & Mao in the end, just in a different way.
