Liberals have strongly defended private life-style choices that challenge traditional morality. However, under the influence of the collectivist philosophies such as Marxism and Socialism, they have contracted the limits of self-regarding acts in the economic sphere so that there is virtually no economic area in which government and society can not and should not intervene. Contemporary Liberalism has more recently fallen away from the ethos of freedom and toward equality of outcome. For example, Liberalism refuses to allow anyone to sell their own labor for less than the mandated minimum wage, while insisting that every private moral choice be treated with governmental and societal indifference or even subsidy. Conservatives have been quick to embrace the expansion of the self-regarding sphere to economic transactions.
Libertarians also extend the sphere other social interactions.
Some Conservatives would like to see government and society directly involved in non-economic questions of morality. More thoughtful Conservatives have argued that while state action should not be directly employed to limit was in regards as behavior that hurts only the individual, the power of custom and tradition should be used to sway private behavior in socially useful ways. Government action, if used at all, should be indirect and circumspect. For example, the state might provide salutary moral persuasion indirectly, by rewarding certain activities by special provisions in the tax code. Mill was a complex man whose temperament, if not political philosophy, was Libertarian in nature, championing women's suffrage and birth control.