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Used to be Libertarian. Stopped labeling myself Libertarian a long time ago (late 90s/early 2000).
One fundamental problem with Libertarianism - one that often gets dismissed as mere "PC" - is that the Libertarian worldview, in young adults, often results from a trouble-free, relatively well-off, privileged childhood and adolescence.
I present myself as an example.
I am a straight white male from a fairly well-to-do suburb in New England. My family was lower-middle class, but both my parents were academics. I was raised in an atmosphere where learning and scholastic achievement were encouraged. My peers were pretty much all white kids just like me, living in a fairly upscale suburb.
So essentially, I was born into certain types of privilege.
Throughout high school, I was unconsciously forging a political worldview and I rejected my own parent's liberal-left worldview in the process because, hey, that's what kids do, we rebel against our parents. It didn't help that I was already deeply contrarian from the age of 6 or 7 onward. That contrarianism and a natural inclination to rebel shaped my later embrace of Libertarianism.
Basically, I just created a political philosophy for myself that directly countered whatever my parents believed in. If my parents thought that pollution was a problem, I would sit and think and do some reading and try to form an argument in my head defending pollution. I was constantly defining myself in the negative: Everyone else thinks X, therefore I will think Y. It was all part of trying to be "special" and different and trying to find what my parameters were as a teenager (i.e. what limits were there and what could I get away with). I viewed liberal values (kindness, sharing) with cynical suspicion just because most people I knew espoused them ("I refuse to be a sheep!") There's nothing that quite flatters the ego than thinking that you are some rare creature who has figured out that both sides of the political spectrum are worthless - oooh, what a revelation! What I was really after was the feeling that I was superior to everyone else.
Because I liked to do drugs and was an atheist, I figured that the Religious Right wing of the Republicans weren't a good fit for me. And since I hated tax-and-spend Democrats and lazy welfare cheats, I figured that the Democrats were just as shitty.
I used to rant about people abusing welfare a lot. Somehow I got it into my head that there were millions of people in the US unemployed by choice, living great lives on welfare while I (such injustice!) had to go to work to earn a living - all paid for with MY hard-earned tax dollars! - and that really got under my skin. Speaking of skin, Black people really got on my nerves back then because I figured that the problems in the Black community were self-created and self-perpetuating - "Why don't they stay in school! I could stay in school no problem!" I was all about those bootstraps, y'all.
Then I moved to New Orleans to go to college and had this worldview challenged every single fucking day. It was a gradual process, and it took several years, but after living with Black people (I had a Black roommate), with people of all ages, races, ethnicities, economic backgrounds, etc. I no longer saw the solution to the world's problems as cut-and-dried. Everything was shades of grey.
Where I came from, your parents got their kids into good schools, and there they learned how to look, speak, dress, and behave like young upstanding members of America's ruling class. Being able to afford a house in the neighborhood I grew up in would require that a person be able to work a well-paying job in the city and commute home every night. Being able to get into a good college required that one perform well in one's upscale high school in an upscale, almost entirely white suburb.
None of that meant jack shit in New Orleans.
After meeting and becoming friends with Black people from shitty economic backgrounds in New Orleans, I discovered that my way of looking at the world was in reality really subjective. My well-to-do background inhered in me the idea that the world was like the town I grew up in, or at least it could be, if only people would just be smart, articulate, law-abiding citizens who worked hard. I mistook my circumstances and my outlook as universal and assumed that the only reason why anyone had things worse than I did was because they just hadn't applied themselves the way I had.
It took actually living among people of all races, economic backgrounds, etc. to realize how lucky I was too be born with the privileges I had. I also became friends with women who turned me on to feminist writers and that changed how I thought about things too. I started seeing the idea of Libertarianism as an imaginary pie-in-the-sky intellectual playground for people who already had it good. It started to appear like a justification for selfishness to me after a while. It was gradual, but by the age of 26, I started to consider myself a liberal.
Another thing that changed how I saw things was going to jail in New Orleans for shoplifting from Tower Records. I figured that I was smart and sneaky and I could get away with it, but I got caught and spent the night in jail, among killers and addicts and some truly dangerous criminals. I had figured that since I was white and well-dressed and well-educated that those qualities would be my safety net. But the (Black) guy who arrested me took glee in the fact that I was a snooty white guy who had it coming - and thought I could weasel my way out of it by dint of my skin color and background. I was the only white face in that jail that night and frankly I was lucky to get out intact. Shit like that helps to wake you up to your privileges and prejudices. It made me realize that I'd been born on third base and had been congratulating myself for hitting a triple.
But yeah, to address the statements in the OP - I was one of those people whose brain would have shut off had someone mentioned that things were worse for Blacks back in the 90s. That thought just wouldn't have registered with me, or I would have found some kind of philosophical way of rationalizing why things were the way they were - "well, maybe they just need to work harder and stay in school" or something like that.
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