Quoted directly from Objectivism by Leonard Peikoff, from the chapter on government.
"The liberals tend to advocate intellectual freedom while demanding economic controls. The conservatives (though they endorse many economic controls) tend to advocate economic freedom, while demanding government controls in all the crucial intellectual and moral realms. Both groups obviously subscribe to and reflect the mind-body dichotomy. The conservatives, whose roots lie in religion, are mystics of spirit. The liberals, whose roots lie in Marx, are mystics of muscle.
'The conservatives [writes Rand] see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories-with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe--but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.'
Is it a paradox that the spiritualists advocate economic freedom, while the materialist advocate intellectual freedom? Ayn Rand holds that such a development is logical:
'...each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities that it despises.... Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man's consciousness; the liberals, his body.'
There is nothing more to be said about liberals; no one can confuse Franklin D. Roosevelt or Edward M. Kennedy with Objectivism. About the conservatives, however, who pretend to be defenders of "free enterprise" or "the American way of life" while spreading all the opposite ideas and laws, something remains to be said.
Precisely because of their pretense, the conservatives are morally lower than the liberals; they are farther removed from reality--and, therefore, they are more harmful in practice. Since they purport to be fighting "big government" they are the main source of political confusion in the public mind; they give people the illusion of an electoral alternative without the fact. Thus the statist drift proceeds unchecked and unchallenged.
Historically, from the Sherman Act to Herbert Hoover to the Bush Administration(s), it is conservatives, not the leftists, who have always been the major destroyers of the United States.
"Conservative" here must be construed in philosophic terms. It subsumes any "rightist" who attempts to tie the politics of the Founding Fathers to unreason in any form--whether he is a Protestant fundamentalist, a Catholic invoking Papal dogma, a neoconservative invoking Judaic dogma, a Republican invoking "states right" (i.e. a man seeking fifty tyrannies instead of one), a libertarian invoking anarchism, or a Southerner invoking racism.
Freedom is the opposite of every one of these creeds--and so is Objectivism their opposite.
Objectivists are not "conservatives." We do not seek to preserve the present system, but to change it at the root. In the literal sense of the word, we are radicals--radicals for freedom, radicals for man's rights, radicals for capitalism.
We have no choice in the matter.
We have no choice because, in philosophy, we are radicals for reason."


So there you have it; the truth about liberals and conservatives; simply two sides of the same coin; a duopoly of power, both meant to enslave and control the masses.