David F. Nolan, whose fierce belief in limited government, personal freedom and the free-market economy led him to band with a handful of like-minded friends to found the national Libertarian Party in 1971, has died. He was 66.

According to Mark Hinkle, chairman of the party’s national committee, Nolan apparently had a stroke or heart attack while driving in Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday. He was found in his car and taken to a Tucson hospital, where he died early Sunday, Hinkle said.

The Libertarian Party has often been called the Party of Principle for its strict adherence to its ideals, even at the risk of alienating voters. It has advocated for limiting government in every sense, and its positions have included legalizing prostitution and drugs, removing restrictions on abortion and gay marriage, and ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars.

“The government’s job is to protect you,” Nolan told an interviewer in 2006. “Beyond that it’s up to you.”

No candidate has ever won national office under the Libertarian Party banner, but Nolan said he saw the party less as a major vote-getter than a way to inject libertarian ideas into the national political discussion.

“This very mania for ‘winning now’ is one of the factors that makes both of our present major political parties unlikely vehicles for libertarianism,” he wrote in 1971.

He added that “a third party, in contrast, can take a long-range approach – running candidates with no intention of immediate victory.”

The impetus for the new party was a national address by President Richard Nixon on Aug. 15, 1971. U.S. currency would no longer be pegged to the gold standard, Nixon announced, and the federal government would institute wage and price controls to curb inflation.

Nolan, who had campaigned to repeal the federal income tax, considered himself a Republican until he watched Nixon’s speech from his home in Colorado, surrounded by a group of friends.

They saw the president’s moves as an unconstitutional overreach of power.

Less than four months later, Nolan and seven others voted to form the national Libertarian Party.