Hi everyone, I just wrote another essay. I hope you like it... and I hope I can find the time to keep writing. Suggestions, edits, etc very much appreciated.

Right-libertarian ideology is little more than a sham. This might be an inflammatory way to begin a piece, but it’s a fairly simple exercise to explore what right-libertarian philosophy is about and point to its obvious flaws, contradictions, and monstrous implications. I hope to see this post used as a sort of quick reference point when confronted with right-libertarian ideology, as they are used to debating with liberals and properly framing a debate with them can quickly prove fatal to their arguments.

The basic ideas of right-libertarian thought include the upholding of a minimally-regulated capitalism as an economic ideal, combined with a minimal nation-State that enforces borders, issues currencies, maintains a standing army and little else (so-called “anarcho”-capitalists despise even these actions from the State). Right-libertarians tend to trace their lineage from the classical liberal tradition onward, although this genealogy gives much to quibble with. With the exception of hypocritical charlatans like John Locke, a favorite of the right-libertarians, many of the classical liberals like J. S. Mill were moving closer and closer to socialism in the later years. A fair extrapolation of classical liberalism’s principles and reasoning, not just their conclusions and positions on some issues of the day, might lead one to a sort of libertarian socialism or perhaps a social democratic viewpoint. Regardless, what is clear is that right-libertarian thinking is largely a creature of the 20th century. Extremely rarely among ideologies of the left or right, societies based on their prescriptions are virtually absent in the historical record, except in a handful of well-publicized cases such as Medieval Iceland where the very policies that were closest to their ideals ended up hastening the collapse of these societies. In that case, privately enforced laws turned into the open buying and selling of justice, and warlords began to favor a very violent form of “free market competition”, destabilizing society. This lack of historical representation bodes poorly for the coherence and viability of the ideology, and as we will see, there are very good theoretical reasons to support this conclusion.

Perhaps the core problem of right-libertarian ideology comes from the separation of the idea of human freedom into something called “positive liberty” and something called “negative liberty”. In the public discourse, this is a distinction of fairly recent vintage, although it supposedly goes back to Kant in some fashion or other. The former, the “positive” part of liberty, is what most people would intuitively imagine when the word freedom is brought up. It is, generally speaking, the ability to live your life, develop yourself, and make choices as you see fit without the interference of other people or forces, provided that you in turn do not interfere. This is generally the basis of the anarchist or left-libertarian grouping of political philosophies, in fact: we must examine various structures in society (from government to capitalism to patriarchy to organized religion) to see if they are impeding the freedom of people both as individuals and as collectives, and look for less liberty-damaging alternatives or eliminate them altogether as unnecessary relics from the past. Originally the moniker “libertarian” was bestowed upon anarchists because of this focus, and in many parts of Europe those connections are still made. The novelty – and fraud – of the right-libertarian movement lay in the emphasis on the “negative” part of liberty, which is concisely described as the simple absence of coercion or obstacles in the way of making choices (which is not the same as having the real ability to live your life according to your will). This is typically vulgarized by right-libertarians into something like “freedom is in not having someone use threats or force when you sign agreements, thus making all contracts you sign in this state the result of free bargaining”.

The issue with this sort of division of freedom into two different ideas and the focus on “negative liberty” is that all humans need some sort of basic level of resources to survive. We get hungry and thirsty, we need shelter from the elements, and so on. This is the condition of nature for us, and there is no getting around it. That means that a society designed around and consistent with the concept of negative liberty can easily exploit our need for resources to benefit a tiny privileged class. The most extreme example is to have a world where one person owns all the land and capital (i.e, the means of production), and has some sort of automated technology that physically prevents anyone else from using the land or capital for productive purposes unless they give their assent. That assent just happens to be dependent on the acceptance of a contract that specifies something akin to slave labor in return for the bare minimum of goods and services needed to survive and come back to work the next day. However, importantly, this impossibly wealthy planet owner does not use any sort of force or coercion or threats to get their labor, they simply wait for everyone else to become desperate enough from the pressing demands of nature to “freely” sign the contract. What here is inconsistent with the right-libertarian principles of negative liberty? Nothing, and although this situation is improbable to say the least, the point is that such an example should not be consistent with any workable or humane set of ethics, much less a political philosophy claiming to be about human liberty. Indeed, a good many low wage workers face something like this situation (labor in the conditions offered by a vastly more powerful employer or starve), which is part of the reason why the minimal impact of minimum wage laws continually confound those fans of Econ 101 who wait for the “statist wage floors” to disrupt labor markets and lead to massive unemployment. It turns out that if you need a given amount of money every month to survive, pay rent, buy school supplies for your children, etc, then you’re going to work however many hours you need to work to reach that number, and that is the dominant dynamic. A slightly higher wage only means you need to work less hours to reach that goal, and the idea of a labor-leisure trade-off increasing the amount of labor you’re willing to supply is completely foreign to you. In these kinds of jobs you make enough to get by and then you come home exhausted. Of course, right-libertarians condemn this government intervention as an unjustified infringement on the supposed right of the worker to work for less money – as if anyone really would choose eighty or ninety hours a week of labor at sweatshop wages because they enjoyed the work and were satisfied with the pay, as opposed to being driven by what Marx called the “whip of hunger”.

A second and highly related issue that fatally saps the coherence and praiseworthiness of right-libertarian thinking becomes clear when considering the libertarian socialist or anarchist critique of power and coercion in a little more detail. In this framework, any attempt to attack the State on one hand while defending Capital with the other boils down to little more than a special pleading argument. Why? As mentioned previously, anarchists believe that the best way to maximize the real ability of humans to follow their will and develop themselves as autonomous people, to create truly free societies, is to take a look around ourselves at the institutions that govern our lives and demand that they justify themselves. If workable, less coercive institutions exist as replacements, then movements should be organized to do just that. If no replacements are even necessary, then the status quo should be radically re-ordered to reflect this more free possible state of society. It is clear, for example, that humans can organize themselves without a strong, centralized State directing their affairs. Thus in general it is better to have weaker and less violent governments or none at all than to have stronger and more vicious ones, a critique shared by both left- and right-libertarians. However, those on the Left believe (with very good evidence including small- and large-scale experiments, although that isn’t the purpose of this essay) that the combination of private property, large-scale markets and hierarchical wage labor that defines capitalism is an intensely dangerous buildup of power and is far from necessary. If implemented using syndicalist, communalist, anarchist or other lines of thought, an economic system featuring socialized means of production could produce wealth while avoiding the very terrible impacts on humans and the environment that capitalism is known for all over the planet. Of course, even New Deal-style welfare state capitalism would be a vast improvement on the American status quo of people dying by the tens of thousands because of a lack of affordable medicine while corporations defraud consumers and pollute the environment with impunity! Thus right-libertarians are stuck arguing that human liberty is the primary measure of the validity of a given political philosophy, and that minimally regulated capitalism is the most free economic system imaginable, despite ample evidence to the contrary. This is simply untenable as a logical or moral argument.

So why do right-libertarians even exist, if their ideas are so fundamentally incoherent and it doesn’t take much to unravel this truth? Upon talking to people of this persuasion, you will tend to find two general categories of people: the first are generally those who know the slogans and generally care about human freedom (often “positive liberty” as well as “negative liberty”), but haven’t dug too deep into the philosophy nor really learned much about opposing ideologies or common challenges to the system. Many in this category are younger and interested in finding a label that makes them stand out or functions as a signaling device for their intelligence. These are great targets for debate and “conversion” because they aren’t fundamentally terrible people, just misguided. The second category, however, are those who know very well the implications of right-libertarian ideology and in fact cheer for them. They enjoy the fantasy of being part of a small class of elites exploiting and exercising their power over the masses through capitalist business, and inherently accept “liberty” as no more than the privilege of this elite. The feudal barons of old come to mind, except with less responsibility from the baron’s side. Interestingly enough, the self-serving habits of John Locke, the odd one out among the well-known classical liberals, would place him as a sort of patron saint among this group. This group uses the talk about freedom and choice simply as a cover for their desire to exploit and immiserate the great masses of people that would be toiling under them with no labor protections and terrible wages, if they had their way. They thus need to be constantly and publicly confronted with the truth of their ideology, not least because they are backed up with the money of a good number of millionaires and billionaires, and they have some sway in the media, in academia, and in politics.

In the end, right-libertarians are correct to focus on human freedom as the basis of a political philosophy, but in approaching it from the angle of negative liberty and ignoring the dangerous hierarchies of power involved in capitalism, they do little but (consciously or unconsciously) put a veil on their true interest: the all-too-human freedom of a tiny elite to use and abuse the privileges of capital ownership. True believers in the ability of people to work in concert with others to fully develop their potential and freely map out the contours of their own lives should discard right-libertarianism as a fraudulent ideology and turn to a more authentic politics of liberty, like that of libertarian socialism.