https://mises.org/mises-daily/left-and-right-within-libertarianism
I have modified my copy of this newsletter removing unneeded incendiary comments about classical laissez-fairists and people in favor of minimal compulsory taxation over complete voluntary taxation. I also removed Rothbards defense of fetuscide (abortion) as the libertarian view. As well as unneeded hatred for people with a more neolibertarian foreign policy over the paleo one.
Recently, a bewildering and seemingly new phenomenon has burst upon the public consciousness, “right-wing libertarianism.” While earlier forms of the movement received brief and scornful attention by professional “extremist”-baiting liberals, present attention is, almost miraculously for veterans of the movement, serious and respectful. The current implication is “maybe they’ve got something here. What, then, have they got?”
Whatever their numerous differences, all “right-wing libertarians” agree on the central core of their thought, briefly, that every individual has the absolute moral right to “self-ownership,” the ownership and control of his own body without aggressive interference by any other person or group. Secondly, libertarians believe that every individual has the right to claim the ownership of whatever goods he has created or found in a natural, unused state: this establishes an absolute property right, not only in his own person but also in the things that he finds or creates. Thirdly, if everyone has such an absolute right to private property, he therefore has the right to exchange such property titles for other titles to property: hence the right to give away such property to whomever he chooses (provided, of course, that the recipient is willing); hence the right of bequest — and the right of the recipient to inherit.
The emphasis on the rights of private property of course locates this libertarian creed as emphatically “right-wing,” as does the right of free contract, implying absolute adherence to freedom of enterprise and the free-market economy. It also means, however, that the right-libertarian stands foursquare for the “civil liberty” of freedom of speech, press, and assembly. It means that he necessarily favors total freedom for pornography, prostitution, and all other forms of personal action that do not themselves aggress against the property of others. And, above all, he regards conscription as slavery pure and simple. All of these latter positions are of course now regarded as “leftist,” and so the right-libertarian is inevitably put in the position of being some form of “left-rightnik,” someone who agrees with conservatives on some issues and with leftists on others.
While others therefore see him as curiously fluctuating and inconsistent, he regards his position as virtually the only one that is truly consistent, consistent on behalf of the liberty of every individual. For how can the leftist be against the violence of war and conscription and morality laws while yet favoring the violence of taxes and government controls? And how can the rightist trumpet his devotion to private property and free enterprise while favoring conscription and the outlawing of activities he deems immoral?
While of course opposing any private or group aggression against the rights of private property, the right-libertarian unerringly zeroes in on the central, the overriding aggressor upon such rights: the State apparatus. While the leftist tends to regard the State as an evil enforcer of private-property rights, the right-libertarian, on the contrary, regards it as the prime aggressor on such rights.
In contrast to believers in democracy or monarchy or dictatorship, the right-libertarian steadfastly refuses to regard the State as invested with any sort of divine or any other sanction setting it up above the general moral law. If it is criminal for one man or a group of men to aggress against a man’s person or property, then it is equally criminal for an outfit calling itself the “government” or “State” to do the same thing.
Hence the right-libertarian regards “unjust war” as mass murder, “conscription” as slavery, and — for most libertarians — “taxation” as robbery. From such past mentors as Herbert Spencer (The Man vs. the State) and Albert Jay Nock (Our Enemy, the State), the right-libertarian regards the State as the great enemy of the peaceful and productive pursuits of mankind.
On the extreme-right fringe of the movement, there are those who simply believe in old-fashioned, 19th-century laissez-faire; the major laissez-faire group is the Foundation for Economic Education, of Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, for which many of the middle-aged members of the right-libertarian movement have worked at one time or another.
The laissez-fairists believe that a central government must exist, and therefore that taxes must exist, but that taxation should be confined to the prime “governmental” function of defending life and property against attack. Any pressing of government beyond this function is considered illegitimate.
The great bulk of libertarians, especially among the youth, have, however, gone beyond laissez-faire, for they have seen its basic inconsistency: for if taxation is robbery for building dams or steel plants, then it is also robbery when financing such supposedly “governmental” functions as police and the courts.
If it is legitimate for the State to coerce the taxpayer into financing the police, then why is it not equally legitimate to coerce the taxpayer for myriad other activities, including building steel factories, subsidizing favored groups, etc.? If taxation is robbery, surely then it is robbery regardless of the ends, benevolent or malevolent, for which the State proposes to employ these stolen funds.
Moving on, we come to the Randian and neo-Randian movements, those who follow or have been influenced by the novelist Ayn Rand. From the publication of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged in 1958, the Randian movement developed into what seemed to be destined as a mighty force. For the emotional impact of Rand’s powerfully-plotted novels attracted a vast following of young people into her “Objectivist” movement.
In addition to the emotional drawing power of the novels, Randianism provided the eager acolyte with an integrated philosophical system, a system grounded on Aristotelian epistemology, and blending it with Nietszchean egoism and hero worship, rationalist psychology, laissez-faire economics, and a natural-rights political philosophy, a political philosophy grounded on the libertarian axiom of never aggressing upon the person or property of another.
Even at its peak, however, the effectiveness of the Randian movement was severely limited by two important factors:
One was its extreme and fanatical sectarianism; Randians refused to have anything to do with any person or group, no matter how close in outlook, who deviated by so much as an iota from the entire Randian canon — a canon, by the way, that has a rigid “line” on every conceivable question, from aesthetics to tactics. (An odd exception to this sectarianism, by the way, is the Republican Party and the Nixon administration, which includes several highly placed Randians as advisors.) Particularly hated by the Randians is any former colleague who has deviated from the total line; these people are reviled and personally blacklisted by the faithful. Indeed, Rand’s monthly magazine, The Objectivist, is probably the only magazine in the world that consistently cancels the subscription of anyone on their personal blacklist, including any subscribers who send in what they consider to be unworshipful questions.
The second, associated factor is the totalitarian atmosphere, the cultic atmosphere, of the Randian movement. While the official Randian creed stresses the importance of individuality, self-reliance, and independent judgment, the unofficial but crucial axiom for the faithful is that “Ayn Rand is the greatest person who has ever lived” and, as a practical corollary, that “everything Ayn Rand says is right.” With this sort of ruling mentality, it is no wonder that the turnover in the Randian movement has been exceptionally high: attracted by the credo of individualism, an enormous number of young people were either purged or drifted away in disgust.
The collapse of the Randian movement as an organized force came in the summer of 1968, when an unbelievable bombshell struck the movement: an irrevocable split between Rand and her appointed heir, Nathaniel Branden.
Since then, the Randian movement has happily become polycentric; and Branden repaired to California to set up his own schismatic movement there. But the latter is still a movement confined to psychological theories and publications, and to book reviews in the occasionally appearing Academic Associates News. As an organized movement, Randianism, whatever variant, is a mere shadow of its former self.
But the Randian creed still remains as a vital influence on the thinking of libertarians, so many of whom were former adherents to the cult. Politically, Rand rejected taxation as robbery, and therefore illegitimate.
Randian political theory wishes to preserve the existing unitary state, with its monopoly over coercion and ultimate decision-making; it wishes to define its “government” as an institution which retains its State monopoly but gains its revenue only by voluntary contributions from its citizens. Rand infuses into the political outlook of herself and her charges an emotional devotion to the existing American government and to the American Constitution that totally negates her own libertarian axioms.
While Rand opposes the war in Vietnam, for example, she does so on purely tactical reasons as a mistake not in our “national interest”; as a result, she is far more passionate in her hostility to the unpatriotic protestors against the war than she is against the war itself. She advocated the firing of Eugene Genovese from Rutgers, on the grounds that “no man may support the victory of the enemies of his country.” And even though Rand passionately opposes the draft as slavery, she also believes, with Read and the laissez-fairists, that it is illegitimate to disobey the laws of the American State, no matter how unjust — so long as her freedom to protest the laws remains.
Finally, Ayn Rand is a conventional right-winger, as well, in her attitude toward the “international Communist conspiracy.”
Many neo-Randians, devoted as they are to logical analysis, have seen the logical clinker in Randian political theory; that if no man may aggress upon another, then neither may an outfit calling itself “government” presume to exert a coercive monopoly on force and on the making of ultimate judicial decision. Hence, they saw that no government may be coercively preserved, and they therefore took the next crucial step; while retaining devotion to the free market and private property, this legion of youthful neo-Randians have concluded that all services, including police and courts, must become freely marketable. It is morally illegitimate to set up a coercive monopoly of such functions, and then revere it as “government.” Hence, they have become “free-market anarchists,” or “anarchocapitalists,” people who believe that defense, like any other service, should only be provided on the free market and not through monopoly or tax coercion.
Anarchocapitalism is a creed new to the present age. Its closest historical links are with the “individualist anarchism” of Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner of the late 19th century, and it shares with Tucker and Spooner a devotion to private property, individualism, and competition. Furthermore, and in contrast to Read and Rand, it shares with Spooner and Tucker their hostility to government officials as a criminal band of robbers and murderers. It is therefore no longer “patriotic.” It differs from the older anarchist in not believing that profits and interest would disappear in a fully free market, in holding the landlord-tenant relationship to be legitimate, and in holding that men can arrive through reason at objective law which does not have to be at the mercy of ad hoc juries. Lysander Spooner’s brilliantly hard-hitting No Treason, one of the masterpieces of antistatism and reprinted by an anarchocapitalist press, has had considerable influence in converting present-day youth to libertarianism.
It is safe to say that the great bulk of right-libertarians are anarchocapitalists, particularly among the youth. Anarchocapitalism, however, also contains within it a large spectrum of differing ideas and attitudes. For one thing, while they have all discarded any traits of devotion to the State and have become anarchists, many of them have retained the simplistic anticommunism, devotion to big business, and even American patriotism of their former creeds.
What we may call “anarchopatriots,” for example, take this sort of line: “Yes, anarchy is the ideal solution. But, in the meanwhile, the American government is the freest on earth,” etc. Much of this sort of attitude permeated the Libertarian Caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom, which split off or were expelled from YAF at the embroiled YAF convention at St. Louis in August, 1969. This split — based on their libertarianism and their refusal to be devoted to such unjust laws as the draft — led to the splitting off from YAF of almost the entire California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey sections of that leading conservative youth organization. These groups then formed “Libertarian Alliances” in the various states.
A group of older anarchocapitalists centered in New York founded the Libertarian Forum as a semimonthly, in early 1969, and formed the Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA), which had a considerable impact in fueling and sparking the 1969 YAF split in St. Louis. Its ideas were propagated among the youth with particular effect by Roy A. Childs, Jr.
Childs had particular effect in converting Jarret Wollstein from Randianism to anarchocapitalism and then to a realistic view of the American State. Wollstein, an energetic young Marylander, had been ejected from the Randian movement, and had formed his own Society for Rational Individualism, publishing the monthly National Individualist. Finally, at the end of 1969, Wollstein’s SRI merged with the bulk of the old Libertarian Alliance members of YAF to form the Society of Individual Liberty, which has become by far the leading organization of libertarians in this country. SIL has thousands of members, and numerous campus chapters throughout the country, and is loosely affiliated with the California Libertarian Alliance, consisting largely of the ex-YAFers and which itself has over a thousand members within the state.
In many ways, California, with the largest right-libertarian population, differs from the movement in the rest of the country. The movement there is led by the California Libertarian Alliance (CLA), of over a thousand members. Led by youthful former YAFers, the CLA is rightist and neo-Randian in tendency, although over the last year and a half it too has abandoned many of its Randian tenets.
