Right-libertarianism,Rothbard, Murray (1 March 1971). "The Left and Right Within Libertarianism" . WIN: Peace and Freedom Through Nonviolent Action. 7 (4): 6–10. Retrieved 14 January 2020. "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 abortion, 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."Goodway, David (2006). Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. p. 4 . "The problem with the term 'libertarian' is that it is now also used by the Right. [...] In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order".Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). "Libertarianism". In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: Sage Publications. p. 1006 . . also known as libertarian capitalism or right-wing libertarianism, "It is important to distinguish between anarchism and certain strands of right-wing libertarianism which at times go by the same name (for example, Murray Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism). There is a complex debate within this tradition between those like Robert Nozick, who advocate a 'minimal state', and those like Rothbard who want to do away with the state altogether and allow all transactions to be governed by the market alone. From an anarchist perspective, however, both positions—the minimal state (minarchist) and the no-state ('anarchist') positions—neglect the problem of economic domination; in other words, they neglect the hierarchies, oppressions, and forms of exploitation that would inevitably arise in laissez-faire 'free' market. [...] Anarchism, therefore, has no truck with this right-wing libertarianism, not only because it neglects economic inequality and domination, but also because in practice (and theory) it is highly inconsistent and contradictory. The individual freedom invoked by right-wing libertarians is only narrow economic freedom within the constraints of a capitalist market, which, as anarchists show, is no freedom at all. is a libertarian political philosophy that supports capitalist property rights and market distribution of natural resources. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a variant of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with collectivist or usufructary property norms. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, capitalist libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like other forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights,Sterba, James P. (October 1994). "From Liberty to Welfare". Ethics. Cambridge: Blackwell. 105 (1): 237–241. the non-aggression principle, and a significant transformation or outright elimination of the modern welfare state.
Right-libertarian political thought is characterized by the strict priority given to liberty, with the need to maximize the realm of individual freedom and minimize the scope of government authority. Right-libertarians typically see the state as the principal threat to liberty. This anti-statism differs from anarcho-socialist theory (but not individualist anarchist theory) in that it is based upon private property norms and strong individualism that places less emphasis on human sociability or cooperation. Right-libertarian philosophy is also rooted in the ideas of individual rights and laissez-faire economics. The right-libertarian theory of individual rights generally follows the homestead principle and the labor theory of property, stressing self-ownership and that people have an absolute right to the property that their labor produces. Economically, right-libertarians make no distinction between capitalism and free markets; they view any attempt to dictate the market process as counterproductive, emphasizing the mechanisms and self-regulating nature of the market whilst portraying government intervention and attempts to redistribute wealth as criminally immoral, unnecessary, and counter-productive. Although all right-libertarians oppose government intervention, there is a division between anarcho-capitalists, who view the state as an unnecessary evil and want property rights protected without statutory law through market-generated tort, contract and property law; and minarchists, who support the need for a minimal state, often referred to as a night-watchman state, to provide its citizens with monopoly provision of courts, military, and police services.Marshall, Peter (2008). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. London: Harper Perennial. p. 565. "The problem with the term 'libertarian' is that it is now also used by the Right. [...] In its moderate form, right libertarianism embraces laissez-faire liberals like Robert Nozick who call for a minimal State, and in its extreme form, anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard and David Friedman who entirely repudiate the role of the State and look to the market as a means of ensuring social order".
Like libertarians of all varieties, right-libertarians refer to themselves simply as libertarians. Being the most common type of libertarianism in the United States, right-libertarianism has become the most common referent of libertarianism there since the late 20th century, while historically and elsewhere,Bookchin, Murray (January 1986). "The Greening of Politics: Toward a New Kind of Political Practice" . Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project (1). "We have permitted cynical political reactionaries and the spokesmen of large corporations to pre-empt these basic libertarian American ideals. We have permitted them not only to become the specious voice of these ideals such that individualism has been used to justify egotism; the pursuit of happiness to justify greed, and even our emphasis on local and regional autonomy has been used to justify parochialism, insularism, and exclusivity—often against ethnic minorities and so-called deviant individuals. We have even permitted these reactionaries to stake out a claim to the word libertarian, a word, in fact, that was literally devised in the 1890s in France by Elisée Reclus as a substitute for the word anarchist, which the government had rendered an illegal expression for identifying one's views. The propertarians, in effect—acolytes of Ayn Rand, the earth mother of greed, egotism, and the virtues of property—have appropriated expressions and traditions that should have been expressed by radicals but were willfully neglected because of the lure of European and Asian traditions of socialism, socialisms that are now entering into decline in the very countries in which they originated".Fernandez, Frank (2001). Cuban Anarchism. The History of a Movement. Sharp Press. p. 9. "Thus, in the United States, the once exceedingly useful term "libertarian" has been hijacked by egotists who are in fact enemies of liberty in the full sense of the word.". Z Magazine. 23 February 2002. "The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing of the socialist movement. In the US, which is a society much more dominated by business, the term has a different meaning. It means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly controls over private tyrannies. Libertarians in the US don't say let's get rid of corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism."Ward, Colin (2004). Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press. p. 62. "For a century, anarchists have used the word 'libertarian' as a synonym for 'anarchist', both as a noun and an adjective. The celebrated anarchist journal Le Libertaire was founded in 1896. However, much more recently the word has been appropriated by various American free-market philosophers." it is widely used to refer to anti-state forms of socialism such as anarcho-socialism,Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641. "The word 'libertarian' has long been associated with anarchism and has been used repeatedly throughout this work. The term originally denoted a person who upheld the doctrine of the freedom of the will; in this sense, Godwin was not a 'libertarian', but a 'necessitarian'. It came however to be applied to anyone who approved of liberty in general. In anarchist circles, it was first used by Joseph Déjacque as the title of his anarchist journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social published in New York in 1858. At the end of the last century, the anarchist Sebastien Faure took up the word, to stress the difference between anarchists and authoritarian socialists".The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (11 December 2008). "150 years of Libertarian" . Anarchist Writers. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved 31 January 2020.The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (17 May 2017). "160 years of Libertarian" . Anarchist Writers. Anarchist FAQ. Retrieved 31 January 2020. libertarian communism, libertarian Marxism, and libertarian socialism.Marshall, Peter (2009). Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. p. 641 . "For a long time, libertarian was interchangeable in France with anarchism but in recent years, its meaning has become more ambivalent. Some anarchists like Daniel Guérin will call themselves 'libertarian socialists', partly to avoid the negative overtones still associated with anarchism, and partly to stress the place of anarchism within the socialist tradition. Even Marxists of the New Left like E. P. Thompson call themselves 'libertarian' to distinguish themselves from those authoritarian socialists and communists who believe in revolutionary dictatorship and vanguard parties." Around the time of Murray Rothbard, who popularized the term libertarian in the United States during the 1960s, anarcho-capitalist movements started calling themselves libertarian, leading to the rise of the term right-libertarian to distinguish them. Rothbard himself acknowledged the co-opting of the term and boasted of its "capture [...] from the enemy".
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