Libertarianism in the United States

[20] The latter is associated with the left-wing of the modern libertarian movement[21] and more recently to the political positions associated with academic philosophers Hillel Steiner, Philippe Van Parijs and Peter Vallentyne that combine self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources;[22] it is also related to anti-capitalist, free-market anarchist strands such as left-wing market anarchism,[23] referred to as market-oriented left-libertarianism to distinguish itself from other forms of libertarianism.

Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties".

[54] Those who seek both economic and social liberty within a capitalist order would be known as liberals, but that term developed associations opposite of the limited government, low-taxation, minimal state advocated by the movement.

Historically, libertarians including Herbert Spencer and Max Stirner have to some degree supported the protection of an individual's freedom from powers of both government and private property owners.

[95] Rothbard argued that the consensus view of American economic history, according to which a beneficent government has used its power to counter corporate predation, is fundamentally flawed.

[11] Important American writers such as Rose Wilder Lane, H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read (the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education) and the European immigrants Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand carried on the intellectual libertarian tradition.

[citation needed] The word liberal had ceased to refer to the support of individual rights and limited government and instead came to denote left-leaning ideas that would be seen elsewhere as social-democratic.

[102][103][104] In the 1950s, Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand developed a philosophical system called Objectivism, expressed in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as well as other works which influenced many libertarians.

[13] Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented challenge to authority had a major impact on the libertarian movement[114] through his book The Conscience of a Conservative and his 1964 presidential campaign.

[116] The Vietnam War split the uneasy alliance between growing numbers of self-identified libertarians and traditionalist conservatives who believed in limiting liberty to uphold moral virtues.

[120] The split was finalized in 1971 when conservative leader William F. Buckley Jr. attempted to divorce libertarianism from the movement, writing in a New York Times article as follows: "The ideological licentiousness that rages through America today makes anarchy attractive to the simple-minded.

[123] Philosophical libertarianism gained a significant measure of recognition in academia with the publication in 1974 of Harvard University professor Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a response to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971).

[125] British historians Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson have argued that by the 1970s Britons were keen about defining and claiming their individual rights, identities and perspectives.

[136] Paul expressed his disgust with the political culture of both major parties in a speech delivered in 1984 upon resigning from the House of Representatives to prepare for a failed run for the Senate and eventually apologized to his libertarian friends for having supported Reagan.

[167] Johnson expressed a desire to win at least 5% of the vote so that the Libertarian Party candidates could get equal ballot access and federal funding, ending the two-party system.

[168][169][170] While some political commentators have described Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky as Republican libertarians or libertarian-leaning,[165][171] they prefer to identify as constitutional conservatives.

[179][180] A variant of non-intellectual right-libertarianism that has been described as "growing in prominence", "changing the dynamics" of the conservative movement in the U.S.,[181] and even "largely defin[ing] the Republican coalition"[182] in the 2020s, has been dubbed "Barstool conservatism".

[188] Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy helped to stimulate the growth of new-style mutualism, articulating a version of the labor theory of value incorporating ideas drawn from Austrian economics.

[202] Left-libertarianism and right-libertarianism is a categorization used by some political analysts, academics and media sources in the United States to contrast related yet distinct approaches to libertarian philosophy.

[203][204][205] Peter Vallentyne defines right-libertarianism as holding that unowned natural resources "may be appropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes her labor with them, or merely claims them—without the consent of others, and with little or no payment to them".

Right-libertarianism is described as having interest in economic freedom, preferring a conservative lifestyle, viewing private business as a "great victim of the state" and favoring a non-interventionist foreign policy, sharing the Old Right's "opposition to empire".

Thin libertarianism deals with legal issues involving the non-aggression principle only and would permit a person to speak against other groups as long as they did not support the initiation of force against others.

[237] Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy aims to revive interest in mutualism in an effort to synthesize Austrian economics with the labor theory of value by attempting to incorporate both subjectivism and time preference.

The first-world such libertarian party, it was conceived in August 1971 at meetings in the home of David Nolan in Westminster, Colorado,[15] in part prompted due to concerns about the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, conscription and the introduction of fiat money.

[269][270] Anthony Gregory points out that within the libertarian movement, "just as the general concepts "left" and "right" are riddled with obfuscation and imprecision, left- and right-libertarianism can refer to any number of varying and at times mutually exclusive political orientations".

Rand first expressed Objectivism in her fiction, most notably We the Living (1936), The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), but also in later non-fiction essays and books such as The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), among others.

Rand described Objectivism as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".

Wouldn't there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

According to MacLean, libertarian-leaning Charles and David Koch have used anonymous, dark money campaign contributions, a network of libertarian institutes and lobbying for the appointment of libertarian, pro-business judges to United States federal and state courts to oppose taxes, public education, employee protection laws, environmental protection laws and the New Deal Social Security program.

Chomsky has also argued that the more radical forms of libertarianism such as anarcho-capitalism are entirely theoretical and could never function in reality due to business' reliance on the state as well as infrastructure and publicly funded subsidies.