## 1. Self-Ownership and Economic Justice



The publication of Robert Nozick's book, *Anarchy, State, and
Utopia* (1974) was the first time mainstream academic philosophy
was forced to pay attention to libertarian ideas. Within philosophy,
therefore, libertarianism revolved heavily around this book's
reception. G. A. Cohen was one of the most important of Nozick's
critics, but he nonetheless sympathized with what he took to be the
core commitment of justice in Nozick's theory -
self-ownership. He therefore made the connection between
self-ownership and libertarian views regarding economic justice the
central area of problematization, and the literature developed for
some decades in that way.



Self-ownership is the idea that all individuals have ownership rights
over themselves, and therefore may do whatever they choose with
themselves so long as they do not violate the self-ownership of
others. Nozick believed, following Locke, that natural property rights
over our own person could ground natural private property rights
beyond the person, and therefore indicate that a market-based economic
system is just. Cohen, however, took it that self-ownership explained
the unjustly exploitative nature of capitalism. Following Karl Marx,
Cohen supposed that capitalists expropriate the fruits of
worker's labour--something that naturally belongs to the
worker herself. Despite Nozick only mentioning self-ownership once,
and developing a large number of arguments against redistributive
conceptions of economic justice which do not explicitly invoke or rely
on the idea of self-ownership throughout part II of *Anarchy,
State, and Utopia*, self-ownership became synonymous with
libertarianism.



Self-ownership means that individuals have a very stringent (perhaps
the most stringent possible) set of rights over their persons, giving
them the kind of control over themselves that one has over possessions
one holds as private property. This includes (1) *control
rights* over the use of the entity: both a liberty-right to use it
and a claim-right that others not use it without one's consent,
(2) *rights to transfer* these rights to others (by sale,
rental, gift, or loan), (3) *immunities to the non-consensual
loss* of these rights, (4) *rights to compensation* if
someone uses the entity without one's permission, and (5)
*enforcement rights* (including rights of prior restraint if
someone is about to violate these rights). Central to this idea of
self-ownership is the right to *control ourselves, and to exclude
others from making use of us.* Self-ownership, in other words,
offers protections against others doing things to us against our will
(unless it is our will to violate someone else's self-ownership,
of course).



The idea of self-ownership is attractive for many reasons. We
recognize people as self-owners when we recognize that there are
things that may not be done to a person without their consent, but
which may be done with consent. As such, it is a way of explaining the
so-called "moral magic of consent" (cf. Barnett 1986a,
Alexander 1996, Hurd 1996). Thus, we consider rape wrong because it
involves a body being used against the will of the person to whom it
belongs, but not because there's something inherently wrong with
sexual intercourse. We consider assault wrong for similar reasons, but
allow voluntary boxing matches. We consider slavery wrong, but allow
consensual employment. There are also more theoretical reasons for
self-ownership's attraction. The principle is a strong
endorsement of the moral importance and sovereignty of the individual,
and it expresses the refusal to treat people as mere things to use or
trade off against each other. It expresses the liberal notion
(asserted by John Rawls against utilitarianism) of the moral
"separateness of persons" (Zwolinski 2008).



In many contexts, self-ownership may be intuitively very attractive.
It offers, for instance, a straightforward and unequivocal
condemnation of chattel slavery. It grounds the defense of
women's rights over their bodies, including the right to
terminate unwanted pregnancies (Thomson 1971, Long 1993) It explains
why it is wrong to sacrifice the rights and freedoms of minorities
(even a minority of one) for the sake of protecting the interests of
the majority. It offers a principled objection to paternalism. And so
on.



Self-ownership does, however, crowd out other moral considerations,
including ones that are often thought relevant to justice. For
example, it rules out the view that individuals have an enforceable
duty to come to the assistance of others, if when they are in serious
or urgent need (accept as a result of prior wrongdoing). For persons
to have such an enforceable duty would be for it to be, in principle,
justified for *A* to threaten *B* with force in order to
get her to assist *C* (*C* being in need of assistance).
However, this threat of force would involve a violation of
*B*'s self-ownership by *A*, since
*B*'s self-ownership includes a right to exclude others
from taking control of her body and her actions without her consent.
Any inclusion of enforceable, positive duties will remove much of the
protective content of self-ownership (see Flanigan 2018).



An implication of this is that taxation for the purposes of giving
assistance to other members of society is ruled out. Nozick argued
that since taxation siphons off part of people's earnings, which
represent people's labor, and people initially have the right
not to be forced to work for certain ends. Therefore, Nozick argued,
redistributive taxation is morally on a par with forced labor (1974,
ch. 7). Self-ownership does not say that is something wrong with
coming to the assistance of others, nor even necessarily with
relations of dependence. But it does say there is something very wrong
with using force to get people to provide such assistance or to enter
into such relations.



Nozick's point was that theories of economic justice face a
choice. One can (a) respect people as the primary controllers of their
lives, labor, and bodies. This means working for whomever they want,
on the terms they consent to, and deciding for themselves what is to
be done with the fruits of their labour. Recognizing this leaves no
room for a conception of economic justice that requires a particular
pattern of distribution. The composition of each individual's personal
choices as to how to contract with others will undo any given pattern
of distribution the state seeks, and the state would have to deny
people their respective choices that lead to interruptions to the
pattern. Or one can (b) endorse the enforcement of certain
distributions. But in that case, the theory must endorse taking what
people innocently produce through their own labor, redirecting their
work to purposes they did not freely choose. This latter option is
unacceptable to anyone endorsing the idea of self-ownership. As Nozick
wrote, it involves claiming a kind of control over the lives of others
that is similar to a claim of ownership in them (1974, p. 172).



Nozick was also pointing to an incoherence within theories of
distributive justice. The point of distributing things to people is so
that they can enjoy the benefits of owning those things. Most
importantly, so they can, through their choices, use those things to
improve their lives. Invariably this will involve using them in
economic transactions. If a theory of distributive justice does not
permit people to actually do the things they choose with what they
have, then it undermines the point in them having them at all. (Long
2002, also see Schmidtz 2011)



Self-ownership is a key libertarian idea not just conceptually, but
rhetorically. It demonstrates the central libertarian preoccupation
with showing that a commitment to personal or social liberty directly
entails economic liberty in the form of private property and
contractual freedom - that economic and social liberty cannot be
separated, as post-war liberalism attempted to do.



However, liberal egalitarians following Cohen's critique of the
connection between self-ownership and world-ownership that
libertarianism depends upon, were keen to separate the two. Seeking to
square self-ownership and natural private property rights with
egalitarian distributive justice, Hillel Steiner, followed by Peter
Vallentyne and Michael Otsuka, developed a theory that endorsed
self-ownership alongside an egalitarian principle of world-ownership.
This approach to distributive justice became known as
"left-libertarianism"
(left-libertarianism2--to be distinguished from
left-libertarianism1 that will be discussed below). The
traditional approach that did not put a distributive constraint on
world-ownership therefore came to be known as
"right-libertarianism1".



Others sought a similar theory of economic justice, but that did not
depend upon intuitions regarding the initial egalitarian ownership of
the external world. On these views, self-ownership, along with all
property rights, can be split into *control-rights* and
*income-rights*. They argue that these two rights need not be
attached; having the right to control the disposition of an object
does not presuppose a right to recoup the entire value of the income
stream the object's disposition generates. On this view the
intuitive appeal of self-ownership (the control rights) can be
endorsed whilst the income rights be subject to social distribution.
(Gibbard 1976, Christman 1994) Such views depend upon self-ownership
rights and property rights generally to be decomposable (Grey 1980,
Attas 2006, also see Honore 1961) which property essentialists
deny (Stern 2017). Whilst right-libertarians2 do not
necessarily deny that ownership is a bundle of logically distinct
rights, they deny that control rights and income rights can be
normatively separated in this way (see Wheeler 1980, Rothbard 1982,
Mack 1990, and Long 2012 [Other Internet Resources]) indeed, this is
one the central tasks Nozick sets himself.



An internal issue is a debate over whether self-ownership may permit
voluntary enslavement. Agents have, on this view, not only the right
to control the use of their person, but also the right to
*transfer* that right (e.g., by sale or gift) to others.
However, this is controversial among libertarians, some of whom deny
that such transfers are possible because others cannot control
one's will. Whilst our rights of self-ownership can be
*waived* they cannot be permanently *alienated* (Epstein
1973, 1979, Evers 1977, Rothbard 1982; Smith 1997, Barnett 1998a,
1998b, pp. 78-82, Kinsella 1998/1999). Some argue that in order
for a right to an object to be transferred, it must be possible for
our possession of the object to be *de facto* surrenderable
(Evers 1977, Rothbard 1982). This is not the case with ourselves as we
always have privileged, agent-type control over ourselves, through
which third parties must act if they wish to control us. Such a view
of contractual transfer is compatible with labour contracts in general
but not specific-performance contracts in particular.



Theorists who endorse the possibility of voluntary enslavement usually
argue that self-ownership is a theory about the moral right to control
permissible use (by giving or denying permission), not about the
psychological capacity to control (Block 2003). Thus, similarly, the
right to *exercise* one's autonomy is more fundamental
than the *protection or promotion* of one's autonomy over
time (Vallentyne 1998; Steiner 1994). Others argue that such a
transfer would undermine our autonomy (Grunebaum 1987), or reject the
permissibility of such a transfer on theological grounds (Locke 1690,
Olsthoorn, 2020).



A second internal concern of self-ownership points out its restrictive
implications. Full self-ownership might seem to condemn as wrongful
even very minor infringements of the personal sphere, such as when
innocuous particles of pollution fall upon an unconsenting person.
Prohibiting all acts that can lead to such minor infringements poses
an unacceptable limit on our right to actually engage in
activities--seemingly, to the very liberty self-ownership is
supposed to safeguard. But from the point of view of self-ownership,
there is no principled difference between minor infringements and
major infringements. Whilst they may require different degrees of
enforcement and compensation, both are equally morally prohibited.
Thus, this objection goes, self-ownership places such strong
protections for our liberty, it makes us mutually unable to act on our
liberty. Thus, it must be rejected as motivationally incoherent
(Railton 2003, Sobel 2012)



This objection, however, presupposes an implausible conception of
self-ownership that its defenders need not endorse. Suppose we
understand the moral benefits that self-ownership confers along two
dimensions: protections from unwanted uses of our bodies, and
liberties to use our bodies. As the objection points out, it is not
possible to simultaneously maximize the value of both dimensions: our
protections restrict our liberties by restricting the possible uses of
one's body, and *vice versa*. Since maximizing the
protection-dimension implausibly restricts the use-dimension, the
correct response is not to reject self-ownership, but rather to loosen
the protection-dimension somewhat in order to enhance the
use-dimension. Doing this would allow minor infringements for the sake
of self-ownership. As Eric Mack (2015) puts it, a good theory of
self-ownership offers people some "elbow room." This is
enabled by ensuring that our claim-rights (whose purpose is to
safeguard the exercise of our liberty-rights) are not made stronger
than they need to be.



Moreover, this critique seems to be deploying a notion of
self-ownership few if any libertarians in fact endorse. Indeed, in
Cohen's critique of Nozick's libertarianism, he developed
the idea of "full" self-ownership and ascribed this view
to Nozick (1985, 1986, 1995). Full self-ownership is simply the
*logically strongest* set of ownership rights over oneself. But
there is no need for self-ownership to be as *logically* strong
as is possible, it needs to be strong enough to safeguard the values
and principles is expresses, and so-called full self-ownership does
not appear to do that, and hence few if any libertarians support
it.



It is noteworthy that under the common law understanding of private
property and nuisance, minor and insensible physical boundary
crossings that do not interfere with normal use and enjoyment of the
property in question, are not considered violations of a right of
ownership. Given that ordinary private ownership rights do not give us
the right to exclude minor physical boundary-crossings in this way,
some argue there is no reason self-ownership should either. Moreover,
it is not clear why a notion of self-ownership that does not include
it should thereby be considered any less "full."
(Christmas 2021c, pp.48-51)



Making modifications to full self-ownership may be necessary to make
it a plausible principle and to make it coherent alongside other
values. This threatens the status of self-ownership as a foundational
principle in libertarian theory. Presumably, foundational principles
are not based on underlying values. For many libertarians, this is not
much of a concession, however. If few endorse full self-ownership,
even fewer endorse it as a foundational principle.


## 2. Property Rights and Original Acquisition



Libertarians conceive of distributive justice as largely (sometimes
exclusively) historical in nature. To ask whether justice obtains in
the world is mainly to ask whether people have been justly treated,
principally whether their rights to their persons and possessions have
been respected. Libertarians generally see people's rightful
possessions as whatever they acquired in legitimate (i.e.,
rights-respecting) ways. As a result, they reject theories that
connect entitlement to outcomes or end-state distributions. In Kantian
language, libertarians believe *distributive* justice is
exhausted by *commutative* justice. As long as no wrongs have
been inflicted by one individual upon another at private law, the
overall distribution is without moral remainder. There is no way of a
distribution to be unjust other than by it resulting from some sort of
private law wrong(s).



The most common mode of just acquisition is through voluntary
transfer. This is why libertarians generally defend noncoerced
(Christmas 2022a), nondeceptive (Ferguson 2018) market relations as
just. Nozick's "entitlement theory" of distributive
justice consists entirely of these two modes of acquisition and a
principle of rectification for their violation. Redistribution is
therefore in principle limited to when it is necessary to correct for
wrongful takings (Byas 2022). However, for *A*'s
entitlement to some possession *x* to be legitimized by
*B*'s voluntary transfer of *x* to *A*,
*B*'s prior entitled to *x* needs to be
established. There must, at least in principle, be a starting point;
an *original* acquisition through which objects that are not
owned by anyone - that no one in particular has unique
entitlement to - come to be owned by some particular person
(Christmas 2021c, pp. 3-4).



Libertarians generally accept that individuals can carry out such acts
of original acquisition. More precisely, they accept that individuals
can acquire unowned goods unilaterally, without there needing to be
authorization by some pre-existing political institution nor needing
to obtain the consent of other people.



The most famous account of how unilateral original acquisition is
possible remains Locke's labor theory. According to Locke, when
people work on previously unowned objects, subject to certain
provisos, they turn those objects into their private property. The
precise nature of Locke's argument, the relation between labor
and acquisition, as well as the nature of the provisos, is hotly
contested. The most famous interpretation, again, seeks to ground
property in the (prior) rights of self-ownership. On this view, when
people labor they quite literally extend their claims of
self-ownership over external objects, thus drawing them into their
rights-protected sphere. As Locke (1690, ch. 5) put it, since laboring
mixes one's self-owned labor with something that is unowned, the
previously unowned thing becomes owned.



So stated, this argument suffers from well-known problems. For
instance, since laboring is an activity, the idea of mixing it with an
object seems at best a metaphor for something else (Hume 1739,
III.II.IIVI fn., Day 1966, Waldron 1983, 1988, pp. 184-91). But
in that case, the argument is incomplete--we still need to know
what really grounds property rights. More importantly, it simply is
not true that mixing something owned with something unowned is
sufficient for appropriation. As Nozick pointed out, if I pour a can
of tomato juice that I own into the unowned ocean, I lose my tomato
juice--I do not gain an ocean (Nozick 1974, pp. 174-5).
Indeed, Locke himself noted that acts of labour cannot acquire
ownership of the sea (though, they can acquire ownership of fish
caught in the sea) (1690 II.30) Third, when the object with which one
mixes one's labour is already owned by someone else, this is
typically regarded as a way of dissipating or donating one's
labour (Thomson 1990, pp. 326-327).



There are two prominent defences of a labour-based account of original
acquisition. The first is Hillel Steiner's physicalistic version
(1994, p. 233 fn). On this view we literally mix *energy* that
we own with unowned objects when we labour on them. The idea of mixing
activities with objects does not, therefore, need to enter. However,
we often expend our energy into all sorts of things that few want to
claim we thereby appropriate, often with no intention or volition in
doing so. We involuntarily transfer heat into the atmosphere, for
example. Moreover, attempts to appropriate things often do not involve
transfers of energy into that particular object, but rather our
possession of the object is the *result* of our energy
transfers into other objects. For example, in capturing a wild animal.
Whilst this rescues the metaphysical idea of labour-mixing as one in
which ownership literally "seeps over into the rest" as
Nozick puts it (1974, p. 174), it raises serious questions over
whether labouring upon things is actually the way to acquire them
since it is neither necessary nor sufficient to mixing our energy with
them (Christmas 2021c, p. 74).



The second is an indirect account (van der Vossen 2021a, 2021b [Other
Internet Resources]). On this view, unilateral acquisition enables us
to come to own the fruits of our labour in an economic rather than a
physical sense. This approach seeks to tie considerations regarding
the material prosperity that systems of private property and contracts
bring about into the justification of unilateral acquisition, without
making the entire theory a merely rule-consequentialist one.



There is a broad and influential line of consequentialist argument
that ties the justification of property to the material prosperity and
well-being that it brings about. Rights of private property serve to
divide the external world into a number of discrete, individual parts,
each exclusively controlled by its particular owner. Organizing the
social world in this way is preferable to collective use or ownership
because it helps avoid collective action problems. When things remain
held in open-access commons, we all have an incentive to use as much
as we can, leading to a general pattern of use that ends up depleting
the resource, to everyone's detriment. Rights to private
property not only avoid such a "tragedy of the commons,"
they also incentivize people to preserve their parts, increase their
productivity, and exchange what they own with others on mutually
beneficial terms (Schmidtz 1994; Buchanan 1993). The indirect
labour-mixing account incorporates these considerations in a
non-consequentialist way, as Nozick claimed to be trying to do (1974,
p. 177).



Many have offered non-labour-based defenses of unilateral acquisition.
On such views, unilateral acquisition is taken to be a requirement of
our being project pursuers or purposive agents (Lomasky 1987; Mack
1990, 2010, Wendt 2022). Such accounts often argue for the
impossibility of separating our biomass from our tools; acquisition on
this view just being an entailment of making objects part of our
actions and therefore inseparable from our bodily rights (Wheeler
1980), and therefore presupposes no distinct *power* to create
new property rights. A common critique of approaches to libertarianism
grounded in a non-aggression principle (NAP) is that is assumes
without argument that property rights violations constitute
aggressions against the person, when the connection of property to
person is precisely the point of contention (Zwolinski 2016).
Connecting external property rights to personal or bodily rights
vindicates the NAP-based approaches (Christmas 2018b).



Other justifications depend neither on accepting a prior thesis of
self-ownership, nor on the affiliated thesis that self-ownership
rights can be extended outwardly through labor. Instead, these
arguments point to the moral importance of people having security over
external resources. Sometimes this is understood in terms of support
for political and civil liberties (Friedman 1962, Gaus 2010). Since
these justifications of property do not rest on a prior principle of
self-ownership, they are not committed to seeing property rights as
absolute as self-self-ownership advocates take those rights to be.
They therefore need not be as immune to regulation and taxation.
Despite what is sometimes suggested (Freeman 2001), virtually all
libertarians that reject self-ownership as a starting point also
accept that property rights need specification, can be instantiated in
quite different, yet morally acceptable forms, and might be overridden
by other moral considerations. Such views do not entail the
impossibility of unilateral original appropriation either.



Libertarians and their critics are concerned with the issue of
original appropriation primarily because it demarcates a major fault
line in political philosophy. The libertarian's historical
conception of justice, and the accompanying insistence that
governments refrain from redistributive projects, require that
property rights do not depend on the government, positive law, or the
consent of others for their moral validity. Such a view is viable if
one can establish the possibility of unilateral appropriation, without
essential reference to the existence of the state or law.



The strongest objection to this area of libertarian thought comes from
neo-Kantian legal and political philosophers who draw up Kant's
arguments that acquisition of property rights in a state of nature is
conceptually incoherent at worst, and unjust at best. Neo-Kantians
largely agree with libertarians that the primary authorization for the
use of coercion in society is to secure freedom for all individuals,
and such individual freedom is borne out in large part through
contractual freedom and private property rights. However, they
disagree with libertarians in that they believing that state authority
is ontologically foundational to individual freedom.



Neo-Kantians argue that property rights cannot be unilaterally
acquired outside of a state's authorization for one or more of
three reasons: (1) Property rights in a state of nature would be
*indeterminate*; leading not only to the high likelihood of
insoluble disputes (over boundaries and the like), but the
inevitability of them. Without a state to lay down a judgement over
what counts as whose property and enforce it, disputes have no
principled answer, and therefore there is no fact of the matter about
what rights and duties individuals have in these cases. (2)
*Unilateral* acquisition and determination of property rights
constitutes the imposition of one person's will on all others.
Having the authority to create new duties and impose them on all
others by one's discretionary choice is not something one could
have among equals. Having the content of one's duties being
subject to another's arbitrary will is to be unfree and unequal
on the Kantian view. (3) In a state of nature, any putative rights are
not *assured*. Without a guarantee of some sort that our person
and possessions be secured against violence, we are authorized to take
pre-emptive action against potential aggressors, and they against us,
meaning that no one is under any duty to abstain from using force
against others. According to neo-Kantians, having a state provides a
solution to all these problems. Its geographical monopoly on the use
of force means it can determinately lay down a scheme of rights and
duties under law and credibly enforce it (overcoming problems 1 and
3). Moreover, the state is not just another private actor, on this
view, but rather has the capacity to act on behalf of all - it
is an omnilateral actor rather than unilateral. Therefore its use of
coercion to secure rights does not subject us to any arbitrary will
(solving problem 2). In short, property rights can only be created by
a *public power*. (Waldron 1996, 1999 part 2, Flikschuh 1999,
2000 ch. 4, 2008, Varden 2008, 2010; Ripstein 2009 ch. 6, 2012, Stilz
2009, ch. 2; 2011; 2012; Hodgson 2010; Pallikkathayil 2010; Sinclair
2018).



Because of this, some neo-Kantians argue that since the state is
ontologically prior to property rights, there are limits to how much
work an historical entitlement theory can do in justifying particular
holdings. There are no acts of original acquisition that vindicate a
chain of transfers leading up to the present, but rather it is state
authority vindicates property rights. State redistribution, therefore,
cannot be condemned on the basis that it violates property rights
- it is the state's coercion that *creates*
property rights. (Hasan 2018) In a state of nature, individuals can,
at best, only acquire "provisional" property rights,
meaning that they are at liberty to make use of these objects, but
others are not duty-bound to respect your claim, and neither would a
state once it is established be obligated to treat it as a
fully-fledged property right. (Kant 1797, 6.255, Ripstein 2009 p. 165,
Stilz 2009 p.45, 2018, Hasan 2018, Messina 2019)



Libertarian responses to these criticisms have taken the form of
arguing that unilateral acquisition is merely the specification of a
right we already have rather than the creation of new rights through
some arbitrary power. It therefore does not presuppose any superior
moral status of the acquirer nor does it problematically subject third
parties (van der Vossen 2009, 2015, Sazanov 2022). On this view,
original acquisition (when done justly) is a case of duty-activation
rather than duty-creation. Similarly, it has been argued that property
rights can be made determinate by constitutive social conventions that
do not require any state authority, and so long as property rights are
determinate, the other problems fall away (Christmas 2021a).



Left-libertarianism2 here can be seen to side-step the
objection in virtue of its commitment to an equal distribution of
external property. So long as your unilateral acquisition cannot be
said to be greater than your equal share, there is no moral remainder
(Steiner 2017, 2000, cf. Sage 2012).


## 3. Other Routes to Libertarianism



As noted above, there are a variety of moral foundations that
libertarians draw upon for their central normative claims. Whilst most
libertarians will articulate the structure of libertarianism in terms
of rights, by no means do all libertarians believe rights to be
foundational in a deontological sense, let alone that the most
valuable articulation of them is in the form of universal
self-ownership. In this section we will briefly discuss other moral
and conceptual inputs that yield roughly libertarian outputs in
political philosophy.



Some libertarians ground their political philosophy in
neo-Aristotelian eudaimonism. On this view, the moral life is
fundamentally understood the flourishing of the individual in terms of
fulfilling or perfecting their nature or telos, achieving a state of
*eudaimonia*. The unique way in which we each flourish requires
a community to flourish within and as a part of, but it also must be,
at bottom, a self-directed process due to its uniqueness. Therefore,
it is an ethical imperative to both live within a society, and to have
one's potential for individual practical reasoning protected.
Douglas Rasmussen and Douglass Den Uyl (1991, 2005, 2016, 2020) argue
that individual rights to negative liberty render each person's
flourishing compossible with others'. These rights allow
individuals to participate in the community (or a variety of
communities) as they deem fit in light of their practical reason, but
does not allow anyone to pursue flourishing in a way that morally
cannibalizes the flourishing of others. Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue
that rights, on this view, are metanormative principles that are
necessary for ordinary normativity to operate within a social context.
Libertarian justice then is a sort of meta-virtue that enables a
diversity of other forms of virtue. Some argue that this approach must
converge with a certain kind of deontological approach (Christmas
2018a), but Rasmussen and Den Uyl resist this (2018). Indeed, there is
a broader tradition of grounding natural rights in Aristotelian ethics
within natural law theory, going back to St. Thomas Aquinas (1947,
also see Finnis 2011).



Other libertarians deploy a contractualist or contractarian framework
of moral reasoning in order to arrive at libertarian conclusions. For
example, Loren Lomasky argues from an egoistic rational choice
framework that it is rational for individuals to adopt a framework of
individual, negative rights (2016, 1987, also see Narveson 2011).
Whilst Gerald Gaus deploys the public reason framework to argue for a
state that is constitutionally constrained along libertarian lines
(2009, 2010, 2012). What these views share is that whilst libertarian
rights may be the most just ideal of rights, they must be discovered
or constructed through a rational and social process, rather than
derived logically from human nature or abstract reason.



Rule-consequentialist libertarians argue that social welfare is
optimized by society adopting libertarian rules. Richard Epstein
argues that legal rules that protect individual rights against one
another and against the state generate higher amounts of social
welfare than legal rules that permit significant amounts of
expropriation and coercion (Epstein, 1995, 1998, 2015, also see
Barnett 1998b). On this view rights are justified to the extent that
they serve this welfare-enhancing role over time as part of a legal
system, but have little or no intrinsic value in and of themselves.
This view therefore permits state-takings of private property where it
is conducive to the general welfare (Epstein 1985). The methodology of
*law and economics* is central to this school of thought. It
seeks to use empirical research to investigate the economic efficiency
of different legal arrangements. Ronald Coase's paper "The
Problem of Social Cost" (1960) is typically seen as the
inaugural work in this vein.



Other libertarians are more implicitly rule-consequentialist and
deploy economic arguments for the kinds of political and legal
arrangements libertarians favour - specifically, epistemic
arguments (Friedman 1997, Pennington 2011, Tebble 2016). They will
often argue that institutions of private property and freedom of
contract, enforced by a constitutionally constrained state, are the
best way of ensuring social knowledge is deployed in pro-social ways,
and will point to constraints on how far this knowledge can be
centralized by even a presumptively benevolent central planner. These
arguments are drawn explicitly from Hayek (cf. Boettke 2018) and the
Austrian School of economic thought more broadly (see especially Mises
1935, Hayek 1945, Kirzner 1997).



A subtle approach that does not easily fit into the categories above
follows the work of Adam Smith, claiming that libertarian ideas are
inherent in our ordinary moral psychology and how it interacts with
commercial society (cf. Otteson 2012, Schmidtz 2016, Cowen &
Geloso 2021, Cowen 2021). Smith famously considered justice to be
strictly negative in nature - something we satisfy simply
through abstaining from theft, coercion, and other violations of
libertarian rights. Thus, in *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*,
Smith wrote that the rules that "call loudest for vengeance and
punishment are the laws which guard the life and person of our
neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and
possessions; and last of all come those which guard what are called
his personal rights, or what is due to him from the promises of
others." (Smith 1976 [1759], p. 84) These are the only acts that
are generally disapproved of in a way calling for punishment. (1976
[1759], p. 78) Rule-following of this kind is desirable because
it's conducive to the stability and effectiveness of society.
(1976 [1759], p. 86) None of this means that people do not have
obligations to assist others. Smith grounds his view in a deeply
social view of moral psychology. Thus, benevolence along with justice
is a pillar of society. However, we cannot expect or force people to
care for distant strangers in the same way as they care for
themselves. And trying to organize a society along these lines would
lead to disaster. Smith was extremely skeptical about government
officials, writing about how they seek fame and power, think
themselves morally superior, and are more than willing to serve their
own interests and those of well-connected businessmen rather than the
public good. (Smith 1976 [1776], pp. 266-7). And, perhaps
foreshadowing Hayek, Smith argued that governments are generally
incapable of knowing enough to guide large numbers of people. Human
beings make their own decisions and respond to circumstances, thus
thwarting any systematic plans the government might lay out for them.
Thus, as a rule, it is more promising to appeal to people's
self-interest through market exchange than to use state coercion.
Libertarian arguments of this kind cast the state as an arbitrator, an
impartial agent that makes fair and productive cooperation between
citizens possible, much like a referee enables fair play by
administering the rules of the game. It is crucial, then, for the
state to remain impartial and not choose sides in society or the
economy. Once governments begin benefiting one party over another,
whether this be certain groups in society or business interests, such
involvement is in principle off-limits and likely to backfire as it
will favor whoever is politically well-connected or favored at the
time. The minimal state, then, is the only state capable of
structuring complex and deeply interdependent societies in ways that
are mutually beneficial.


## 4. Libertarianism, Left and Right



There are two active ways in which libertarianism is self-consciously
deployed as a left-wing as opposed to a right-wing philosophy. There
is a left/right paradigm in the broader history of libertarian thought
that hinges on whether or not, broadly speaking, it is deployed as a
radical project or a reactionary one. The other is narrowly within the
debate over distributive justice, and hinges on principles concerning
ownership of external resources that are posited alongside
self-ownership.



Within the first paradigm, left-libertarianism1 refers to
an approach that takes its cue largely from the American individualist
anarchism of figures such as Benjamin Tucker, Thomas Hodgskin, and
Lysander Spooner, and to a lesser extent, early radical French
liberalism of Jean-Baptiste Say, Charles Comte, and Charles Dunoyer.
The chief contemporary advocates of left-libertarianism1
are Gary Chartier and Roderick Long.



Left-libertarianism1 typically maintains the familiar
normative and deontological commitment to justice as constituted by
strong rights of all individuals to freedom of action, social
association, and economic cooperation (understood as rights of
property and contract). However, it couples that normative framework
with a set of descriptive commitments. Namely, it holds close to a
class-based view of political sociology developed by radical liberals
such as Say, Comte, and Dunoyer (see Weinburg 1978, Hart 1990) as well
as Franz Oppenheimer (1914, also see Rothbard 2009) that places the
state within a class-based analysis of human history. Coupled together
these commitments generate a radical critique of the state as the
chief vehicle of plutocracy, and myriad other forms of domination that
make people unfree.



Left-libertarians1 regard the state as inherently unjust in
virtue of not being consented to (Tucker 1893, Spooner 1870, 1882,
1886, Long 1995, Chartier 2011b, 2012). The state is also regarded as
instrumentally dangerous in that its monopoly on the use of force
makes it the play-thing of groups that seek to dominate and exploit
other groups (Long 2008c, 2012 [Other Internet Resources], Chartier
2011b). It does not regard the state as a mere epiphenomenon of
plutocratic power, but rather as empirically instrumental to
plutocratic power.



Modern advocates of left-libertarianism1 regard state
coercion as being both constitutively related to broader forms of
domination and instrumentally related to them (Christmas 2016).
Crucially, left-libertarians1 typically regard the economic
conditions of actually-existing capitalism as being largely an effect
of state interventions on behalf of incumbent capitalist interests
(Chartier & Johnson 2011). Some argue that a market freed of state
interference would be one in which there were more, smaller, more
cooperatively organised, productive units, and in which inequality of
income would be lower. Some argue more strongly that it would be
indistinguishable from anarchist socialism. For this reason, most
left-libertarians1 describe their position as
"anti-capitalist". They maintain a strong distinction
between a *free market* based political economy and
*capitalist* political economy where the latter involves either
state-capital partnership or capitalist domination of society, or both
(Chartier 2011a, Long, 2008a). Some argue for these conclusions based
on the "cost-principle" of classical political economy
that said where there is a lack of monopoly, prices would tend toward
cost, making cooperative enterprise the most efficient productive
model (Carson 2007, 2008). Others argue for similar conclusions from
modern, marginalist economic theory (Long 2008a). Central to both
analyses is that monopoly power is responsible for aberrations from a
more egalitarian market equilibrium. And that monopoly power is, in
turn, enabled by the state - the monopoliser of coercion itself,
which is the chief enabler of all other monopolies (Tucker 1888).



Whilst it may have been reasonable for the early American
individualist anarchists to believe that market forces were an
egalitarian, equilibrating force given the level of development around
them, critics of left-libertarianism1 argue that it ignores
important developments in economic conditions (see Anderson 2017)
since then. Others argue that this view of market forces ignores
developments in economic theory since then, in particular, that it is
grounded in a fallacious labour theory of value (Rothbard 1965 [2000],
Murphy 2006).



Left-libertarians1 also argue that libertarian commitment
to justice sit coherently alongside egalitarian commitments outside of
the narrow scope of justice. Whilst individual rights to maximal
freedom of action, association, and economic cooperation describe the
moral limits to the interpersonal use of force, there is much morality
of social and political interest that lies beyond justice but which is
not entirely separable from justice (Johnson 2008, Christmas 2017).
Opposition to sexism (Long & Johnson 2004), racism, nationalism,
et al, are often taken to be part of a full package of human
emancipation. Whilst these commitments are not logically deduced from
a commitment to libertarian justice, they are grounded in similar
first-order intuitions regarding egalitarian individualism (Christmas
2019). Critics of this aspect of the view argue that the libertarian
view on justice derives part of its value from its transcendence of,
and compatibility with, a variety of other views about the good (Block
2010).



This paradigm of left-libertarianism1 is distinguished from
a right-libertarianism1, that, whilst radical in a sense of
being strongly demanding upon the status quo, regards fewer aspects of
the status quo as a normative problem.
Right-libertarianism1 takes the structure of
actually-existing capitalism to be a closer proxy of what a free
market would look like. Right-libertarianism1 may also be
taken to be part of a thicker bundle of moral and social commitments,
but not ones associated with individual emancipation beyond the narrow
scope of libertarian justice. On this view it is allied with social
conservatism favouring cultural homogeneity/segregation, patriarchy,
and inequality (so long as these things can be sustained voluntarily,
and therefore in a way consistent with libertarian rights for all)
(Feser 2010, Hoppe 2018).



A figure in whom these dual tendencies of libertarianism can be viewed
to play out is Murray Rothbard. An economist who also wrote
extensively in history and philosophy, who swung between these radical
and reactionary tendencies over his lifetime (see Massimino 2020). For
libertarianism to be fully understood it must be taken seriously in
both its radical leftist and its reactionary right-wing forms, as well
as when it combines aspects of both tendencies (Tomasi & Zwolinski
2023).



Narrowly within the scope of distributive justice, libertarianism is
described as being left- or right-wing depending on whether it demands
an egalitarian pattern of property rights in external resources. Both
left- and right-libertarians2 within this paradigm agree on
self-ownership. The question arises over what constraints (if any)
exist on what external resources self-owners can appropriate.
Left-libertarians2 countenance a principle demanding that
external resources be equally distributed among self-owners, whereas
right-libertarians2 do not. Though there is variance on the
kinds of constraints right-libertarians2 place on
acquisition, none of them demand equal holdings.



At one end of the spectrum sits the maximally permissive view of
original appropriation. This view holds that that there are no
quantitative constraints on the appropriation of unowned and unused
resources. (Rothbard 1978, 1982, Narveson 1988, ch. 7, 1999, Feser
 2005, Christmas 2020)
 Whilst there are particular procedures through which one must acquire
initially unowned (for example, making ostensive use of the resource
in question), there is no limit on how much property this procedure
can be used to acquire. The initial non-ownership of the external
world drives this view.



Most libertarians accept something like the so-called *Lockean
proviso.* This proviso holds that appropriation is permissible if
"enough and as good" be left for others. There's an
extensive debate over how exactly this proviso is to be understood.
Nozick interprets the proviso to require that no individual be made
worse off by a particular appropriation of a natural resource. But
this interpretation is problematic for at least two reasons. First,
such a welfare-based constraint on the exercise of people's
natural right to appropriate seems ill-motivated within Nozick's
theory. In general, the exercise of our rights is not usually
constrained by a non-worsening requirement. Second, Nozick's
proviso is vulnerable to the objection that, as long as property
owners compensate non-owners only slightly over the pre-appropriation
baseline (which is likely quite low), non-owners are not wronged
(Cohen 1995). This seems to permit what intuitively seems like a
problematically unequal outcome in which one person could appropriate
all property, so long as they compensate everyone else by a tiny
amount. On such a view, private property seems to only function to
produce welfare rather than giving each individual a sphere of
independence.



Others interpret the Lockean proviso as requiring something like a
sufficientarian requirement, such that people must have access to an
adequate share of natural resources (Lomasky 1987; Wendt 2017). This
view might invoke differing conceptions of adequacy, such as
well-being or the ability to be self-governing (Simmons 1992, 1993).
Or one might see the proviso as ensuring the ability to exercise
one's rights of self-ownership. (Mack 1995) Or one might see is
as grounding the *right of necessity* that has been a core part
of the general natural rights tradition from Thomas Aquinas to Hugo
Grotius (Christmas 2021c, pp. 51-54) These views converge
closely with the no-proviso view in that they articulate the inherent
restrictions within the power of acquisition which is grounded in our
original rights. Nozick does not explain how the power of acquisition
is grounded in our original rights, and hence posits the proviso as an
external principle so that the power of acquisition is not entirely
untethered.



At the other end of the spectrum, left-libertarians2 argue
that the external world is not initially unowned in the sense
presupposed above but is owned in some egalitarian manner. Therefore,
any private acquisition of it is strongly constrained in some
egalitarian way.



One version of this view leans on the equal freedom principle of Kant
and Spencer (see Steiner 1974). The argument is that self-ownership
depends upon some amount of world-ownership. If we do not have the
right to locate our body at some location in space over time, we have
no right to exist and therefore cannot be said to be self-owners
(Steiner 2009, p. 241, also see Spencer 1851, ch. 9). The mere
conceptual possibility of one person coming to own all the land is
incoherent alongside the principle of universal self-ownership. Since
we must all equally be self-owners as far as is conceptually possible,
and ownership of natural resources is essential to our being
self-owners, to truly be self-owners we must all equally own the
external world. This does not mean private appropriation cannot take
place, but it does mean that all private appropriations are encumbered
with a tax liability to compensate all others who may have privately
appropriated less than you. Viewed this way,
left-libertarianism2 therefore intimately connects a
universal basic income to self-ownership and freedom (Steiner
2016).



An alternative version of the argument is leans more closely on the
labour-based justification of property found in Locke and others. The
argument is that whilst all self-owners own their labor, and are
therefore entitled to recoup the full fruits thereof, the external,
natural world is not the result of anyone's labor. Therefore,
when we produce objects of value by laboring upon natural resources,
we can only claim a portion of the value it has, namely, the portion
contributed by our own labor. The only person that can be said to be
entitled the natural value found in nature is all of humanity.
Therefore, all owners of private property must pay a tax against the
value of the natural resources they own to compensate those who are
excluded from it, whilst still being able to recoup the value they
add. Viewed this way, left-libertarianism2 intimately
connects land-value taxation to self-ownership and freedom, and as
such continues the legacy of Henry George (1897). This view is,
however, subject the critiques of labor-mixing views of property and
of the labor theory of value, noted above.



The debates one finds within luck-egalitarian approaches to
distributive justice over the nature of luck- and
responsibility-sensitivity, the measurement of freedom and of welfare,
enter left-libertarian2 debates over the Lockean proviso.
For example, Michael Otsuka proposes a welfarist rather than a
value-based metric of equality of ownership (2003).



As an exegetical interpretation of Locke's requirement that
appropriators leave "enough and as good", however,
left-libertarian2 views are implausible. In his discussion
of appropriation, Locke invokes the idea of distributive shares only
three times (sections 31, 37, and 46). All appear in the context of
the (quite different) prohibition on letting things spoil. In these
cases, and in these cases alone, Locke sees appropriation as taking
what belongs to other particular people.



Left-libertarians2 often claim intuitive support for an
egalitarian proviso. When multiple people are presented with a
previously undivided resource, equal division is the intuitively fair
approach. An objection, however, is that such intuitions apply only to
circumstances that ignore relevant conditions. For instance, while
Otsuka (2018) is correct to claim that if two persons are stranded
together on an island, equal division is the intuitive solution, this
may not be true if one person arrived earlier and had already
cultivated, say, two-thirds of the island, while leaving more than
enough for the second person to independently make a living, is
willing to cooperate, trade, and so on. In that case, the latecomer
insisting that she has a right to half the island is not only
counter-intuitive, but probably unjust. The intuition of equal
division becomes even less appealing if we imagine more than two
parties, capable of production, trade, and cooperation, arriving at
different times. It remains true, of course, that such latecomers will
be entitled to something like an equally good shot at making use of
the world's resources. What such an equally good shot comes to,
however, is much less clear. Others argue that the respective
intuitions behind egalitarian ownership of the world and individual
self-ownership are strictly incoherent (Risse 2004).


## 5. Anarchism and the State



Libertarians are highly skeptical of political authority and state
legitimacy. Where a state is understood to be an agency with an
exclusive right to lay down and enforce laws within a territory, it is
not clear how it could do this without either the consent of all
people subject to it, or by violating all of the rights of its
citizens. Of course, all states fail to satisfy this requirement for
most of their subjects (Spooner 1867, Simmons 1976, 1993). Many
libertarians embrace, at least philosophical, anarchism, and are
thereby deeply suspicious of social contract theory. Philosophical
anarchists believe that we have no duty to obey the laws of the state
simply because they come from the state. Some laws reflect natural
moral precepts like "do not murder or steal," and so we
should obey those laws because they happen to be just, but not because
the state has *made* them just. The implication of this is that
the state's enforcement of the rest of their body of law is
illegitimate, and amounts to little more than a large group of armed
agents imposing their will on non-consenting third parties.



The strongest version of the libertarian critique of the state's
authority is articulated by Lysander Spooner: the laws of the state
either reflect natural justice and are therefore superfluous, or they
contravene natural justice, and are illegitimate (1882). Libertarians
are not necessarily *political* anarchists in that they may
believe justice is not served by directly attempting to abolish the
state (e.g., Simmons 2000, ch. 6), though many are (e.g. Chartier
2012, ch. 6) Libertarian anarchists tend to be optimistic about the
possibility of anarchic provision of justice, and of public goods, and
offer sophisticated, if radical, accounts of how a just, stateless
society could operate (Barnett 1986b, 2014 chs 7-9, Molinari
1849, Rothbard 1978, ch. 12, Friedman 1989, pt. 2, Hoppe 2009, Huemer
2012, chs 10-12, Chartier 2012, chs 3-5, Leeson 2014, Long
2008b, Murphy 2008, Skoble 2008, Tannehill & Tannehill 1970, pt.
2). The right-libertarian1 version of this theory is known
as *anarcho-capitalism* whereas the left-libertarian1version is known as *left market anarchism*.



Essential to the libertarian view of the state is the *moral parity
thesis* which says that individual state actors - and
therefore, states as composite actors - have the same rights and
duties as private citizens (Brennan 2016b, 2019, 2021). Libertarians
therefore sharply differ from, for example, neo-Roman republicans and
neo-Kantians in rejecting any fundamental distinction between public
and private action. For libertarians, only a person's consent
can give you the right to do things to them that would ordinarily be
rights-violations. The purportedly special moral status of acting in a
public capacity is not something that libertarians can reconcile with
natural equality (Long 1995, 2001 [Other Internet Resources],
Christmas 2019).



Even though libertarians are generally quite hostile to state
authority, this does not mean that the state cannot permissibly
undertake certain minimal activities. After all, if all persons are
entitled to defend rights, then the state may undertake such actions
as well. It has the same permission to enforce individual rights as
anyone else. However, it does not have any prima facie right to stop
others from doing this too. These activities do not presuppose any
special authority since such activities are permissible with or
without people's prior consent (unless, of course, such
activities involve the violation of rights themselves). However, no
agency that engages in rights-protection could force anyone to pay for
its protection, and hence could not legitimately exercise a tax power.
Without the right to tax and to hold an exclusive right to use force
to protect rights, the state is really just a private agency like any
other.



Robert Nozick offered a controversial and subtle argument that a
state, with strictly curtailed domain of activity, could exist without
anyone's rights being violated. It is often known as an
"invisible hand argument" for the state (1974, pt 1). In a
situation in which rights were enforced by a plethora of protective
associations, where each association protects the rights of those who
voluntarily chose to become members and pay fees, there would be a
significant advantage in being a member of that protective association
with the most members within your territory. The more people who are
in the same protective association as you, the more people you can
have peaceful, predictable, low risk social and economic interactions
with. For this reason, Nozick believed one protective association
would come to dominate the market for protection and would be a *de
facto* monopoly. Those who are not members of the association, if
and when they enter a dispute over rights with a member, will have no
other choice but to be subjected to the dominant associations
procedures for determining wrongdoing. Whilst the dominant association
does not claim any exclusive right to administer all disputes, it is,
by a matter of fact, the only agency administering disputes (Bader
2021).



When there is a plurality of competing associations, each particular
association has an interest in cooperating with others when a dispute
arises between its respective members. However, when there is one
dominant association, Nozick argues that it serves its members by
outlawing new competitors, given that it would introduce alternative
and most importantly *risky* procedures into its system of
administering justice. In coercively prohibiting new entrance into the
protection market, it enforces its monopoly, and thereby becomes a
*de jure* monopoly and not a merely *de facto* one.



Moreover, Nozick argues that this association can even charge fees to
those who do not voluntarily become members, so long as it provides
them with protection that provides protection to their rights that
leaves their rights as protected or more protected than if they did
not. So, out of anarchy, a state emerges without violating
anyone's rights. Of course, if the state engaged in any further
activities, for example, redistributing wealth in a way that was not
strictly necessary to the protection if rights, it *would* be
violating rights and would be illegitimate. This state is therefore
referred to as the "minimal state".



There are reasons to think that when it comes to enforcing justice, it
is important that there be an agency whose decision is final. This, is
a matter of fact, is going to be the one with the greatest capacity
for coercion. Some therefore believe states as such can have
legitimacy so long as they primarily use their unique capacity for
coercion to secure justice (Renzo 2011, Christmas 2022b).



Nozick's argument is a potentially strong one as it uses
anarchist premises to argue that a state could in principle emerge
through just steps. Note also that it applies to both
right-libertarian2 and left-libertarian2theories, on the latter the state is just enforcing a different
set of rights over external objects.



Whilst the argument is sophisticated, it has come under attack from a
variety of angles. Anarchists argue that a de facto monopoly would not
be just in using force to prohibit anyone else from forming a new
protective association. Therefore any de facto monopoly remains merely
de facto and challengers to the state would always be justified in
protecting people's rights in alternative ways so long as they
were consistent with justice (Chartier 2011, pp. 257-262). They
also argue that a de facto monopoly is less likely to be a faithful
guarantor of justice and the possibility of external challenge is
necessary to safeguard justice (Long 2008b).



Non-libertarian liberals argue that even if the argument is internally
coherent in terms of showing that a de jure monopoly could emerge
justly, it does not yield a state that wields *public power*,
but only a form of overwhelming private power, such as the states of
feudal Europe (Freeman 2001, Anderson 2017). To be a legitimate
government, a state must exercise power over all on *behalf of
all*, and not simply be a nexus of private contracts between
individuals.



An additional problem with the argument is that Nozick presents the
minimal state as if it were the terminus of the invisible hand
processes rather than a moment on a continuum. Whilst he insists that
anarchy would not be a stable equilibrium and a minimal state would
emerge, he does not attempt to show that a minimal state is a stable
equilibrium. Once it has succeeded in having a justified monopoly on
rights protection, it may well continue to extent its power,
influence, and wealth beyond that which is necessary to secure
individuals' rights.



Relatedly, Nozick argues that taxation is only justified to the extent
that it is necessary to fund the protection of rights. This is often
taken to mean that the state would be "small" and its
taxes "low". However, there is an important difference
between minimalism in terms of the quality justificatory grounds of
state power, and minimalism in the actual quantitative size of the
state. It is possible that due to empirical circumstances, a state
that is limited to only protecting rights, and only taxing so much as
to fund such activities, nonetheless requires a vast bureaucratic
apparatus. If this turns out to be the case, questions arise as to how
such a large organization should be internally organized in order to
ensure its efficient functioning. It may require elements of
bureaucracy and administrative discretion, as well as democracy and
open-access. Therefore, the size and structure of government is not
determined a priori by its functions being limited to the protection
of rights. Whilst the courts and the police are the morally necessary
outputs of the state apparatus, we cannot know a priori what
organizational complexities are necessary for their stable and
efficient functioning. Whatever they are, they seem to be consistent
with the normative foundations of the minimal state (Murphy 2023).
Non-ideal libertarian theorizing along these lines converges with
neoliberalism, insofar as it recognizes a reasonably strong state as
instrumentally essential to the maintenance of a market-based social
order (Vallier 2021).



Democratic theorists often argue that state authority holds that
states can be legitimate if they are democratic, libertarians tend to
be skeptical about this view. A large body of empirical findings has
shown that voters tend to be radically uninformed, ignorant, and
biased about political issues. And democratic deliberation does
little, if anything, to improve this. Indeed, it seems like it is
rational for people to remain ignorant about politics. Given that
one's causal influence on the quality of political decisions is
negligible, and it is costly in terms of time and effort to become
informed, it is rational for people to remain ignorant. Most people
thus vote in ways that have more to do with signaling their
ideological allegiance or virtues, and less with the merits of the
issues (Caplan 2008, Somin 2016, Brennan 2016a, Pincione &
Teson 2011).



In addition to voter ignorance, many libertarians fear the more
general dynamics of state power. Public choice theory points out that
since the best way to understand the behavior of political agents is
along roughly maximizing lines, there is little reason to think that
the state will generally behave in the public interest (Tullock &
Buchanan 1962). Thus, many government policies impose widely dispersed
costs on the populace to confer localized benefits on a few, often
politically well-connected elites. Examples include the large-scale
bailouts of financial companies and agricultural subsidies.



Where libertarians view of democracy positively it will therefore be
instrumental in general, and agonistic in particular.
Democracy's value will be cashed out in terms of its role in
limiting the excessing power of the state, rather than in any
purported intrinsic value of citizens sharing positive control over
government (Levy 2017). Democratic regimes, whilst far from ideal on a
libertarian standard, tend to have a far better track record of
supporting individual rights to socioeconomic liberty than any other
regime. Whilst voters do not turn out to vote for candidates favouring
libertarian reforms per se, the overall effect of democratic
institutions seems to be a liberalizing force on government and a
constraint on state excess, on this view of democracy (Levy 2018).