Left-libertarianism

Left-libertarianism accepts full self-ownership but denies that natural resources may be appropriated unilaterally. The earth's raw material — land, minerals, the atmosphere — is owned in some egalitarian way by everyone, so those who take more than an equal share owe compensation to all the rest.

The result is a position that fuses a libertarian premise with an egalitarian conclusion. Because people own themselves and what they make but not the world they find, there can be no forced labour and no paternalism, yet a robust redistributive claim follows — grounded not in need or desert but in the simple fact that natural resources were nobody's to begin with. In practice it points toward a universal basic income or 'citizen's dividend' funded from resource rents.

It is a small but rigorous academic tradition — Steiner, Otsuka, Van Parijs and the basic-income movement — that revives much older arguments: Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice (1797) already proposed compensating everyone for their lost share of the commons, and the position connects directly to Georgist and mutualist thinking about land.

Its internal dispute is technical but consequential: how the initial equal share is specified — an equal division, a Lockean 'enough and as good left for others,' or an equal claim on the total value — determines how redistributive the view turns out to be, from modest to sweeping.

Critics on the right deny that unowned resources generate any enforceable claim, so the whole redistributive apparatus collapses; critics on the left counter that focusing on natural resources leaves the ownership of factories, firms, and accumulated capital — the real engines of inequality — untouched.

Because it sounds paradoxical — libertarian and egalitarian at once — it is often assumed to be a contradiction or a fudge, when it is a coherent position that simply refuses the usual pairing of self-ownership with unlimited property in land.