Libertarianism (right)

Right-libertarianism treats self-ownership and the non-aggression principle as near-absolute constraints: each person fully owns themselves and whatever they justly acquire, and no one — not even a democratic majority — may override that for a greater good. The state, if it is permitted at all, is confined to protecting person, property, and contract.

Its central argument runs from self-ownership to a minimal, night-watchman state. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) contended that only such a state can arise without itself violating rights, and that any 'patterned' distribution — everyone equal, or everyone above a floor — cannot be maintained without continuous interference in voluntary exchange between consenting adults. Redistributive taxation is therefore characterized, quite literally, as a species of forced labour.

Its lineage is intellectual more than governmental: Rand's popular novels, the Austrian economists, Rothbard's activism, and the American Libertarian Party. No state has ever been built to its specification, though its influence shows in deregulation, tax revolt, school-choice, and drug-decriminalization movements, and in a durable strand of American politics hostile to federal power.

Its internal range runs from minarchists, who accept courts, police, and national defence as the irreducible core, to the anarcho-capitalist wing that denies even those and would supply law and protection on the market. The lower edge of the placement marks that dispute — whether the tradition's own premises permit any state at all.

The recurring criticism is that it measures freedom only against the state and is blind to private power: an employer, a monopolist, or a landlord can coerce as effectively as a government, yet registers on this axis as pure liberty. Critics also press the starting point — that original property titles trace back through conquest and expropriation, not a clean chain of just acquisition.

It is easily caricatured as mere selfishness, but its core is a moral claim about the inviolability of the person: that individuals are ends in themselves whom even a well-meaning majority may not use as means.