Portal:Libertarianism

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Introduction

Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, itself from the Latin: libertas, lit. 'freedom') is a political philosophy that holds freedom and liberty as primary values. Many libertarians conceive of freedom in accord with the Non-Aggression Principle, according to which each individual has the right to live as they choose, so long as it does not involve violating the rights of others by initiating force or fraud against them.

Libertarians advocate for the expansion of individual autonomy and political self-determination, emphasizing the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice. They generally support individual liberty and oppose authority, state power, warfare, militarism and nationalism, but some libertarians diverge on the scope and nature of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. (Full article...)

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Left-libertarianism (or left-wing libertarianism) names several related, but distinct approaches to political and social theory which stress both individual freedom and social equality. In its classical usage, libertarianism is a synonym for anti-authoritarian varieties of left-wing politics, e.g. libertarian socialism, which includes anarchism and libertarian Marxism, among others.

Left-libertarianism can also refer to 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. While maintaining full respect for personal property, they are skeptical of or fully against private property, arguing that neither claiming nor mixing one's labor with natural resources is enough to generate full private property rights and maintain that natural resources (land, oil, gold and vegetation) should be held in an egalitarian manner, either unowned or owned collectively. Those left-libertarians who support private property do so under the condition that recompense is offered to the local community. Many schools of thought are communist, advocating the eventual replacement of money with labor vouchers or decentralized planning.

On the other hand, left-wing market anarchism, which includes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism and Samuel Edward Konkin III's agorism, appeals to left-wing concerns such as egalitarianism, gender and sexuality, class, immigration and environmentalism within the paradigm of a socialist free market. In the United States, the word "libertarian" has become associated with right-libertarianism after Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess reached out to the New Left in the 1960s. However, until then political usage of the word was associated exclusively with anti-capitalism and in most parts of the world such an association still predominates.

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But what the Left That Was demanded was not the symbolic image of the "broken rifle" - so very much in vogue these days in pacifist boutiques - but the training and arming of the people for revolutionary ends, solely in the form of democratic militias. A resolution coauthored by Luxemburg and Lenin (a rare event) and adopted by the Second International in 1906 declared that it "sees in the democratic organization of the army, in the popular militia instead of the standing army, an essential guarantee for the prevention of aggressive wars, and for facilitating the removal of differences between nations.

This was not simply an antiwar resolution, although opposition to the war that was fast approaching was the principal focus of the statement. The arming of the people was a basic tenet of the Left That Was, and pious demands for gun control among today's leftists would have been totally alien to the thinking of the Left That Was. As recently as 1930s, the concept of "the people in arms" remained a basic tenet of independent socialist, no to speak of anarchist, movements throughout the world, including those of the United States, as I myself so well remember. The notion of schooling the masses in reliance on the police and army for public safety, much less turning the other cheek in the face of violence, would have been regarded as heinous.

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— Murray Bookchin (1921–2006)
Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995)

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Credit: Lexicon, Vikrum

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General images

The following are images from various libertarianism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Sébastien Faure, prominent French theorist of libertarian communism as well as atheist and freethought militant (from Libertarianism)
Image 2The Nolan Chart, created by American libertarian David Nolan, expands the left–right line into a two-dimensional chart classifying the political spectrum by degrees of personal and economic freedom (from Libertarianism)
Image 3The Political Compass: the green quadrant represents left-libertarianism and the purple right-libertarianism (from Libertarianism)
Image 4Gary Chartier, a left-libertarian of the free-market anti-capitalist school (from Left-libertarianism)
Image 5Members of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo marching in Madrid in 2010 (from Libertarianism)
Image 6Former congressman Ron Paul, a self-described libertarian, whose presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 garnered significant support from youth and libertarian Republicans (from Libertarianism)
Image 7A diagram of the typology of beliefs in libertarianism (both left and right, respectively) (from Libertarianism)
Image 8Murray Bookchin, American libertarian socialist theorist and proponent of libertarian municipalism and communalism (from Libertarianism)
Image 9Thomas Paine, whose theory of property showed a libertarian concern with the unequal distribution of resources under statism (from Libertarianism)
Image 10Murray Bookchin, a left-libertarian of the social anarchist school (from Left-libertarianism)
Image 11John Locke, regarded as the father of liberalism (from Libertarianism)
Image 12Spanish anarchist militiawomen during the 1936 Revolution (from Libertarianism)
Image 1317 August 1860 edition of Le Libertaire, Journal du mouvement social, a libertarian communist publication in New York City (from Libertarianism)
Image 14Tea Party movement protest in Washington, D.C., September 2009 (from Libertarianism)

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Sarwark in 2016

Nicholas Joel Sarwark (born August 27, 1979) is an American attorney and businessman who served as the 19th chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), the governing body of the Libertarian Party. Prior to his election in 2014, he served on several LP national committees and as chair of the Libertarian Party of Maryland State Committee and vice chair of the Libertarian Party of Colorado State Committee. As of 2020^[update], he is the only LP chair to have served three consecutive terms.

Sarwark declined to run for another term as LNC chair in 2020, and was succeeded by Joe Bishop-Henchman. (Full article...)

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Lysander Spooner Adam Smith Frédéric Bastiat Murray Bookchin Murray Rothbard Ayn Rand Ron Paul Mary Ruwart Milton Friedman Noam Chomsky Lew Rockwell Walter Block Steve Kubby Hans-Hermann Hoppe Randy Barnett John Stossel Gary Johnson Jo Jorgensen