[vidarh]

Libertarianism started on the far left - The "original libertarian", the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, attacked Proudhon, the "original anarchist" for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for his regressive views on women.

Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights and on whether or not de jure vs. de facto rights matter most.

As such it is often hard to place people with libertarian views firmly on a traditional left-right axis. You'll find a variety ranging from the far left seeing private property as illegitimate restrictions on liberty (Dejacque applauded Proudhon's famous "property is theft"), to right wing libertarians who see private property as fundamental to liberty (often invoking e.g. Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises), to people in between who want various trade-offs (e.g. mostly protecting property rights but seeing a need for some level of welfare provisions)

My experience is that engineering in general tends to have a lot of socially liberal people, many of whom could probably be described as libertarian, but that the left/right position of their views is often a lot more ambiguous.

[abalone]

> Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights

I don't think this is correct at all. What's called right libertarianism or laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid 20th century (e.g. Ayn Rand). It stole the term which had historically been a left term and simply cleansed it of its critique of corporate power.

Corporations are authoritarian, anti-democratic organizations that exercise a great deal of control over our economic lives. Laissez-faire capitalists saw an opportunity to use Left anti-authoritarian concepts to attack democratic state controls and regulations on corporate power. Often they will employ some mental gymnastics to redefine corporations as extensions of individual rights, hence the John Galt cult of personality stuff. This is akin to calling feudalism "liberty" because, think of the rights of kings. As such we have entered an era of unparalleled corporate power, control and concentration of wealth.

What exposes the sheer fraud of "right libertarianism" in Silicon Valley is that much of SV was created by the state and continues to be subsidized to the tune of billions annually. Look up DARPA.[1] So they're not even against state capitalism.

[1] https://unherd.com/2018/06/government-agency-made-silicon-va...

[vidarh]

It was Murray Rothbard that popularised the use of the term libertarian on the right. Rand very explicitly rejected the label when faced with it. You're right that she is an important figure for right-libertarians, but she was highly critical of them. The use of the term on the right somewhat predates Rothbard - e.g. Mencken used it, but never pushed the term publicly.

Rothbard, while highly critical of the left, did very explicitly seek some sort of rapprochement with left-libertarians. E.g. see "Left and Right: A Journal of Liberterian Thought" [1]. Here's a retrospective at the Mises institute[2] (with the caveat that it's the Mises Institute..).

While I sympathise with some of your criticism of right-libertarianism; I find their fetishistic approach to property rights highly flawed, for example, at the same time there are a lot of right-libertarians who are much more moderate and accept and understand the need for trade-offs rather than the kind of absolutist approach to property rights that e.g. Rand pushes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_and_Right:_A_Journal_of_L...

[2] https://mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-yea...

[klaudius]

Imagine if the mafia went around to collect protection money from business owners and then spent tiny percentage of that money funding various projects, many of which went nowhere and there are some projects that benefit their victims.

This is the setup you're in with the government. Wealthy people pay most of the taxes and support the government system. Tiny percentage of their confiscated wealth was apparently used to create the internet. Government was simply a middleman just like they are a middleman between people and construction companies when it comes to building roads.

People could have come together to create a non-profit that would do some basic research into various things. They could've pooled their money and paid for it collectively. However, you are already taxed, so why not use those funds to create an agency inside the government and do the same thing?

[perl4ever]

Free markets only work if transaction costs are reasonable.

I actually agree with you that the fundamental purpose of government is to be a middleman, but that is the most important thing in the world!

All the time people want to talk about negative externalities - lowering transaction costs is the ultimate positive externality, and it doesn't get accounted for on anyone's books, so people get deluded into thinking there is no return on tax money.

[buboard]

the term "Libertarianism" was leftist in the 19th century. Nowadays it refers to laisez-faire capitalism and the austrian school. Get on with the times people