page_title: Right-libertarianism
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Right-libertarianism / By country / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Austrian Economists: Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Hoppe. With a mention to the Mises Institute and its website Mises.org Español: Economistas Austriacos: Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Hoppe. Con una mención al Instituto Mises y su sitio web Mises.org
context_page_description: Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism or right-wing libertarianism, is a political philosophy and type of libertarianism that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.
  Right-libertarian political thought is characterized by the strict priority given to liberty, with the need to maximize the realm of individual freedom and minimize the scope of public authority. Right-libertarians typically see the state as the principal threat to liberty.
context_section_description: Right-libertarianism is the dominant form and better known version of libertarianism in the United States, especially when compared with left-libertarianism. Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard have been described as the most noted advocate of this type of libertarianism. Unlike Rothbard, who argued for the abolition of the state, Nozick argued for a night-watchman state. To this day, there remains a division between anarcho-capitalists that advocate its abolition and minarchists who support a night-watchman state. According to Nozick, only such a minimal state could be justified without violating people's rights. Nozick argued that a night-watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights and therefore morally justifies the existence of a state.
  Already a radical classical liberal and anti-interventionist strongly influenced by the Old Right, especially its opposition to the managerial state whilst being more unequivocally anti-war and anti-imperialist, Rothbard had become the doyen of right-libertarianism. Before his departure from the New Left, with which he helped build for a few years a relationship with other libertarians, Rothbard considered liberalism and libertarianism to be left-wing, radical and revolutionary whereas conservatism to be right-wing, reactionary and counter-revolutionary. As for socialism, especially state socialism, Rothbard argued that it was not the opposite of libertarianism, but rather that it pursued liberal ends through conservative means, putting it in the political center. By the time of his death in 1995, Rothbard had involved the segment of the libertarian movement loyal to him in an alliance with the growing paleoconservative movement, seen by many observers, libertarian and otherwise, as flirting with racism and social reaction. Suggesting that libertarians needed a new cultural profile that would make them more acceptable to socially and culturally conservative people, Rothbard criticized the tendency of proponents of libertarianism to appeal to "'free spirits,' to people who don't want to push other people around, and who don't want to be pushed around themselves" in contrast to "the bulk of Americans", who "might well be tight-assed conformists, who want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange dress habits, etc." while emphasizing that this was relevant as a matter of strategy. Rothbard argued that the failure to pitch the libertarian message to Middle America might result in the loss of "the tight-assed majority".
  At least partly reflective of some of the social and cultural concerns that lay beneath Rothbard's outreach to paleoconservatives is paleolibertarianism. In an early statement of this position, Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker arguing for a specifically Christian libertarianism. Later, Rockwell would no longer consider himself a "paleolibertarian" and was "happy with the term libertarian". While distancing himself from the paleolibertarian alliance strategy, Rockwell affirmed paleoconservatives for their "work on the immigration issue", maintaining that "porous borders in Texas and California" could be seen as "reducing liberty, not increasing it, through a form of publicly subsidized right to trespass".
  Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that "libertarians must be conservatives". Hoppe acknowledges what he describes as "the importance, under clearly stated circumstances, of discriminating against communists, democrats, and habitual advocates of alternative, non-family centered lifestyles, including homosexuals". Contra Walter Block and arguing that libertarianism need not be seen as requiring open borders, Hoppe attributes "open border enthusiasm" to "egalitarianism". While defending market anarchy in preference to both, Hoppe has argued for the superiority of monarchy to democracy, maintaining that monarchs are likely to be better stewards of the territory they claim to own than democratic politicians, whose time horizons may be shorter.
  Defending the fusion of traditionalist conservatis
caption: Austrian School economists which greatly influenced the development of right-libertarianism in the United States