User talk:TFOWR/Sandbox/Libertarianism - tenets

< User:TFOWR/Sandbox/Libertarianism - tenets

These are what Brittanica (Boaz) has to say about libertarianism and property.


 * "[Libertarianism] may be understood as a form of liberalism, the political philosophy associated with the English philosophersJohn Locke and John Stuart Mill, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, and the American statesman Thomas Jefferson. Liberalism seeks to define and justify the legitimate powers of government in terms of certain natural or God-given individual rights. These rights include the rights to life, liberty, private property, freedom of speech and association, ..."


 * "Thus, [libertarians] believe that individuals should be free to behave and to dispose of their property as they see fit, provided that their actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others."


 * "The first well-developed statement of libertarianism, An Agreement of the People (1647), was produced by the radical republican Leveler movement during the English Civil Wars (1642–51). Presented to Parliament in 1649, it included the ideas of self-ownership, private property, legal equality, religious toleration, and limited, representative government."


 * "... a sophisticated philosophical foundation in Locke’s theories of natural rights, including the right to private property and to government by consent."


 * "... the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises challenged the basic tenets of socialism, arguing that a complex economy requires private property and freedom of exchange in order to solve problems of social and economic coordination."


 * "This prohibition entails that governments may not engage in censorship, military conscription, price controls, confiscation of property, or any other type of intervention that curtails the voluntary and peaceful exercise of an individual’s rights."


 * "Finally, they contend that, if the libertarian tradition often seems to stress private property and free markets at the expense of other principles, that is largely because these institutions were under attack for much of the 20th century by modern liberals, social democrats, fascists, and adherents of other leftist, nationalist, or socialist ideologies."

If you are going to distill any tenets of libertarianism from Brittanica, surely the individual's right to own, buy, sell and rent private property is one. There is no allowance for the libertarian socialist idea that "property is theft" within the conception of libertarianism as presented in Brittanica. --Born2cycle (talk) 17:15, 14 October 2010 (UTC)