Free Market Fairness or Freed Market Anti-Capitalism?

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there has been little fruitful exchange between high liberals and libertarians. Tomasi can be commended for taking on the momentous task of bridging the gap between, what is usually considered to be, the left and right wings of liberal political philosophy.

Showing the natural connection between social justice and economic liberty is a particularly urgent academic task: the content of the two cannot be completely settled without reference to the other, so embracing one and rejecting the other inevitably leaves out something of importance. Free Market Fairness articulates classical liberalism in high liberal terms, making it more malleable for high liberal purposes, and providing a common language for classical liberals like Hayek and high liberals like John Rawls to discuss and converge their commitments. However Tomasi’s particular approach to bridging this gap is not a promising one.

Free Market Fairness is premised upon a conflation of actually existing capitalist institutions (and the vaguely defined “economic liberties” that constitute them) with institutions based upon actual libertarian rights. The extent to which capitalist institutions have negative outcomes from the perspective of a high liberal is therefore taken to be the extent to which libertarian principles must be compromised and supplemented with high liberal principles in order for libertarianism to avoid these negative outcomes.

The economic liberty Tomasi refers to as being central to libertarianism is never properly defined. Against this backdrop of ambiguity Tomasi appears to conflate economic liberty with license to take advantage of economic institutions that happen to exist under capitalism. We should not be surprised, then, that this economic liberty comes into conflict with social justice. However we should not take this to mean that economic liberty as defined by libertarianism comes into conflict with social justice: libertarians carefully define the shape of economic liberty in reference to self-ownership, peaceful deployment of one’s legitimately owned property, and a free market. Tomasi falsely assumes that all the institutions of capitalism are legitimate by libertarian standards. However when capitalist institutions are exposed to a libertarian critique, it becomes clearer why we do not need high liberal principles in order to reconcile economic liberty with social justice because economic liberty as defined by libertarians does not give persons the kind of license that is available to some under capitalism.

Even if we assume away any injustice involved in capitalist institutions, and treat the capitalist era as one of perfect “formal equality” (i.e. one in which all persons enjoy the same negative rights), Tomasi overlooks the long lasting and unrectified effect of the injustices constituted by formal inequality. Tomasi assumes that superimposing a regime of libertarian-style formal equality upon a society that has historically been formally unequal (without any rectification of the effects of that formal inequality) fully satisfies the libertarian commitment to formal equality. Tomasi concludes that since the burgeoning of capitalism, formal equality has not sufficiently manifested itself as substantive equality. Libertarianism therefore needs to take insights from high liberalism, substantive equality being their calling card. Greater substantive equality need not require the imposition of high liberal principles into libertarianism, but rather a look at how the ideal of formal equality calls for the rectification of historical formal inequality. This requires no compromise of libertarian principles, but rather a more complete development thereof.

For Tomasi the early capitalist era in what is now the United States was an embodiment of libertarian principles. He therefore applies legitimate worries about the justice of that society to libertarianism itself. Even if we operate on the (false) assumption that America was ever a society characterised by “formal legal equality” [2] for all, with no government privilege to market incumbents, no slavery or racial oppression, no oppression of women; no fundamental socioeconomic distortions by the state, something crucial is nonetheless overlooked in Tomasi’s normative analysis of it. [3] The capitalist era was overshadowed by the ill-gotten accumulations of wealth and power of the feudal-cum-colonial era. Therefore even assuming that the legal rights of all under the burgeoning commercial system nearly perfectly reflected libertarian theory, the distribution of property which was the starting point from which free markets were to proliferate was extremely unequal, owing to a long history of unjust land seizures, slavery, mercantilism, etc. Even if we assume these injustices stopped, that is, slaves were freed, no more land was unjustly seized, and all mercantilist privileges ended, the accumulations of property and of wealth obtained prior to the liberation of the market could then be used on the market to consolidate economic power in a way that would not have been possible, had it not been for these historical injustices.

The distribution of property and wealth that served as the backdrop for the new libertarian order was manifestly not the result of economic liberty in any sense identifiable by a libertarian theory of rights. There is therefore ample scope to condemn class inequality even as it exists in a putatively formally equal market order, insofar as it is a product of the injustice of the preceding order. One need not look to high liberalism to supplement libertarian principles, but merely see that formal equality cannot be superimposed onto just any socioeconomic framework, and generate just outcomes. When the rules of the game are changed half way through, the ultimate outcome cannot be explained only by reference to the new rules; one needs also to understand the old rules, and the failure to properly correct their effects.

In chapter two of Free Market Fairness Tomasi explores the theoretical development of high liberalism in tandem with the historical development of capitalism. In Tomasi’s view, while the “equal freedoms” of the emerging market order were no doubt an improvement on the status-based feudal order that came before, these “classical liberal institutions generated a hereditary class structure of a different kind.” [4] Tomasi writes of the failed promise of classical liberal notion of formal equality:

The institutions of the early American republic emphasized private property, commercial exchange, and guarantees of formal legal equality…. A society that provided formal protection to the natural rights of citizens…

However, the social and economic conditions on which that belief relied were rapidly changing. Many philosophers saw these changes as requiring a shift in the liberal understanding of justice as well… Instead of owning, or working to own, the tools they used each day — horses, plows, fields — people increasingly worked in great factories owned by distant others. Even in America it became less common for people to control the direction and intensity of their productive activities. Increasingly, the conditions of work were decided for people by others. The ideal of formal equality, given full play, in these changed economic conditions, generates a social world with a unique set of challenges.

With industrialization, rights to private property made possible the amassing of great new fortunes. That same system of property rights generates economic imperatives that concentrated capital in great industries, built and controlled by a small number of private hands. Locke had argued that the essential role of the state is to protect property rights; but what if those property rights predictably, even if not intentionally, generate a society divided by hereditary class distinctions? In this case, the so-called system of natural liberty would turn out to be yet another device by which inequalities of status are coercively imposed upon the people. [5]

Tomasi claims these “changed economic conditions” were the outcomes of the spontaneous interplay of the actions of legally equal persons, voluntarily exchanging property on mutually beneficial terms, as per libertarian principles of justice. A predicable result of leaving individuals to peacefully trade with one another is, supposedly, the entrenchment of wage-labour as a means of existence for many, and the concentration of capital into the hands of the few. Whether or not this is a fair claim generally, I will not discuss at any great length here. However, in the case of the early American republic, this seems unwarranted. The new individualist era was entered into gradually against the status-based backdrop of colonial feudalism. The antithesis of libertarian institutions gave people enormously differential starting positions in the new market order; therefore it is hardly surprising that those who started out with the most power exploited this new order. This is not a case against the system of formal equality per se, but a case against the idea that we can institute a system of formal equality in any socioeconomic context, and expect good results.

Tomasi’s analogy with the board game Monopoly offers a useful means by which to understand this issue. Tomasi imagines two board games “Feudal Monopoly”, the rules of which violate the libertarian notion of formal equality, and “Classical Liberal Monopoly”, which embodies it. Tomasi writes,

For classical liberals such as Smith and Hume, the rules of a free society are like the rules of a competitive board game. If the game is to treat all the players as equally free and responsible participants, it cannot include rules that impose disabilities on certain participants and bestow advantages on others. Imagine a version of the board game Monopoly that includes additional, token-specific rules: players who find themselves holding the Thimble, Shoe, and Car tokens, let’s imagine, are prohibited from purchasing or holding any property. Further, all players with these tokens must give 10 percent of their money to the player holding the Cannon token each time they pass around the board. The player holding the Cannon token has taken an oath of fealty to the Terrier. The Cannon is thus allowed to amass property and money, but hold its wealth only at the pleasure of the Terrier. The Terrier can confiscate property from and levy taxes upon the Cannon, or call upon him for service, at any time. Call this “Feudal Monopoly.”

Feudal Monopoly violates the classical liberal principle of formal equality because it varies the rule by status. In a society based on equal freedom, as in a traditional game of Monopoly, the same rules must apply equally to all players. This requirement springs directly from the ideal of voluntarism in human affairs. After all, once people learned the rules of Feudal Monopoly, it would be difficult to find anyone who would be willing to sit down and play it. Similarly, it would be implausible to expect people to give their consent to enter into a society organized along feudal lines.

Classical liberal Monopoly therefore sweeps away all token-specific rules. It requires that the same rules apply equally to all players. With formal equality in place, the distributions that emerge will largely reflect the talent and ambition the players exhibit as they play the game. Under this “system of natural liberty,” each will receive his due. Under formal equality, classical liberal argued, people can enjoy the benefits of social cooperation. By enforcing this system, the state will have discharged its responsibility to treat all citizens as “free and equal children of God.”

For the new liberals, however, formal equality of opportunity does not go far enough. In the first place, people come into the world with very different natural abilities — physical traits, intellectual aptitudes, and emotional dispositions. Difference of family life and station can amplify the effects of these genetic advantages and disabilities. No one can be said to have earned these initial advantages: for the most part, people are simply born with them. The system of formal equality of opportunity seeks to remove status-based arbitrariness from the social world. But that system leaves in place the arbitrary advantages of birth and family circumstance. Under Classical Liberal Monopoly the same rules apply equally to all players but, we might say, players start the game with different amounts of money. Classical liberals accept this as “natural,” but the new liberals see it as unfair. The stain of that unfairness would not be lifted merely by the requirement that once the game had begun, those differently endowed players must all abide by the same set of formal rules. The reasons classical liberals give for Feudal Monopoly’s unfairness apply with equal force against Classical Liberal Monopoly too. Both systems allow distributions to arise on the basis of features that seem arbitrary. [6]

Tomasi’s intention in these passages is to show that a system of “formal equality” or “natural liberty” works to the benefit of those who start off better endowed. The different amounts of money that players start with in Classical Liberal Monopoly is supposed to represent persons’ different abilities to use their formal equality to their advantage. These advantages are not earned, Tomasi claims, but rather “for the most part, people are simply born with them.” The lesson libertarians have to learn from high liberals here, Tomasi believes, is to embrace a concern for these unequal outcomes, since they are not earned.

The hypothesis that a system of formal equality results in the amplification of inequalities of birth is a prevalent one among high liberals. For Rawls, inequalities traceable to “greater natural capacity” [7] are unjust, and are seemingly one of the main targets for his high liberal project. Cohen believed that if individuals were free to manufacture and exchange resources (over which they have sole ownership of), the inevitable outcome would be the able becoming rich and the infirm starving to death (or at least, being exploited to the point of destitution). [8] Dworkin believed that differential talents unjustly leads to unequal distributions of resources. [9] Tomasi is right, I think, to claim that the evolution of classical liberalism into high liberalism is a result of the class inequalities that were produced by capitalism. However he is wrong to side with the high liberals in believing that the classical liberal notion of formal equality needs to be compromised, due its purported indifference to such class inequalities.

Whether or not the high liberal claims about undeserved talents, or that such undeserved talents are what create actually existing inequality, interesting issues though they might be, I will not discuss them here. What I want to stress is that the most important aspect of persons’ differential starting points, continuing the Monopoly analogy, is that they keep their fortunes that they amassed under the Feudal Monopoly rules when they start playing by the Classical Liberal Rules. Tomasi treats the two games as separate, but historically, the era Tomasi believes to have been largely dominated by classical liberal institutions emerged gradually out of the feudalistic era. There was no revolution wherein all ill-gotten wealth and property was redistributed according to some classical liberal doctrine (by some Lockean or usufructory criterion, or returned to the commons for original appropriation, or distributed as reparations, for example), but rather, the concentrations of wealth and land that were unjustly accrued under the Feudal rules, were maintained as the new classical liberal rules took over. We should conceive not of two separate board games, but of one board game, where the rules change half way through. Although the classical liberal rules may be the right ones, the game itself is still unjust because the effects of the injustices of the previous rules are ongoing, even in spite of the change in rules. Insofar as the classical liberal has reason to object to the feudal rules that govern the first half of the game, she has reason to object to the state of affairs that occurs under the classical liberal rules in the second half of the game.

While it may be a matter of luck who it turns out has the unfair advantages obtained under the old rules, it is not sheer luck that some class of persons should have these advantages, since they were the deliberative and predictable result of the preceding set of rules.

Tomasi is right that classical liberals should be concerned about the vastly unequal shares that accrue in the proverbial Classical Liberal Monopoly, but he is wrong to say that libertarian principles fail to warrant such a concern, and that they therefore need to be supplemented by high liberal principles. It is the persistence of past injustices in the form of individuals being permitted to keep wealth and property they obtained unjustly (and to pass it down to future generations, and benefit from trading it, investing in it, etc.) under the previous set of rules. These rules were unjust from a libertarian perspective; therefore there are explicitly libertarian grounds for wanting to remedy that injustice, rather than taking it as a legitimate starting point from which to commence formal equality.

The libertarian, qua libertarian, has reason to be concerned not only that a society is governed by the appropriate libertarian rules, but that the conditions upon which these rules are imposed, themselves be structured by libertarian principles. [10] In order to clarify this difference, consider the following, from Rothbard:

Suppose that somehow government becomes persuaded of the necessity to yield to a clamor for free-market, laissez-faire society. Before dissolving itself, however, it redistributes property titles, granting the ownership of the entire territory of New York to the Rockefeller family, of Massachusetts to the Kennedy family, etc. It then dissolves, ending taxation and all other forms of government intervention in the economy. However, while taxation has been abolished, the Rockefeller, Kennedy, etc., families proceed to dictate to all the residents in what is now “their” territory, exacting what are now called “rents” over all the inhabitants.

Rothbard’s point here is that the deontological libertarian is in a particularly good position to condemn this regime. [12] Regardless of whether or not there is a free market in goods, and prices are determined by supply and demand, and contracts are voluntarily agreed to according to mutual benefit, etc., as per the various libertarian mantras, what is of equal important is from whence these commercial engagements arose. The state of affairs described in the passage in one entirely governed by libertarian rules, but it is nonetheless deeply unjust from a libertarian perspective, because of the unjust conditions upon which the libertarian rules were imposed.

In order for the libertarian to endorse the right to exchange property on mutually beneficial terms, that property must actually legitimately belong to whoever exchanges it; they have to have obtained it through legitimate means, not through some feudalist or mercantilist privilege of a purportedly bygone era.

Even conceding that the era in which the feudal class system evolved into the capitalist class system was one of real formal equality, the libertarian need not endorse the state of affairs that pertained, since she condemns the starting position. A critique of capitalist class inequality, therefore, need not take the form of a critique of libertarianism.

As Matt Zwolinski says, not all markets or commercial relations should be endorsed by libertarians. [13] For example, markets that have been set up by coercive state intervention, or severely rigged by past intervention, (like many labour markets), or markets in things that no one has any right to exchange in the first place (like slave markets), should not be endorsed by libertarians. Commercial society is only a libertarian aspiration insofar as it is the embodiment, and playing out of, individuals exercising their rights and respecting the rights of others. A market order wherein a vast amount of property was obtained through land grants, military conquest, purchased with money earned through mercantilist privilege or from slavery, is manifestly not one a libertarian or classical liberal could or should endorse.

In chapter 5 Tomasi comes close to making these kinds of observations, but sadly does not follow them to their conclusion. Tomasi ably argues that there is a distinction between social orders that are the product of deliberate human design and orders which are unplanned products of human action and spontaneous interaction, ought not be seen as an existential distinction. Rather, social orders are designed or spontaneous at different levels of analysis. Tomasi’s intention here is to highlight a possible Hayekian route into his project of Free Market Fairness: that is, to use high liberal principles in designing institutions that operate through spontaneous social mechanisms. In this way, the rules of the game can be set up in advance so as to make certain kinds of spontaneous outcomes more likely. What can be taken from this important discussion about Hayek, however, is that while libertarian principles of justice lend themselves to societies that are spontaneously ordered according nexuses of voluntary agreements and transactions of different individuals, it matters where we start from. The character of the society-wide distribution is not only the result of the rules that govern it, but also the socioeconomic state of affairs that obtained when the rules were imposed.

Tomasi quotes Hayek in saying that a “spontaneous order may rest in part on regularities which are not spontaneous but imposed.” [16] The importance of this point for Tomasi is that, from a Hayekian perspective, social orders can only be condemned as unjust if they are the product of intentional human design. Some regularity within a spontaneous order may partially rest upon some sort of intentional human design, say if property rights were protected by the state so that a free market could ensue. Features of intentional human design can affect the entire system so as to affect their overall character, again, think of the role of property rights in a free market. And since it is the lack of intentionality of spontaneous orders that denies them candidacy for social justice, an element of intentionality in shaping the regularities around which a spontaneous order operates, allows us to talk about the social justice thereof. [17] Condemnations of society-wide distributions can be made insofar as there is some regularity to the social order that was the product of human design. This gives the political theorist space to answer questions of institutional design from a high liberal, social justice perspective, while operating within the Hayekian framework of spontaneous order. However, the case for wanting to make such judgements from a high liberal perspective remains underdetermined. Tomasi writes,

Like most libertarians, Nozick rejects the very idea of social or “redistributive” justice. Liberal principles of justice should be historical rather than patterned. Any questions about the justice of distributions in our world are reducible to questions about the justice of prior appropriations, exchanges, and transfers of goods. [18]

Tomasi appears to take the libertarian rejection of the idea that there is some particular pattern of holdings is required by justice to imply that no particular pattern of holdings is unjust. However, it can be true that all roads lead somewhere, without it being the case that there is somewhere to which all roads lead. Nozick’s historical criterion of justice does not imply that there is no such thing as a just distribution, it only implies that its justice/injustice can be read off of it in a historical vacuum: how we get there matters more than any present pattern. If the history “of prior appropriations, exchanges, and transfers of goods” is one of expropriation, enslavement, government patronage and protection, then to the extent that “questions about the justice of distributions… are reducible” to such questions, we have a libertarian case of distributional injustice on a society-wide scale.

Tomasi identifies important issues in relation to libertarianism and the existence of class inequality under democratic capitalism. However he fails to note the libertarian objection to the conditions of actually-existing capitalism, which is rigged toward market incumbents by generations of formal inequality. In his Monopoly analogy he notes that if people unjustly start out with different amounts of money, then formal equality will generate unequal outcomes. He claims the money in the game is analogous to natural endowments that allow one to play the game of the marketplace better, rather than actual wealth and property that has been accumulated under generations of feudalistic and mercantile invasions of liberty. While there may be an interesting conversation to be had about the extent to which individuals “deserve” their natural endowments that make their life go better, the need to condemn the division between those who own productive property and those are subordinated to them need not resort to this kind of argument. In his discussion of spontaneous order wherein he notes the importance of from whence the regularities of spontaneous order arise, which for the libertarian means that the overshadowing injustices of feudalism and mercantilism, he sadly takes as an opportunity to insert high liberal principles of justice into the libertarian schema of institutional design.

Since there is ample scope within libertarianism to condemn the rigged markets in which unjustly obtained shares of wealth have predictably, created new kind of class division and inequality between persons, how ought the libertarian proceed? If what I have said is correct, she ought not proceed by compromising libertarian principles by supplementing them with high liberal ones. Since there are, ex hypothesi, good reasons to believe libertarian principles are correct, and they are sufficient to condemn the class inequality that developed throughout the capitalist era qua its traceability to feudalistic and mercantilist privilege, no motivation for revising these principles can be found in the abhorrence of a system that it already condemns. If libertarianism needs to address more attention to the class division of actual capitalist societies, without adopting the principles of high liberalism, what then ought it do? Broadly speaking there are three areas where libertarianism has, is, and should continue to engage with it is to address some of the issues that drive liberals who care about social justice away from libertarianism and toward high liberalism.

I have assumed for arguments sake here that at some point during the burgeoning of the capitalist era our proxy society nearly perfectly embodied libertarian principles. I did this in order to highlight the importance of the persisting pattern of wealth that was obtained illegitimacy under the previous order(s). However one way in which libertarianism ought to proceed (and indeed has and is, in many cases) is to identify the ways in which the unjust invasions of liberty under the feudal and mercantile eras persist under modern democratic capitalism in new forms. Through the lenses of history and political economy, the various ways in which the rich and powerful maintain and consolidate their favourable position is bound up with the state’s invasion of the liberty of everyone else. Libertarian class analysis then highlights a means by which abstract libertarian principles can be integrated into social justice concerns. For example Benjamin Tucker argued that without a state-protected cartel of banks, credit would be so widely available that anyone who wanted to work would have access to means of production. [19] Indeed, along with Thomas Hodgskin [20] he believed that a truly free market society would coalesce into a something of a socialist economy as the state refrained from invading the liberty of its citizens. Hodgskin explicitly believed that exploitation was a result of the violation of the natural right to private property. In a similar vein as the French liberals Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, [21] Franz Oppenheimer [22] believed that the only way one class could become dependent on another for work is by the state invading the peasantry’s property rights in their land, and giving it to the politically connected. A decade later Albert J. Nock [23] echoed the same ideas about exploitation, and today Kevin Carson [24] has done extensive work on formulating an explicitly libertarian account of exploitation and the development of capitalism, based on similar observations made by these earlier radicals. Carson has also done extensive work in examining the relationship between state intervention and growth of the hierarchical firm. [25] Many libertarian scholars view the libertarian project to be synonymous with anti-capitalism, believing libertarian principles to be so bound up with social justice as to be antithetical to what people refer to as capitalism. [26]

Through a more normative lens, many scholars are interested in how to rectify historical and ongoing injustices that so shape the distribution of wealth in the world. [27] Indeed Nozick suggested that large-scale redistribution would be necessary before distributions of holdings could be considered just according to his historical conception of distributive justice. [28] Roderick T. Long [29] and Zwolinski [30] have done work that straddles both these descriptive and normative projects.

Finally, there is another normative approach that seeks to locate libertarian principles of justice within a broader, thicker set of moral, political, and cultural commitments, such as commitments to social justice issues. The project of “thick libertarianism” looks into the relationship between the central abstract principles of libertarianism, and other more concrete issues that these abstract principles either causally [31] or conceptually entail a concern with. [32]

What is common to these three projects is a belief that libertarianism is emancipatory. Whereas Free Market Fairness seeks to pit high liberalism and libertarianism on two opposing sides of a pole so as to check each other, work done in these areas rests on the notion that rather than moderating each other, libertarian principles and social justice reinforce each other as part of an integrated, coherent world-view. [33] The most ideal proxy for this position is Lysander Spooner: an adamant and uncompromising supporter of the individual right to private property who believed that the result of the state’s invasion of this right was “simply to keep one class of men in subordination and servitude to another.” [34] For Spooner (and many others) the right to own property is the ultimate bulwark against exploitation and subordination, not just in ideal political theorising, but evident in concrete historical socioeconomic development.

In conflating the source of the social evils generated by the burgeoning of the capitalist era with libertarian institutions, Tomasi looks past the organic integration of libertarianism with social justice issues such as class inequality. He wrongfully portrays libertarianism having nothing to say against the class divisions that emerged throughout the capitalist era, and rationalises a shift away from libertarian principles toward high liberal ones. And insodoing looks to the state apparatus to correct the social ills that it is responsible for creating in the first place. If the rationale for incorporating high liberal principles of justice into libertarian ones is that libertarian principles offer no grounds to block the kind of economic inequality that existed and exists under capitalism, then there is no rationale for doing so.

Notes:

[1] Tomasi, J. Free Market Fairness. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012.

[2] Ibid, p. 32.

[3] While it is important to understand how government privilege, slavery, the subjugation of women, and other injustices that continued (and continue) throughout the capitalist era shape the structure of the economy and create class division, I intend, as far as I can, avoid questions of history and of political economy to make a more philosophical point about historical injustice from the perspective of libertarian rights theory.

[4] Tomasi, op. cit., p. 32.

[5] Ibid, pp. 32-33.

[6] Ibid, pp. 33-34.

[7] Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971, p. 92.

[8] Cohen, G. A. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 92-96.

[9] Dworkin, R. Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 65-119.

[10] A distinction between libertarian rules and a social condition upon which rules are imposed which is considered appropriate from a libertarian perspective, might pave the way toward a libertarian version of a Rawlsian “basic structure” (Rawls, J. Political Liberalism. Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1993, 257-269).

[11] Rothbard, M. N. ‘Justice and Property Rights,’ in his Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays, 2nd ed. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000, p. 95.

[12] Relative to a utilitarian defender of free markets.

[13] Zwolinski, M. ‘A Libertarian Case for the Moral Limits of Markets,’ forthcoming in Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy.

[14] Tomasi, op. cit., p. 142-161.

[15] Ibid, p. 155.

[16] Hayek, F. A. von. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas. London: Routledge, 1978, p. 74. Quoted Tomasi, op. cit., p. 155.

[17] Tomasi, op. cit., p. 152.

[18] Ibid, p. 48.

[19] Tucker, B. R. ‘State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherein The Differ,’ Liberty, March 10, 1888. Reprinted in his Instead of A Book By a Man Too Busy To Write One. New York: Adamant Media, 2005. (First published 1897.)

[20] Hodgskin, T. Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital. London: The Labour Publishing Company, 1825; Popular Political Economy. London: Charles and William Tait, 1827; The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. London: B. Steil, 1832.

[21] See Hart, D. M. Class, Slavery and the Industrialist Theory of History in French Liberal Thought, 1914-1834: The Contribution of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. Ph. D Thesis, King’s College, University of Cambridge, 1990.

[22] Oppenheimer, F. The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically. New York: Vanguard Press, 1926. (First published 1914.)

[23] Nock, A. J. Our Enemy, The State. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1935.

[24] Carson, K. A. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Fayetteville: BookSurge, 2007.

[25] Carson, K. A. Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. Fayetteville: BookSurge, 2008.

[26] Carson, op. cit.; Johnson, C. W. ‘Markets Freed From Capitalism,’ in G. Chartier & C. W. Johnson (eds) Markets Not Capitalism New York: Minor Compositions, 2012; Chartier, G. ‘Advocates of Freed Markets Should Oppose Capitalism,’ in G. Chartier & C. W. Johnson (eds) Markets Not Capitalism. New York: Minor Compositions, 2012.

[27] Rothbard, M. N. ‘Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,’ Libertarian Forum, 1 (1969): p. 3-4; ‘How and How Not to Desocialize,’ The Review of Austrian Economics, 6 (1992): p. 65-77; The Ethics of Liberty. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, ch. 9-11. (First published 1998.); Stromberg, J. R. ‘The American Land Question,’ The Freeman, 59 (2009): 33-38; Hoppe, H-H. ‘De-Socialization in a United Germany,’ The Review of Austrian Economics, 5 (1991): 77-104; Democracy, The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. London: Transaction, 2001, ch. 6; ‘Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization,’ Libertarian Papers, 3(1) (2011).

[28] Nozick, R. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, pp. 230-231.

[29] ‘How To Reach The Left,’ presented at Mises Circle, Chicago, April 9, 2011, unpublished. <http://praxeology.net/RTLreachleft.pdf> 27/3/15; ‘Left-Libertarianism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice.’ <http://praxeology.net/historical-justice.doc> 27/3/15; ‘Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now,’ Cato Unbound, November 10, 2008; ‘Free Market Firms: Smaller, Flatter, and More Crowded,’ Cato Unbound, November 25, 2008.

[30] Zwolinski, M. ‘Structural Exploitation,’ Social Philosophy & Policy, 29 (2012): pp. 154 – 179.

[31] On the connection between a concern for the non-aggression principle and rape-culture see Johnson, C. W. ‘Women and the Invisible Fist: How Violence Against Women Enforces the Unwritten Law of Patriarchy,’ unpublished. <http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/women-and-the-invisible-fist/women-and-the-invisible-fist-2013-0503-max.pdf> 5/6/15; Christmas, B. ‘Libertarianism and Privilege,’ presented at American Philosophical Association Eastern Division, 29 December, 2014, unpublished.

[32] Johnson, C. W. ‘Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin,’ Rad Geek People’s Daily. October 3, 2008. Reprinted in G. Chartier & C. W. Johnson (eds) Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate power, and Structural Poverty. New York: Minor Compositions, 2012; ‘Remarks on Jan Narveson’s “Libertarianism: the Thick and the Thin,”’ presented at American Philosophical Association Eastern Division, 28 December, unpublished. <http://charleswjohnson.name/remarks/2005/12/28/narveson> 8/2/15.

[33] ‘Left-Libertarianism: Its Past, Its Present, Its Prospects,’ presented at MANCEPT workshops, in Manchester, September 10, 2014, unpublished.

[34] Spooner, L. 1886. A Letter to Grover Cleveland. Reprinted in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, vol. 5. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010, p. 20.