Libertarianism in this idiosyncratic,
anarcho-capitalist denotation tends to have three
primary characteristics:



First, these curious
market-fundamentalist libertarians take the
incontrovertible righteousness of a commitment to the
Non-Initiation of Force as an axiom, and then treat that
axiom as a foundation from which to exhaustively
characterize what they consider a just, stable, and
prosperous social order.



Because the non-initiation principle delineates an
essentially negative concept of liberty, I routinely
describe these figures as negative libertarians. One
could usefully distinguish, for example, purely negative
libertarians from civil libertarians for whom a
positive conception of liberty is necessary to affirm
what is valuable in a human rights culture, or in the
support of civic institutions like a separation of
church and state, an independent press, vibrant and
widely accessible education and so on. (My use of the
terms negative and positive here is derived from the
canonical formulation by Isaiah Berlin.)



Second, negative libertarians will tend
to reduce all conceivable political and public relations
to contractual relations (as against acts of force or
fraud which they identify as criminal and so
anti-political, or acts of love or generosity which they
tend to identify as intimate or charitable and so
pre-political, or simply not-political).



Third, negative libertarians will tend
to identify the outcome of market exchanges as both
optimally efficient and optimally fair or just. Of
course, what actually counts in the world as a
market outcome is in fact profoundly contingent
historically and territorially, and depends on a context
of agreements, protocols, implicit and explicit norms,
and so on. But negative libertarians will tend to
describe markets nevertheless as spontaneous upwellings
out of human nature or as if emerging from the tidal
forces of supply and demand treated as deep and
immutable analogues to physical principles like the Laws
of Thermodynamics.



Because of their stubbornly provincial misreading of
contingent generalizations from the market conditions
that prevail in their own neighborhoods as if they
delineated eternal principles, I will sometimes describe
these negative libertarians likewise as market
naturalists. It is among the many ironies of the
apparently irresistible allure of market naturalism
among negative libertarian technophiles, that many of
these ideologues otherwise cultivate a profound
suspicion of deployments of the idea of nature to
justify customs, institutions, or norms.



Against the purported spontaneity and inevitability of
market relations, so-called, the negative libertarians
array the countervailing and always-only coercive
machineries of national states. They reduce all
government to violence and see in governing nothing but
violence, and then declare, practically as a matter of
fiat, that market outcomes (and typically market
behavior will be treated as synechdochic with corporate
conduct) non-coercive.



Never mind that extraordinarily many real-world
corporations, of course, routinely use physical
threats and engage in exploitation and deliver harm in
the effort to improve their bottom lines. And never mind
that legitimate governments, of course, whatever their
flaws, routinely enagage in social administration that
is the farthest imaginable thing from physical threat.
Once one puts the negative libertarian blinders on every
nice social worker and dedicated public servant suddenly
becomes a jack-booted thug and every corporate titan,
even if he is little better than a mafia don, suddenly
becomes a Randian Archetype of boundless benevolent
creative energy.



Minarchists and neo-classical liberals will for the most
part affirm all three of these three planks as their own
worldview, but for whatever reasons, will compromise
their applications in certain key areas, usually on
utilitarian or strategic political grounds. Typically
these compromises are experienced as exceptions that
prove the rule rather than deep challenges to the
overall correctness of the negative libertarian
viewpoint.



While the coterie of technology enthusiasts who espouse
market fundamentalism in an undiluted form remains in
fact a vanishingly small one (though unbelievably noisy
for its scale), it is key to recognize the extent to
which the more mainstream neo-liberal and
neo-conservative practical and institutional universe,
with its incessant drumbeat for deregulation without
end, its lust for market discipline for the poor and
military-industrial welfare entitlements for the rich
remains importantly (and unfortunately) continuous in
its assumptions, in its sense of the problems at hand,
and in many of its aims with an extreme market
fundamentalist negative libertarian world-view this
mainstream would presumably and properly explicitly
disdain in practice.



For the record, first, though I affirm the
non-initiation principle myself, I do not think it is an
axiom nor do I think you can erect an adequate
social order upon its foundation. Non-initiation is a
purely negative conception that will rely for its
intelligibility and force on all sorts of implicit (some
of them disavowed) positive conceptions of what
constitutes initiation in the first place, what counts
as force, what is and isn't violation, and a whole host
of assumptions about what all of this is good for. For
me, defenses of individual autonomy and deep suspicions
of authoritarian concentrations of power must be
complemented by equally foundational defenses of
fairness. Second, I do not think it is even possible to
characterize actual contract-making and
contract-adhering behavior exclusively in
contractual terms, let alone adequately capture all
political relations through the figure of the contract.
I opt instead for performative metaphors, like the
speech act or the citation of scripts/norms as the
politically exemplary figure. Third, I know that many
so-called market-exchange outcomes are profoundly
unfair, that they can occur under conditions of duress
that are too easily disavowed.



While I agree that the debate between markets and
central planning was concluded in the twentieth century,
I believe that regulated markets were the verdict of
that debate. The principle of market regulation is
itself a norm, not a compromise of a market ideal that
does or could function as a norm. There has never been,
nor could there ever be a pure market against which one
properly arrays an antithetical force of regulation. The
modern state is not a sovereign state and its power is
not unilateral regulation is always already
multilateral in the modern state, and hegemony can
recuperate and so tolerate resistences. Negative
libertarians seem to me to be enraptured by models of
power, authority, consent, autonomy, and exchange that
were already hopelessly simplistic by the nineteenth
century, let alone the twenty-first.



We can all easily agree that coercion is wrong. We can
all agree that the sources of coercion and exploitation
inhere in human nature, such as it is, and probably we
can agree that conspicuous asymmetries will invite
exploitation and abuse. The liberal state seeks to
diffuse the worriesome "whip hand" of coercive
governance through competing state apparatuses and the
multilateral institutions of civic society. Negative
libertarians simply define the "whip hand" out of
existence by declaring "market" outcomes as non-coercive
by fiat. Liberals recognize the abuses of our system as
is, but we seek to ameliorate coercion through reform,
while market naturalists seem stubbornly wedded to their
word-magic and pie-charts.



To what can we attribute the ongoing allure of the sadly
sociopathic libertarian imaginary, especially to
American technophiles? Perhaps it is a matter of
technical-minded people who prefer the clarity of
reproducible results to the ongoing and unpredictable
reconciliation of contending ends among the multiple
stakeholders to social problems. Perhaps it is a matter
of the elitism of the highly educated or the early
adopters, or the more straightforward elitism of people
who believe that they are innately superior and hence
will always be among the winners in any outcome where
there are winners and losers. Perhaps it is simply the
commonplace disavowal by the privileged of the extent to
which individual accomplishment inevitably depends on
the maintenance of social norms, enforced laws and
material infrastructure beyond itself.



Lately, I have begun to suspect that at the
temperamental core of the strange enthusiasm of many
technophiles for so-called "anarcho-capitalist" dreams
of re-inventing the social order, is not finally so much
a craving for liberty but for a fantasy, quite to the
contrary, of TOTAL EXHAUSTIVE CONTROL. This helps
account for the fact that negative libertarian
technophiles seem less interested in discussing the
proximate problems of nanoscale manufacturing and the
modest benefits they will likely confer, but prefer to
barrel ahead to paeans to the "total control over
matter." They salivate over the title of the book
From Chance to Choice (in fact, a fine and nuanced
bioethical accounting of benefits and quandaries of
genetic medicine), as if biotechnology is about to
eliminate chance from our lives and substitute the full
determination of morphology -- when it is much more
likely that genetic interventions will expand
the chances we take along with the choices we make.
Behind all their talk of efficiency and non-violence
there lurks this weird micromanagerial fantasy of
sitting down and actually contracting explicitly the
terms of every public interaction in the hopes of
controlling it, getting it right, dictating the details.
As if the public life of freedom can be compassed in a
prenuptual agreement, as if communication would proceed
more ideally were we first to re-invent language ab
initio (ask these liber-techians how they feel about
Esperanto or Loglan and you will see that this analogy,
often enough, is not idle).



But with true freedom one has to accept an ineradicable
vulnerability and a real measure of uncertainty. We live
in societies with peers, boys. Give up the dreams of
total invulnerability, total control, total
specification. Take a chance, live a little. Fairness is
actually possible. Justice is in our reach. Radical
technological development regulated to ensure that
costs, risks, and benefits are all fairly shared can
emancipate the world. Liberty is so much less than
freedom.