In a libertarian utopia an employer would be free to implement their own version of the Northern Territory Intervention. As the only private sector employer in a remote Indigenous community, they might choose to pay their workers using a Basics Card that can only be used at a company store. Naturally the store would stock only healthy products like fresh fruit and vegetables. The employer might also regularly test workers for drugs and alcohol — not in order to prevent accidents at work — but in order to encourage workers to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

According to Friedrich Hayek’s definition, this would be coercion. In the Constitution of Liberty he defined coercion as “such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.”

Libertarians object to coercion by governments. They strenuously object to coercion when it’s directed against employers or corporations trying to sell things like cigarettes, alcohol and junk food. But they don’t object to coercion when it’s part of the labour contract.

So it turns out libertarians don’t have a principled objection to nannying. In some cases, they’re all for it.

The radicalism of students everywhere took the form of a deep hostility towards the parties of the Left; some of the values it exhibited were distant from, or quite external to, the traditional values of socialism. For example, the new youth culture expressed a profound individualism, epitomised by the phrase ‘doing my own thing’, and a pre-occuption with the self which were quite alien to the more regimented traditions of social democracy. When youth culture - through the student Left - embraced a political-collective approach of the ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ variety, it tended to identify as ‘youth’ or ‘students’ the group to be united, rather than the working class. When the young radicals sought a privileged role for the working class, they believed that ‘youth’ would assume a leadership role, or, at least, that of the spark which started the prairie fire (to use one of Mao’s expressions). When civil rights issues were embraced - such as the struggled against racial discrimination or against excessive police powers - they were always approached from a libertarian standpoint, which intersected, but never merged, with that of the organised Left.

What baffled and still baffles scholars is that, under the cover of a great similarity in behaviour, style, fashion and action, the trend displayed a complex array of contradictory values. Hard-core young Stalinists or Trotskyists went around with long hair and in tight jeans. Maoists enjoyed listening to the Rolling Stones’ ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. Defence of individualism and distaste for bureaucracy went hand in hand with staunch advocacy of state or collective action against racism and poverty. Avowed libertarians urged withdrawing free speech from supporters of far-right groups. In the name of liberalism, student radicals defended the autonomy of the universities against the encroachment of capitalism, and condemned any funding from private enterprise or government departments connected to the police and the armed forces. At the same time, they criticised the liberal, elitist and allegedly ‘irrelevant’ nature of much academic research, demanded that the universities should no longer be ivory towers and a preserve for the few, and should instead serve society and the people.

Almost all uses of land will entail some infringement on some other piece of land that is owned by someone else. So how can that ever be permitted? No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels, because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent – for honest libertarians – of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.

Even the justification of private property and competitive markets presupposes the priority of positive freedom and non-domination over negative freedom. Consider a world of perfect negative freedom: nobody is entitled to or does interfere with anyone else’s freedom of action. Under such conditions, the world would be an unregulated commons. Everyone would be free to use whatever they like.

The liberty-based argument for private property observes that in such a system of anarchist communism everyone would be poor because people would deplete the commons. Forests would be razed; fisheries destroyed; game hunted to extinction. No one would want to invest their labor in farming or other productive pursuits, because the product of their labor would be seized by others. However, if we allowed private property, then individuals could appropriate parcels from the commons. Out of self-interest, they would conserve the resources they own and invest in productive activities in the confidence that they would be able to reap rewards from this. Allow markets to arise, and everyone can get richer by making mutually beneficial voluntary trades with others. Everyone gains from having private property and markets.

This is an excellent argument. But note what it implies. To grant Sarah private property in some parcel P, the law—the government—must take away the negative freedom of 6.7 billion people to use P. What could justify this massive restriction of negative liberty? The vastly greater opportunities or positive freedom everyone enjoys through the higher productivity of a society with private property and markets. The argument for private property already presupposes that opportunity—positive freedom—often overrides negative freedom. Considerations of nondomination also override negative freedom. That’s why capitalist countries, unlike feudal ones, declare contracts into slavery and serfdom void and illegal. Once we recognize that the general case for private property and capitalist (non-feudal) contracts is based on the priority of positive freedom and nondomination over negative freedom, nothing stops us from configuring property rights (for example, to social security) and contractual limitations so as to abolish domination and maximize positive freedom for all. The same logic that justifies private property and markets justifies social democracy.

Libertarianism:

The belief that pursuing one’s own self-interest, while shirking larger social responsibilities, is still somehow humanitarian.