ABSTRACT
A left-libertarian approach to economic policy seeks a market-based road to equality and social justice that promotes efficiency, equality, and fairness more effectively than existing welfare states. The well-known right-libertarian commitment to individual liberty and faith, in the capacity of ordinary people to manage their affairs through mutual self-interest, is based on a powerful critique of concentrated and therefore unaccountable State power. A brief meditation on the nature of American freedom, informed by a realist understanding of human need, and the connections between social hierarchy, poverty, and violence, shows why right-libertarianism is either a delusion or a commitment to social warfare. Equality before the law has a further, far-reaching demand that directly undermines the right-libertarian's insistence that substantive economic equality is the enemy of freedom. The fight between right- and left-libertarians then gets very interesting, precisely because the rightist gives up on the defense of privilege and social hierarchy in favor of the defense of real freedom.
