Me. 

I am confused by why you think that is strange, but, I better not get ahead of myself. 

By definition:

- Libertarianism emphasizes personal liberty/individualism.

- A socialistic economy offers most control of property to some "government" or "collective" instead of to private entities. 

- Capitalism, idealistically, is the economic system where individual members and private corporations own and control most of the property. 

Do you agree with these?

Socialism can also be libertarian if it meets the above definition but rejects capitalist property relations.

Forms of libertarian socialism include anarcho-communism on the anti-market, anti-property side and mutualism (this is the philosophy I ascribe to) on the pro-market, pro-property side.

Individualist anarchists like Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, etc where self-styled socialists.

See my sig for my favorite definition of socialism.

This is what anarcho-capitalists will tell you but that's overly general in my opinion. Capital-ism means a structure of production where the owners of capital can be the residual claimant (as opposed to labor-only). You can be pro-markets and property and not be a capitalist.

No, it's not. It's essentially an economic theory that endorses the idea that labor should receive its full product.

There is noting socialist about any state. States represent rulership.

Socialism within libertarianism has two general connotations:

1. Anti-private property and anti-markets (communism)

2. A focus on labor and economic democracy, labor theories of property and/or value (Ricardo, Hodgskin, Tucker) as opposed to capitalist predominance. Not necessarily anti-market or property.

I would say anyone who isnt a total isolationist is a socialist even if they hate the word, its fundmanetally a believe that society exists and has a role.

There are a few on the extreme right who don't believe in this, Margaret Thatcher infamous 'there is no such society' speech is an example.

It's really a case of how far you take it, I believe capitalism has a role in our society (as a tool to fund it not as a religion) but I don't believe that makes me a 'conservative'

 Well, for me, socialism simply means a democratic ownership of productive utilities where decision making is self-managed. To me, a government control of the economy is a command economy that is state-managed and not self-managed. Capitalism is, well, obviously, a market economy that is privately-managed as opposed to self-managed. In neither a statist command economy nor a market capitalist economy are the productive utilities democratically owned. I am aware that anarchists are debating whether a socialist economy ought to incoporate markets or not. David Schweickart and Michael Howard both think, yes, a socialist economy, which is self-managed by nature, needs to have a market system. Other socialists like Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel argue, no, a socialist economy ought to have self-managed, democratic ownership of productive utilities and decision-making by consumer and worker councils that are cooperatively planned.

 Let me try to be as precise as I can here. I would say that socialism probably ought to be defined as a municipal ownership of productive utilities, in which the decision of what to produce is done in a democratic, participatory fashion through consumer and worker councils if not a market system. I realize that many people think of "socialism" as a failed program that the USSR tried. But, given that I don't think any socialist economy can be a state-managed command economy, I don't believe for a second that the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other "Communist" country ever implemented authentic socialism.

 I agree with you completely here. I would say, give the word "liberal" back to the classical capitalists or at least the neoclassical capitalists who favor a "free market". Give the word "libertarian" back to the socialists/anarchists who first used it. Even now, many people on the political left, while not even being socialists, are abandoning the word "liberal" in favor of "progressive". This is no doubt the result of being criticized and even mocked by cocky and self-righteous political conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

 I am curious as to what capitalists have in mind calling the market "free", though. What is it free from? I take it that they consider it to be free from govenrment intrusion and regulation. But in this sense, it's only a negative freedom as far as I can tell. I am not sure that unfettered, unregulated markets can promote any positive freedom precisely because class stratification and income inequality tend to alienate people's rights to life, liberty, and freedom. A single mother in a low-income family who is working two jobs to make ends meet seems to me not to have as much freedom and liberty as the son of a millionaire who never has to work a day in his life because his father's successful company allows him to have all the freedom in the world and more money than he knows what to do with it. This difference between the single, hard-working mother and the wealthy son is what I have in mind as an example of class stratification that I think results from income inequality.

  I appreciate you welcoming me here! I strive to be friendly and civil in my disagreements with everyone and I appreciate your courtesy as well. I remember one time I disagreed with one atheist who was a 'libertarian-capitalist' like yourself and he just mocked me the whole time and didn't care one bit that he was rude, arrogant, and disrespectful. His whole attitude was "well as long as I am right and I can prove it, I don't care about respecting other people and if you don't like it, piss off!" I was grieved that he chose to be that way considering that we're both atheists. I regret that kind of attitude from people who are strongly religious but I was taken aback that I would get it from someone secular. I am grateful that you are friendly and open to discussion!

 Matthew

 I can agree here with you that some government regulation seems excessive. Perhaps a good question for discussion is where we ought we to draw the line between reasonable and unreasonable government regulations. It seems that we both agree that OSHA and the FDA are good, at least hypothetically, if they are run very efficiently with well-managed oversight. As for trade tariffs and union privileges- I have to decline comment here. My knowledge is woefully inadequate on these topics. So we would have to carefully draw lines to demarcate reasonable and even necessary government regulations from excessive and strangulating ones.

 I do support positive freedoms. The question for me is to what extent are we entitled to our rights to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom? I am guessing that we are both Humanists. I believe that the Humanist answer should be: to the fullest extent possible! Some people believe that if we have positive freedom and rights to, say, healthcare, education, decent housing, a decent job, then others are obligated to provide it and this is tantamount to slavery by forcing people against their will to provide for others. It's argued that since we cannot steal from them, we must tax them and to tax them is to force them into labor, some of which will pay for the rights of others. This is the argument that Richard Carrier advances in his book Sense and Goodness Without God.

  My problem with this argument, indeed, what I consider to be its fatal flaw is that it seems inconsistent if not outright incoherent. The right to not only own private capital but to invest it and employ labor for the purposes of making a profit is the chief economic right in a capitalist system. Capitalism is literally founded on this economic right to privately own capital for purposes of making a profit. But this is a right and not a privilege. If it is a right, then people who privately own capital are entitled to protection of their capital. To do so we must have law enforcement and legal protection to protect owners of capital against both physical piracy and intellectual piracy.

  Who pays for law enforcement or the legal system? Taxpayers do! Taxpayers pay for law enforcement which protects people who own productive capital against physical piracy and for the legal system which protects against intellectual piracy. The existence of rights to the private ownership of capital requires the means to protect it and therefore if people have a right to capital, being a right at all, they are entitled to have their rights secured and protected and law enforcement and the legal system ensure this. But no capitalist would argue that forcing people to pay for law enforcement and a legal system to protect the right of private capital against all forms of piracy, to enforce legal contracts, to protect against any kind of theft, to enforce property rights and so forth is a form of slavery. Then is why having people pay for the right to healthcare, the right to education, the right to a comfortable pension or a decent, livable wage regarded as tantamount to slavery?

 If capitalists have the economic right to privately own capital and if this right is necessary to make a profit so that they can pay for basic necessities as well as any material comforts because they have an unalienable right to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom, then I think that others should have the right to adequate healthcare, education, pension, and a living wage because these rights would allow them to enjoy the full extent of their unalienable rights to life, liberty, happiness and freedom. As I see it, income inequality alienates people's rights to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom. The single mother who works multiple jobs to make ends meet doesn't get to enjoy the full extent of her right to liberty and I don't imagine that she can be happy working multiple jobs while all the Paris Hiltons of this world don't contribute to the happiness of mankind other than being something for men to lust at.

 Income inequality, privatized healthcare, privatized education, a privatized pension, industrial waste and other forms of pollution tend to alienate people's rights to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom. Privatizing certain industries or institutions means that rather than people's rights be guaranteed, the fulfillment of peope's rigthts to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom is left to chance. Therefore, as I see it, negative freedom is simply not enough. To enjoy the full extent of our rights, we need more positive freedoms and more economic rights.

I can and do respect a difference of opinion regarding the origins of class stratification. I think it results from the ownership of private capital and hierarchical divisons of labor in a society. You argue that labor is a commodity and therefore some people sell their labor for much more than others. My problem with this is that not everyone is able to sell their labor for much more than others because they simply lack the education, they lack the health to do so, they lack other advantages that would otherwise make for a more level and fairer playing field. This is why I believe that more rights are necessary; to give other people a fair chance at success and at least allow people to fully realize their opportunities that they wouldn't otherwise have.

  Matthew

The only problem I've ever had with the libertarian mindset is that it ignores the success of the mixed economy. In the case of Mr. Rothbard, I have a bit of difficulty taking seriously the idea that everyone left to their own devices would be the best policy. The US provides some good examples of why that sucks: you have tons of factory towns that can be set up and taken down within a couple of generations, the result of which is economic and emotional turmoil for everyone, except, of course, the few people who set up the factories. Those people may believe that they can operate without human capital, but they can't. it's in their best interest, certainly, to provide for those people, but the nature of the system is such that only the shareholders of a company are really the concern. The poorest citizens, then, are constantly vulnerable to a culture of parasitic gain. In the US, those citizens are part of a republic, and should be less vulnerable.

That's not to say the entrepreneurial spirit need be crushed. It will always exist anyway. There are always going to be people who want to play the game as close to the rules as possible to maximize their gain. Always. Even in a completely economically socialist system. Shit, I'm one of them! I trade commodities for a living. I love markets. But I also know what they can and cannot do: they can set a price; anything else is out of their league.

Yes, government is inefficient (economically speaking). But from an economic standpoint, the only real purpose of taxation is to smooth the business cycle. So it doesn't matter what the government does with the money. It's nice if it does something that makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but it really doesn't matter. Most of the time, the military (the largest group of government bureaucrats) are charged with looking after the capital interests of a country anyway.

The other problem is that the people who espouse libertarianism have never been poor. I mean explaining to your friends poor. I mean going insane with your money as soon as you get it and spending irresponsibly and then realizing you were crazy poor. I mean hoping that you can cover next month's rent poor. When you've been that poor, you know that it doesn't matter how hard you work, it's like everything's against you, and you'll never get out. When you've been that poor, and you remember that feeling, it's harder to make quick judgements and believe that economic efficiency is the most important thing.

 Don't get me wrong here- I am not suggesting complete income equality regardless of how much or hard one works. I think that greater education and work experience open up greater opportunities but I am thinking that it is one's work effort that should determine how one is paid. When people think of "socialism", people think guaranteed income regardless of any work, effort, sacrifice or anything of the sort. The complete slacker gets just as much income as the hardest working person on the planet. I agree- this is grossly unfair. But I don't think any authentic socialist economy should promote this kind of economic reward. I am thinking that perhaps the ideal socialist system would be one that rewards people according to their effort and sacrifice rather than according to the contribution of their capital or labor.

 I am not sure with what I would disagree with here. I wholeheartedly agree and I tend to agree that government spending definitely has gotten out of control.

 Surely there is more than just property tax unless I misunderstand what you're getting at. But we as individual taxpayers, regardless of where we are economically or socially, pay for police protection, education, infrastructure, federal taxes in addition to state taxes, and so forth. I am sure that you would agree with this. From what I read, much of the middle and lower classes pay mostly through payroll taxes. But we all pay for not just the protection of property but for many more things, education, and infrastructure being among them.

 I don't regard taxation as any form of slavery. I just think that conservatives and others who object to funding healthcare and other government projects are being inconsistent. They seem to want to pay for the right to own capital and have it protected without realizing that if they were consistent, they'd have to argue that forcing others to provide for the protection of capital or property is slavery as well, whether directly through force, or indirectly through taxation.

 I agree with you that the minimum wage shouldn't be set too high. It shouldn't be too low nor too high. I do like the idea of having a living, minimum wage so that people can at the very minimum, afford the basic necessities of life.

 Let me be the first to state that it's quite possible that I don't understand the "living wage" concept as much as I thought I do. I am not completely sold on it and it may be the way it was originally phrased that I liked it and thought more favorably of it. Anyways, I am not a diehard advocate of it and I could go without it; it's not a "must" for me. My concern, though, is that if employers are allowed to set the wage at any way that they want to, they could set it so low that workers are being exploited. I personally would rather have the wage reflect the value of the person's contribution of labor, not too low as to exploit the person and not too high as to make employees not worth hiring.

You think I consciously and deliberately want to take away your economic rights? Where do you or others derive this economic right to set the price for your labor at any amount of your choice? This is the tricky thing about rights though. People can and do argue that the positive rights of others infringes on the negative rights of others. What if the right of you and  your employer want to settle the price of your labor at any amount that you two agree to and it's at such a price that leads to a negative externality elsewhere? What if your economic right to freely negotiate the price of your labor infringes on someone else's right to life, liberty, or happiness? What if your right to free wage negotiation (if we may call it that) is infringing on another person's right to life?

 As I see it, your argument can work both ways here. You might argue that a minimum or a living wage may take away your right to free wage negotiation but one can argue that to freely negotiate wages infringes on others' rights, particularly the right to life being that a minimum or living wage might allow people to better access to basic necessities of life. If all wages were freely negotiated as you desire, what's to prevent some employers from setting the wage so low that the person is literally being exploited? What if the wage is so low that a person cannot do anything with the money, cannot afford groceries, rent, clothing, or any kind of payment? Your fundamental right to free wage negotiation, then, would open the door to allow for employers to exploit their workers, hypothetically.

 To be perfectly fair, I can admit that perhaps I have misunderstood what you are getting at. That's possible and if I have I freely leave it to you to correct me if I have.

 I believe that economic rights ought to be those that increase the greatest amount of fairness to all people. My beliefs about economic justice are those which would provide the greatest fairness for the greatest number of people. I personally do not like the thought of people being rewarded according to the contribution of their capital or labor and like better the thought of people being rewarded according to their effort and sacrifice.

 This is my problem with capitalism; it's notion of economic justice seems unfair. You seem to me to concede this point but I do not like fairness; I never have. That's why I tend to like the economic maxim of reward according to effort and sacrifice and of necessity. Ever since having read Robin Hahnel's book Economic Justice and Democracy, I have come to like the notion of rewards according to effort and sacrifice. In Hahnel and Albert's model of "Participatory Economics", everyone would be rewarded according to effort and sacrifice. Capitalism seems inherently unfair and I like Hahnel's updated definition of "exploitation"; any social relationship that results in unfair economic outcomes.

 I don't think of libertarians as being mean, callous, and uncaring necessarily. Actually, I think of religious conservatives as being this way. I think that libetarian-capitalists are mostly concerned with freedom and value freedom. The problem is not with libertarian-capitalists like yourselves; I think the problem is with capitalism. You cannot reform it to make it fairer. What may improve my economic rights might infringe on yours. I see rights as paradoxal in capitalism. The right of the rich and wealthy to do as they please infringes on the rights of middle and lower classes to live a life of liberty and happiness.

  Capitalism is, I believe, a bad boy's economy where "nice guys finish last" as one baseball manager put it.The truth, I argue, is that it is horrendous condemnation of a society to say "nice guys finish last". I think a better description, one that I take from an author I like, is that "garbage rises". When you have an economy that rewards callousness and viciousness, where people are indifferent to the degradation and negativity caused by their actions in the name of profits, this is the garbage that rises.

  Lastly, I think that "libertarian-capitalism" is ultimately an oxymoron. This, I think, is reflected in the fact that liberty and rights are paradoxal in a capitalist system. My rights to life, liberty, happiness, and freedom infringes on your freedom. Your rights to life, liberty, happiness, and so forth will infringe on my economic freedom. I think that the best way to resolve the paradox is to go to the root of the problem with capital. Government attempts to amend the markets and make them more "humanitarian" or "consumer-worker friendly" is more of a band-aid solution than a solution that gets to and solves the core of the problem: the "economic right" of capital to exist.

  Matthew

 I'm doing a bit of tl;dr here but I think I can help some.

To get it out of the way, I'm an ex-anarchocapitalist. Now I just call myself an anarchist (probably closest to Benjamin Tucker). Even by ancap reasoning, capitalism = free market, and market = freedom, and freedom = anarchism, making the idea of identifying as anything additional to "anarchist" purely redundant and pointlessly separatist. I'm just an advocate of freedom.

A big part of anarchism as was stated earlier is opposition to privilege. This is what makes an anarchist an anarchist. Even the ones who want to use privilege to destroy privilege are still anarchists, they're just a bit mixed up about consistency between means and ends. Some emphasize different forms of privilege; for example they will try to get into the state in order to destroy economic privilege, not seeing the state itself as a system of privilege that will inevitably create economic privilege.

Rewarding according to labor is how the more sensible versions of socialism have been trying to do it for ages. Wages are more important than profits and rent. Socialism has traditionally been against profit and rent as understood to be eating into the wages of the people who actually do productive work. Compensation according to effort and sacrifice would seem to promote doing things that take too much effort just to get more compensation, which is ultimately just wasteful.

Ultimately I think just getting rid of the factors which give employers unfair bargaining power over their employees will reduce the incidence of worker exploitation. I like the word "vulgar libertarian" to describe people who defend the economic products of the state because they are economic in context.

Libertarian-capitalism is either an oxymoron or is redundant, depending on the conception of capitalism being used.

The idea of anticapitalism as I understand it isn't opposition to capital understood as the tools of production, but an opposition to their being owned by people other than those doing the actual work. The idea isn't to destroy all those tools so much as it is to put those tools into the hands of the people that use them. Thus the "profit" that normally accrues to the owners of capital goes to the workers instead of to some other person profiting off the worker's work without actually doing any of that work. Because the worker becomes the capitalist. That's what anticapitalism is about, turning the workers into capitalists, the capitalists into workers, everyone into their own landlords, etc.

Things like taxation and minimum wage I am opposed to, if for no other reason, then on the basis of the fact that it's just not your decision to make, and in fact you couldn't possibly be making this decision without using the same kind of privilege that you're intending minimum wage to work in opposition to. Rather than creating justice, this approach can only lead to more injustice, privilege is antithetical to justice. By getting rid of the privileges (mostly state-caused) that shift bargaining power in favor of the employers, everyone can set their own minimum wage that they refuse to work for. You can't trust the judgement of any one individual of power as well as you can trust the judgement of the people who have a stake in the decision.

This wasn't aimed to be complete or at one specific person, just throwing stuff out there.