page_title: Right-libertarianism
section_title: Anarcho-capitalism
hierarchical_section_title: Right-libertarianism / Schools of thought / Anarcho-capitalism
caption_attribution_description: English: Murray Rothbard in the 90's
context_page_description: Right-libertarianism, also known as libertarian capitalism or right-wing libertarianism, is a political philosophy and type of libertarianism that supports capitalist property rights and defends market distribution of natural resources and private property. The term right-libertarianism is used to distinguish this class of views on the nature of property and capital from left-libertarianism, a type of libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to natural resources. In contrast to socialist libertarianism, right-libertarianism supports free-market capitalism. Like most forms of libertarianism, it supports civil liberties, especially natural law, negative rights and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.
  Right-libertarian political thought is characterized by the strict priority given to liberty, with the need to maximize the realm of individual freedom and minimize the scope of public authority. Right-libertarians typically see the state as the principal threat to liberty.
context_section_description: Anarcho-capitalism advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty in a free-market capitalism. In an anarcho-capitalist society, courts, law enforcement and all other security services would be provided by privately funded competitors rather than through taxation and money would be privately and competitively provided in an open market. As a result, personal and economic activities under anarcho-capitalism would be regulated by privately run law rather than through politics.
  The most well-known version of anarcho-capitalism was formulated in the mid-20th century by Austrian School economist and paleolibertarian Murray Rothbard. Rothbard coined the term and is widely regarded as its founder. He combined the free market approach from the Austrian School with the human rights views and a rejection of the state he learned from 19th-century American individualist anarchists such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, although he rejected their anti-capitalism, along with the labor theory of value and the normative implications they derived from it.
  In Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, there would first be the implementation of a mutually agreed-upon libertarian "legal code which would be generally accepted and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow". This legal code would recognize sovereignty of the individual and the principle of non-aggression. Many writers deny that anarcho-capitalism is a form of anarchism at all, or that capitalism itself is compatible with anarchism, regarding it instead as right-libertarian.
caption: Murray Rothbard
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