> it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal.

You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.

> The answer, should you produce it

The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.

> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.

The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.

> Power is either diluted or concentrated.

Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.

> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.

Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.

> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?

I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.

Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.

> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.

Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.

I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.

I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.

> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.

The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.