Libertarian Left does not exist
TL;DR
The article argues: libertarian left cannot exist in current political reality.
The very idea of the left is incompatible with liberty.
It can only exist in small stateless communities – a completely different animal, never clearly implemented.
The setup, before the argument
A line, before anything else: we’re talking about current political reality.
I ask you not to think about strictly left and right, but to think about the classic political quadrant.
Current left and right in a sense are predominantly authoritarian anyway, but if we presume that somewhere in the dream future there is a libertarian version, the left definitely would not be so.
Fundamental conflict.
You cannot be both way-too-left and way-too-libertarian. The two are structurally incompatible.
If there was such a thing as libertarian left, it would have essentially a single mechanism to actually be left-like: taxes. All non-libertarian economic systems have some mechanism of state correction, and if a true libertarian left existed, the only mechanism it would have is taxation.
They can’t use heavy government oversight, protectionism, anything else – they would be in conflict with being libertarian in the first place.
The very nature of "left" in an economic sense is to use some authority to reallocate limited resources.
Or to limit associations in some way. And resources are always limited. This very fact makes them unable to be both way too left and too libertarian.
Try to do anything else: shooting way up on the authoritarian axis. Or moving to being a centrist rather than left/far-left.
So: libertarian left, in current political reality, can only exist, if at all, as something adjacent to center. Not actually deep in the libertarian quadrant. The more you stray from the center toward the left, the less you can be freedom-loving. You just can’t.
Why even the taxes-only version fails
Now grant the left its cleanest case. Taxes only. No social-issue interference, no protectionism, no oversight beyond the bare minimum. The most generous version of the argument. If libertarian left is going to exist anywhere, it has to exist here.
It still doesn’t work.
Even if you successfully assign them with making taxes only as a mechanism, it is still producing massive bureaucracy.
Because you cannot just apply a flat tax. They would consider that unequal. Wherefore, they will start to create a lot of different bureaucracy around it. A lot of different ways this money is being redistributed.
And this again what requires? It requires knowing about everyone. Forget about your privacy. To be efficient, it has to be all-knowing, it has to be all-powerful.
Yes, first we tax the rich people. Then, therefore we need to decide who the rich people are. Then we need to redistribute it to poor people. Then we need to see who the poor people are.
When of course we need to watch out about everyone so they don’t dodge the taxes.
Oh yeah, and some people cannot be just helped with just redistributing money, they need to be helped some other way. When you need social services, you need this and this and that…
See how they would erect massive structures to fill the space?
Bureaucracy is turtles all the way down, and none of them are productive. It is self-perpetuating and grows regardless of results. A bureaucrat seeing how their medical checks are not matching because people are just not living healthy will start to think about how we can force them to be healthy or something. And for a bureaucrat they don’t care for rights, they just want the numbers to meet.
They will gladly throw away your liberty the moment they find out they can’t deliver what they promised.
Should I remind you how the governments are never too eager to admit their failure?
To even somehow the system could be working, you need such a strong protection of your fundamental rights and keeping those bureaucrats in check.
We in human history never achieved anything like it.
As opposed to a single flat rate and minimal taxes.
The left, even if they claim to be pursuant of liberties, they are still always very dangerous.
Because it is unlikely they will ever be satisfied from having the equality they dream of to be made from taxes only.
And even if that would be working, it still requires extensive interference of the government in your life and in your business. Which essentially again leads for you to allowing that, even just for tax purpose, that poses a danger again for window shifting into leaking it into other areas of life. Because once you have a notion that they can, in theory, going around and telling you how you should be living – even just for taxes, then they will eventually do it for everything else.
Our history is already full of examples of governmental overreach.
The mechanism asymmetry – left has one tool, right has two
A small note: when I say "the right" I mean libertarian right – the one that wants the state withdrawn.
Authoritarian right uses the state just as much as the left does, just for different things. The argument here is about libertarian right vs. left.
The left has a single instrument: interfere with something.
The right has two. The right can use two paths to diverge:
- Be authoritarian of course (like already is lol)
- Just fucking withdraw and not touch anyone at all. Just switch interpretation that everyone already has all the rights they need.
The left toolkit is: interfere, interfere differently, interfere more, create a department to interfere.
The right-libertarian toolkit is: just stop doing the thing. Withdraw. No new budget, no new bureaucracy, no new laws. Just stop. Enough.
Keep the lights on, build the roads when they break, help when situation is dire, leave the rest alone.
The right-libertarian move is to switch interpretation – change how the existing law is read, and everyone has the rights they need.
No new law needed. 90% of your constitutions are already full of noble words.
Yes, we are talking about the current state of events. Historically, yes, there were a lot of strife.
Most oppression of minorities historically was active government policy. Jim Crow was law. Voting restrictions were law. So the fix wasn’t adding new rights – it was repealing the interference that caused it. Government broke it; government just had to stop breaking it. Constitutional rights require no bureaucracy. Invented rights require infinite bureaucracy. That asymmetry is the whole thing.
The left profits politically from problems government created by promising to fix them with more government.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a business model. That is their entire mode of operation.
Well, most of the governments already do that, but the Left are notoriously zealous of inventing new problems to solve them, which again requires what? The state. With of course – "them" at the helm.
Now – to be fair – the libertarian right still needs enforcement. The right of property, the right to associate by contracts and have it enforced – these are also part of the fundamental human rights. Right to have money, right to manage yourself – not up to discussion. The assumption is that libertarian doesn’t mean total anarchy. It means your fundamental rights are still protected. The state still has to do that work – courts, police against fraud and theft, contract enforcement. But notice: that is a closed list of negative duties (do not steal, do not break contracts) enforceable by clear rules. The left’s list is open-ended and requires continual redefinition. The right’s bureaucracy turtles in a defensive shell. The left’s grows in every direction.
The detour, to be honest about alternative ‘left’.
(just exploring that the alternative left is and why it’s also not viable – you can skip it)
Yeah, before we are still talking about the situation where you have the state, but the left also had a lot of movements where the state is abolished.
Never implemented, never used, because it has a limitation of only being viable in very small homogeneous communities.
The mutual-aid, peer-to-peer, no-state folks, federated local assemblies.
Bookchin’s municipalism, Kropotkin’s mutual aid, Rojava and the Spanish Revolution – all small, all isolated, all gone.
The "villages federated together" thing is Bookchin’s named model, actually. Not "the left in miniature" – a different category. No state, no parties, no enforcement apparatus. That is why it can be both left and libertarian, and also why it cannot scale.
Still shaky. We’ve never seen them be long-living and self-sustaining. Partially because they still have to exist as part of the larger world, but that again proves that such systems cannot be any kind of global.
So why, then, isn’t this even a real category? Because of the simple principle underneath.
It all looks lovely – in a small homogeneous community, yes, cooperation can be unilateral. Everyone agrees, everyone benefits, no one has to enforce it. But that’s only because the community is homogeneous. The moment you have a dissenter, or a freeloader, or simply someone who wants out, you need some mechanism of accountability that promotes cooperation.
And the moment you have that, you have pressure. And pressure is exactly the thing that violates liberty.
Compare it to the free market: your liberty is guaranteed to be as you wish in private as long as you use the market way of cooperating.
Market is neutral. To survive, to sustain yourself, you just at the base principle you just have to trade.
You have resources, they have resources. You trade only. If you happen to avoid warfare, you can both live with your own ideals.
The opposite is either command economy, where again you have some authority, or this authority is distributed around everyone else. But again, principle the same. It is some authority, some standard, some coercion happening, even if invisible.
Voluntary mutual aid works until one defector appears that can poison the public well. "Just put social pressure in" requires all unilaterally agree and even so – freedom to ignore that still present.
All mini versions of self-governed communities would fail at first land conflict. All left anarchist ideations would be viable only with full self-sustainability and isolation. But even a space colony would be confused the moment a galactic empire starts paying attention.
There is Dunbar’s number (~150): the cognitive limit on how many relationships a human can meaningfully track and hold accountable through informal social pressure alone, no formal enforcement.
Increase the size – you have to hire someone to do that work instead. And here we go back into hierarchy.
And that is without thinking how even such a hundred people community would reach consensus.
And again, hello old friend, tyranny of a majority. Eventually someone left unhappy.
The crypto escape hatch (and why it fails).
Okay, the newest attempt: algorithmic enforcement. Blockchain slashing – an algo that penalizes you for behaving badly.
Replace human enforcers – who inevitably accumulate power and become the hierarchy – with rules baked into a protocol that nobody can selectively apply favoritism through.
A slashing condition doesn’t care if you’re the founder’s friend. That’s a genuinely different mechanism.
Sounds fancy, but it is still an algorithm, what somebody have to think of, implement, everyone have to agree, which again leaves someone unhappy, not free.
Market solves it thru competition. You do stupid shit – you starve.
Why people vote for lefties.
You hired them to fix the economy – they instead started ‘fixing’ your life.
People vote left mostly for economic issues. Wages, jobs, cost of living, healthcare costs. That’s the entry point. It’s also, frankly, the legitimate mandate. Working-class voters want better wages and they want healthcare. That’s a real ask.
And then they get something else.
Politicians exploit the economic entry point: voters say "fix wages" and the party delivers "47 new ideological priorities you didn’t ask for."
This is the representation gap – working-class economic concerns get sidelined, social ideology gets front and center.
Yes, there are still a lot of people who are actively working on economy only and doing an honest job here.
But all the other so-called fixing eventually requires either to interfere how business works, to interfere how society works, to start managing it.
Why? Because once you accept the premise that the state can tell you what to do, even just for taxes, the window opens for them to do it for everything else. The coalition got complicated.
The economic mandate gets used as cover to pursue social re-engineering.
The brutally honest version: they had a legitimate economic mandate and they used it as cover.
The "social issues = rights" trap, on the same structure:
The left frames social issues as "rights people didn’t have." Constitutions already cover fundamental rights almost everywhere. So what are these "new" rights?
The left is inventing rights that aren’t in the constitutional baseline. Invented rights require enforcement. Enforcement means restricting someone else. So "giving rights to X" is, structurally, "taking from Y" – taking from Peter to give to Paul.
Anti-discrimination is the perfect example. Force a business owner to do something against their will – that’s their rights getting violated. Zero acknowledgment of that trade-off is ever given.
The economic and the social critiques are different failures, and mixing them together weakens the actual argument. But the modern left social agenda has expanded far beyond basic rights into prescriptive ideological territory – telling people how to think, speak, what values to hold. That is the actual overreach. The seeds of oppression.
Constitutional rights need no bureaucracy. Small enough enforcement for base "pls no murder here".
"Invented" rights need infinite bureaucracy and govt interference.
Why right-libertarianism scales and left doesn’t
Here’s the thing that takes the whole argument from a position to a structure: left requires homogeneity of ends. The market requires homogeneity of procedure.
The left essentially tries to equate everyone to a very similar homogeneous standard. First of all with economic equality, then with everything else. Libertarianism presumes first of all that people are different, therefore they have different wants, therefore they all behave differently. Therefore, any system must assume that everyone has different competing interests with much different goals and desired outcomes.
Which goes completely against any kind of collective stuff. If you have everyone with different wants, you cannot own it collectively, because everyone will pull to their own idea. And consensus here is shaky. Therefore, any idea of left to equate somebody requires some form of coercion, essentially.
The right, the completely opposite, can solve it by having a free market where your desires are limited by your ability to pay, the market creates the framework for cooperation, so you have to do it anyway.
The market is the smallest consensus algo already. Agree on money, on rights, on what fair trade is – and here we go. The rest is solved by itself.
Yes, of course, the conditions are already set by years of consensus before, so the starting point is unfair for some. Some can say it is unfair for everyone. It still has failures, the monopolies for example, but most of them can be solved without sacrificing too much liberty.
Hayek called this catallaxy – the market as a system where radically different, even incompatible goals get coordinated anyway, via the price mechanism. Nobody votes on the price of wheat. It just emerges from millions of people pulling in different directions.
And for every quirk – there would be opposite meet, eventually.
The global goal of the left
The base principle of the left is to reduce everyone to the same standard. That means reduce everyone to the same similar set of wants and lifestyles.
Conform everyone to a some universal standard.
You think not? Then why they fight so hard to make a million laws for every case? You shut down many expression of plurality – that they consider ‘undesirable’.
The centrist can do the same economic-uplift work, very much the same. But the centrist has a choice of doing it without interfering with liberty, while the left always collapses to some kind of tyranny because of the exact governmental interference. The right (libertarian) can also do economic uplift – by withdrawing interference, not by adding new state.
"Wait, but we have good examples! Social democracies, the Nordics…"
Yeah, they claim that their version sets a floor, not a ceiling. Minimum wage, public healthcare, a baseline. That is not the same thing as enforced sameness, and the distinction is real. But the floor does not stay a floor. It becomes a wage cap, a price ceiling, a regulatory ceiling, a list of acceptable expressions.
The left always does both at once – lifting the floor on one hand, contracting the expression on the other. Lifting the floor is something anyone can do – contracting the expression is the part only the lefty wants.
In addition, in case of Nordics, it is, again, an example of a homogenous society.
And this model cannot be exported everywhere. Many European countries strive the same and know so successfully that system still introduces a lot of strife. Maybe even more strife than the alternative centrist version would be.
Even so, they are well past the trend of solving economic issues only. See what Europe does in the late years. Endlessly overreach, endless growing tyranny, endless restrictions of rights, sanctions against their own citizens.
Each European every day becomes less and less free. Who did all that? The lefties again, mostly.
In the zeal to make everyone equal, they will commit any and all atrocities against human rights and common sense. They start on slogans of "managing the economy" and "managing inequality," then escalate to "managing society" – from manager to shepherd.
Show me ever an example where the Left in the form of socialism was ever free.
If you try to tell me what European style is, this thing it is not is, because we are seeing exactly in real time how it is being corrupted by the very same ideas I was talking about here. They already passed behind any notion of liberty, with massive interference with the market, in your private life and whatever else.
Dead area on the quadrant.
Again, if you look at the quadrant, you see the bottom libertarian part. On the right you have the whole quadrant of possibilities. On the left you have only half of it. One half that exists more to the center, but not on the extreme edges.
You could have left authoritarian or you could be more centrist, but left libertarian very unlikely. Unless of course we presume no state at all.
Anyone on the left party, left-leaning, with their ideas, are essentially – they cannot be libertarian because everything they do, whatever, even if they elected, their methods, their ideas are always some, imply some force, imply some government or someone making choices and shaping society as instead of making it evolve by itself.
This is a warning, a word of caution to notice around any leftist parties – me here trying to explain why they would always be secretly authoritarian no matter what they claim.
So, don’t just go thinking around the labels like authoritarian, libertarian, but consider what the ‘left’ will use and prioritize the state being big and powerful to solve the issues. And that state will eventually start eating you.