Right-Libertarian vs. Libertarian vs. Left-Libertarian

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I don't think that one can really establish a "libertarianism" as a third position between the left and the right. Rather, right-libertarianism and left-libertarianism are actually intellectually disconnected ideas that are vying over the same title. Left-libertarianism is intellectually descended from anarchist movements and other related movements, while right-libertarianism is generally descended from the Enlightenment and free-market economics. The two have not really interbred at all.(with rare exceptions, such as Roderick T. Long, and Samuel L Konkin) What happened was that right-libertarianism used to be called "liberalism" but the left-wing took that name, forcing right-libertarians to take another name, so they took "libertarianism" from the left-libertarians. The left-libertarians have generally not taken another name though. So, what we end up having is two different ideologies taking up the same title.

Right-Libertarians (Conservatives in disguise ...)
Left-Libertarians (Liberals in disguise ...)

There is quite a good argument you can make that certain classical liberals (J.S. Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Rousseau) really anticipated left-libertarianism. And, actually, there is quite a bit of "interface" between left-libertarians and propertarians (right-libertarians) concerning "self-ownership". Left-libertarians simply have a broader view of effective self-ownership than right-libertarians do.

Technically AG, I view Libertarianism as a fourth position to the Left-Center-Right spectrum. There are people that identify as Libertarians when they are something else in disguise, case in point Glenn Beck and Noam Chomsky.

Pretty much, barring a few quibbles on the examples. The Tea Party accepts libertarian principles with respect to economics, without having any real opinion on social issues, so that might count as partial adherence to libertarian philosophy.

The word “libertarian” in the sense of the
combination of the word “liberty” and the
suffix “-ian” literally means “of or about
freedom.” It is an antonym of “authoritarian,”
and the simplest dictionary definition is one
who advocates liberty (Simpson and Weiner
1989). But the name “libertarianism” has
been adopted by several very different
political movements. Property rights
advocates have popularized the association of
the term with their ideology in the United
States and to a lesser extent in other Englishspeaking
countries. But they only began
using the term in 1955 (Russell 1955). Before
that, and in most of the rest of the world
today, the term has been associated almost
exclusively with leftists groups advocating
egalitarian property rights or even the
abolition of private property, such as
anarchist socialists who began using the term
nearly a century early, in 1858 (Woodcock
1962, p. 281).

This entry distinguishes between three
types of libertarianism, left, right, and
socialist. It then considers the extent to which
the policies of these three diverse groups
overlap. The third section focuses on the
policies right-libertarians, both because they
have popularized their association with the
name and because they have a more unified
policy agenda.

Libertarianism: left, right, and socialist

At least three distinct groups claim the name
“libertarian” today. There is no clearly agreed
terminology to distinguish the groups but the
terms “left-libertarian,” “right-libertarian,”
and “libertarian socialist” suffice. The three
are not factions of a common movement, but
distinct ideologies using the same label. Yet,
they have a few commonalities.
Libertarian socialism: Libertarian socialists
believe that all authority (government or
private, dictatorial or democratic) is
inherently dangerous and possibly tyrannical.

Some endorse the motto: where there is
authority, there is no freedom.
Libertarian socialism is also known as
“anarchism,” “libertarian communism,” and
“anarchist communism,” It has a variety of
offshoots including “anarcho-syndicalism,”
which stresses worker control of enterprises
and was very influential in Latin American
and in Spain in the 1930s (Rocker 1989
[1938]; Woodcock 1962); “feminist
anarchism,” which stresses person freedoms
(Brown 1993); and “eco-anarchism”
(Bookchin 1997), which stresses community
control of the local economy and gives
libertarian socialism connection with Green
and environmental movements.

...

To some extent anarchist forbearers also include Max
Stirner, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell,
Bertrand Russell, and the early liberal
tradition (Woodcock 1962), although some
anarchists are hostile to what could be called
“bourgeois liberalism.”
2
A guiding principle of libertarian
socialism is that all people must have the
equal privilege to share in the blessings of
liberty, and this principle leads to opposition
to unequal property rights. They want to
replace the state and the capitalist property
rights regime enforced by the state with
voluntary mutual aid associations made up of
free individuals. They consider centralized
authoritarian socialism, such as the regimes
that took power in Russia and China, to be
another form of state oppression.
Anarchists are a diverse group who put
great stress on individual initiative and
action. Therefore, it is hard to determine the
libertarian socialist position on many specific
issues. Some libertarian socialists oppose
political action to further social reform within
the prevailing system of government
authority, and prefer only direct action that
works outside of government authority. All
libertarian socialists want radical social
reform and the fewest possible restrictions on
human behavior.

...

Some want community control of
local economies. Some place great stress on
gender and ethnic equality, sexual freedom,
and personal and cultural freedom. Some
place great stress on environmental
protection. Some see worker control and
economic equality as the primary means of
establishing most other kinds of personal
freedom...

Libertarian socialists have succeeding in

Right-libertarianism: Right-libertarians
believe in strong private property rights
and/or an unregulated market economy with
little or no redistribution of property. They
are also known as “free-market advocates,”
“property rights advocates,” or “Neoliberals”
The most extreme version of rightlibertarianism,
“anarcho-capitalism,”
advocates virtually unlimited private property
rights. Right-libertarians seldom call
themselves right-libertarians, preferring to
call themselves simply “libertarians,” often
denying any other groups have claim to the
name. It is perhaps poetically appropriate that
property rights advocates have appropriated a
term that was already being used by people
who subscribe to the idea that property is
theft, and that these property rights now
3
accuse anarchists of trying to steal it from
them.

...

They
sometimes call themselves “classical liberals”
and claim to be the heirs of early liberals such
as Thomas Hobbes (1962), John Locke
(1960), Adam Smith (1976 [1776]), and John
Stuart Mill (1859). However, the modern
right-libertarian defense of private property is
so radical as to be in opposition to the views
of property held by nearly all classical
liberals, and some liberals argue that rightlibertarianism
has strayed from the essential
characteristics of liberalism (Freeman 2001).

Most right-libertarians use an ethical
argument based on natural property rights to
support their market policy prescriptions.
Right-libertarians promote liberty as negative
liberty or freedom as noninterference (Berlin
1969). That is, a person is free to do whatever
no other person prevents her from doing
whether or not she is actually able to do it. In
the sense, a person is free to fly by flapping
her arms even though she is unable to do it.
Right-libertarian freedom is also often
expressed as self-ownership—the belief that
every adult individual owns herself and no
one can take away her rights over herself
away without her consent (Cohen 1995;
Locke 1960; Nozick 1974; Otsuka 2003).
Self-ownership does not mean that people
naturally treat themselves as property; it
means instead that every individual is free
from being treated as the property of another
person. A self-owner determines what he or
she will do.

Although libertarian socialists and rightlibertarians
agree about their skepticism of
state authority, they have diametrically
opposite views of property. Libertarian
socialists oppose state authority largely
because they see it as the source of property
rights; right-libertarians oppose state
authority because they see it as the enemy of
private property rights (Heider 1994, p. 95).
Right-libertarians combine the belief that all
individuals have strong self-ownership rights
with the belief that individuals have the
responsibility to respect preexisting claims to
private property in natural resources even if
these claims are unequally and unfairly
divided. According to right-libertarians,
unowned natural resources are essentially up
for grabs. But once someone appropriates
them as private property, the owner’s rights
are extremely strong and ever lasting. Owners
have little or no responsibility to share with
those who have no property. In some rightlibertarian
theories, individuals’ claims of
property ownership are as strong as
individuals’ claims of self-ownership (Feser
2005; Narveson 1988; Nozick 1974; Wheeler
2000). In contrast to the views of libertarian
socialists any attempt by the government or
any other authority to ensure that everyone
has access to property is unjustified
interference with the natural right of property.
Government authority, if it should exist at all,
must be limited to protecting property and
self-ownership rights.

...

Left-libertarianism: According to Peter
Valentine (2000), left-libertarians combine a
belief that all individuals have the right to
strong self-ownership with a belief in some
kind of egalitarian right of ownership of
natural resources. They share the belief with
libertarian socialist that an equal right to be
free implies an equal right of access to (or
ownership of) natural resources (Gibbard
2000; Otsuka 2003; Steiner 1994; Vallentyne
2000), but they propose a more individualist
solution. Rather than wanting to abolish
private ownership of property, leftlibertarians
want to equalize private holdings
of natural resources, or at least tax private
holdings of natural resources in some way to
ensure that all individuals have equal access
to their benefits.

Use of the term “left-libertarian” for this
group in particular is slightly overly specific
because libertarian socialists are also on the
left of the political spectrum. The term “leftlibertarian”
is sometimes used as a generic
term for the two groups of libertarians on the
left. However, “left-libertarianism” is mostly
commonly used for the combination selfownership
with resource equality, and it is
what this group usually calls itself, while the
other main group in the libertarians left more
often use the terms “libertarian socialist” or
“anarchist.”

Left-libertarians take their defining
influence from thinkers such as Thomas
Paine (1797), Thomas Spence (2000 [1793]),
the early writings Herbert Spencer (1872),
Henry George (1976), and Leon Walras
(2000 [1896]). They take a great deal of
influence from the early liberal movement
and some influence from both of the other
two libertarian movements. Modern leftlibertarian
thinkers include Hillel Steiner
(1992; 1994), Michael Otsuka (1998; 2003),
Peter Vallentyne (2000; 2003), Nicolaus
Tideman (1982; 1997; 2000; 2004), and
Philippe Van Parijs (1995). The term,
“Georgist” refers to a subset of leftlibertarians
who accept Henry George’s
positive economic theories about the
efficiency of a land tax and the causal role of
rent in the business cycle (George 1976), but
most left-libertarians are not Georgists and
they tend to consider their ideology as
primarily normative. There is a connection
between some forms of left-libertarianism
and Green, environmentalist, and libertarian
socialist ideologies, but many of these groups
do not accept the left-libertarian thesis of
self-ownership.

...

Although they differ on how
resource equality should be achieved and on
what resources should be equalized, they are
united by the search for some version of
resource equality.

The best known left-libertarian policy
prescription is the belief that the government
must tax away 100% of the resource value of
land and other fixed assets, and every
individual is entitled to one share of whatever
benefits are derived from that revenue
(George 1976; Paine 1797; Steiner 1994).
Property holders would pay a tax to the state
equal to the rental value of a vacant lot on the
site of their property. For these leftlibertarians,
the private individual or business
attains the right to hold a natural resource by
paying the full market value of the resource
in its raw state to the government as
5
representative of everyone else, but the value
of the efforts and improvements they put into
their holding are private property at least for
the life of the owner. This form of leftlibertarianism
leads essentially to a market
economy on stated-owned, privately rented
land.

...

Others argue that it should be redistributed in
cash as an basic income—a cash income
unconditionally paid to everyone (Steiner
1992; Van Parijs 1995). Under the equalshares
version, each person receives one
share of the rental price of all natural
resources in cash, as if she owned one share
in a giant real estate holding firm the
distributed all of its profits in dividends.
Others argue that an equal claim to natural
exists, but it confers only the right to work
with resources or the right to employment.

...

Are any policies common to all
libertarians, left, right, and socialist?

Although all three movements have roots in
the liberal tradition, they do not stem from a
common branch off of that tradition, and
there is a great deal of mutual animosity at
least between right-libertarians and the other
two groups. Perhaps Max Stirner (1971
[1845]) is common to the three movements,
but he is not a central figure for any of them,
and some in each group would deny his
influence. As different as these groups are,
they do have some beliefs in common. They
all put a high priority on protecting their
(conflicting) conceptions of liberty, and they
are all skeptical of authority. All advocate
strict limits on government authority,
sometimes to the point of advocating its
complete abolition.

Technically AG, I view Libertarianism as a fourth position to the Left-Center-Right spectrum. There are people that identify as Libertarians when they are something else in disguise, case in point Glenn Beck and Noam Chomsky.

Second, in addition to the better-known version of libertarianism—right-libertarianism—there is also a version known as “left-libertarianism”. Both endorse full self-ownership, but they differ with respect to the powers agents have to appropriate unowned natural resources (land, air, water, minerals, etc.). Right-libertarianism holds that typically such resources may be appropriated by the first person who discovers them, mixes her labor with them, or merely claims them—without the consent of others, and with little or no payment to them. Left-libertarianism, by contrast, holds that unappropriated natural resources belong to everyone in some egalitarian manner. It can, for example, require those who claim rights over natural resources to make a payment to others for the value of those rights. This can provide the basis for a kind of egalitarian redistribution

Where would you gentlemen classify Geolibertarianism?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Geolibertarianism

Technically AG, I view Libertarianism as a fourth position to the Left-Center-Right spectrum. There are people that identify as Libertarians when they are something else in disguise, case in point Glenn Beck and Noam Chomsky.