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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> but why describe FSU as "right-wing libertarian"?

I would guess, from everything I've seen about Young and the FSU, because it is.

> Are they just normal libertarians?

Well, right-libertarians are a common subset of normal libertarians (in the US, most—but not remotely all—who identify as libertarians are right-libertarians, non-right libertarians are more likely to identify differently, but I don't think that that soft tendency applies to the UK, at least in the same degree.) So, sure in one sense they are “normal libertarians” but not representative of the broader group, AFAICT.

> The vast majority of libertarians do not self-identify as being 'right-wing'.

So? The FSU is not the vast majority of libertarians, and descriptions of someone's policy position can be independent of their self-identification.

A Nazi doesn't become a moderate just because they self identify as “moderate”.

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My understanding of the major libertarian groups in the US is that they side with the left on social issues like culture war, abortion, and secularism. They side with the right on economic issues like free markets. They like to make a 2D political compass to explain this difference. Insisting on placing them on an extreme on a 1D axis seems like an insistence on speaking in half-truths. At least they should be placed near the center yes. People tend to do this when they focus on narrow issues and ignore the rest. E.g. to someone who only cares about opposing gun control, a centrist who supports it is on the left in their eyes.

Eloquently put, thank you. I happen to be a left-wing libertarian - when it comes to preference for utopian projects that is - and that informs my opinion of "the general direction things should go in", if you like. I like to make the distinction between left and right-wing libertarianism wherever possible.

When you look up on Wikipedia, you'll even find that "libertarianism originated as a form of left-wing politics such as anti-authoritarian and anti-state socialists like anarchists, especially social anarchists, but more generally libertarian communists/Marxists and libertarian socialists."

Another quick search, and you'll find that:

> 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.

So I do think it's right to make the distinction between left-wing and right-wing libertarianism.

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