Martin Elson
A libertarianism that is only the non-aggression principle cannot hold. It is neutral toward every social arrangement short of force, so it ends up excusing domination that doesn’t involve a punch or a weapon. Liberty needs a wider set of values and a non-dogmatic way of holding them.
Thin libertarianism becomes vulgar libertarianism
“Thin” libertarianism treats non-aggression as a bare axiom and every other value as irrelevant (the terms are Charles W. Johnson’s, from 2008). Brainpolice’s 2009 essay shows the result: it becomes “a de facto sanction for every questionable ideology” — racial separatism, patriarchy, fundamentalist rule. Kevin Carson’s term “vulgar libertarianism” named the economic version, the use of free-market language to defend corporate power. The same move happens in culture. A society of majoritarian tradition is easy for elites to exploit, harsh to its margins, and unlikely to stay free.
“Thick” libertarians ground non-aggression in the values that make it matter: autonomy, equality, mutual aid, a live-and-let-live temper. This is not a rejection of non-aggression or markets. It is a refusal to use them without context.
The thin camp has not softened. In 2013–14 Tom Woods and Lew Rockwell attacked thick libertarianism as a distraction from non-aggression, and Walter Block was still arguing in 2022 that only thin libertarianism is valid. Sheldon Richman answered for the thick side: thickness never licenses force; it asks why non-aggression matters and follows the reasons where they lead. Respect for the person is why force is wrong, and the same respect tells against racism, sexism and petty authoritarianism even when no one is hit. Those are fought with persuasion and boycott, not the law.
Smaller is not freer
Brainpolice adds that libertarianism, followed through, is anarchism — and that anarchism without libertarian values is just decentralization. Scale is not content: “A mini-theocracy is still a theocracy, a mini-monarchy is still a monarchy, and a mini-state is still a state.” Pluralism has a place, but only among people who understand the difference between voluntary and coerced.
Logic as discipline, not foundation
Logic is the rigor here, not the ground. Every argument should be valid, its terms defined, its steps checkable. But no argument proves its own first premises. Ask for the proof of a claim, then the proof of that proof, and you end in one of three places: an endless regress, a circle, or an axiom taken on trust. Hans Albert named this the Münchhausen trilemma in 1968, and drew the lesson that final justification is not on offer; the honest course is to hold claims open to criticism and test them.
That is where the axiomatic proofs fail. Hoppe’s argumentation ethics and Molyneux’s “universally preferable behavior” are, brainpolice argues, Kantian deontology in disguise: they take the third horn and call it self-evident. Secular natural law keeps the shape of divine command with “nature” in God’s place. Pressed for reasons, each turns circular — libertarianism is valid because libertarianism is valid.
Robert Anton Wilson makes the same case with more laughter. In Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy he treats natural law as papal infallibility in secular dress, and asks whether we are “learning and growing every hour, or are we still enthralled by verbal abstraction.” Libertarianism should widen freedom and shrink violence, not hand down a new rulebook.
What replaces the axiom is a public test. The Unfinished Exclusions shows the method: borrow a premise the reader already holds, ask why it stops where it does, and put the burden on whoever adds a stopping point to show it bears on what is being done. Claims stay conditional, and anyone can run the test without signing up first. Liberty is defended by arguments that survive criticism, not by any premise placed beyond it, like thin libertarianism’s axioms of non-aggression and self-ownership.
The Randian detour
Lance Klafeta’s 1992 essay is the cautionary tale. Ayn Rand’s defense of the state rests on Hobbes: without government, gang war. State enforcement of contracts then tilts “free” agreements toward lenders, landlords and employers. Her circle, ironically called “the Collective,” demanded conformity. Klafeta’s point for this site: a liberty movement built on a single authority’s axioms reproduces the authority it claims to oppose.
Klafeta’s Rand is the weak one, so here is the stronger one. In “The Nature of Government” (1963) Rand does not argue from fear. She grants that force is the enemy of reason and asks only that its use be bound by objective law. Retaliation cannot be left to whoever has the will and the weapons. When two private agencies each claim to be right, nothing stands above them but more force. So she calls anarchism a “naive floating abstraction” and argues for a government confined to police, courts and defense, under rules written in advance and known to all. This is the rule-of-law case for the minimal state, or minarchism, and it is the best one there is. (Rand never used the word: Samuel Konkin coined “minarchism” around 1971, and she wanted nothing to do with libertarians; she and her followers called themselves Objectivists.)
I agree with more of Rand’s case than my side usually admits. Force should answer to rules, not to whoever is stronger, and Rand’s insistence on reason and on persons as ends in themselves is close to the humanism this site starts from. Her “objective law” needs a second look, though. Part of it is procedure: rules written in advance, known to all, applied to the strong as to the weak. That part I keep. The rest is her ethics, rights read off “man’s nature,” which is natural law in Aristotle’s dress and no easier to prove than Rothbard’s version or the Santa Claus kind (see Rights and Law). Rules can be objective in the first sense without being handed down by nature. And her answer makes one enforcer the judge in its own case. When a citizen’s dispute is with the government itself, the only judge is the government, which is exactly the unchecked agency she feared. Roy Childs put this to her in an open letter in 1969: her own premises lead to competing, accountable agencies, not a monopoly. The rule of law does not need a monopoly. It needs enforcers that can be left, recalled and held to their own rules, which is the test the Rights and Law section applies to polycentric law. Her blind spot showed elsewhere too. In a 1961 lecture she called big business “America’s persecuted minority,” defending the beneficiaries of state privilege as if markets had made them. That is thin libertarianism in its purest form.
Sources
- Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason (1968; English translation, Princeton University Press, 1985). The Münchhausen trilemma.
- Robert Anton Wilson, Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy (Loompanics, 1987; expanded from a 1985 essay in New Libertarian). Natural law as papal infallibility; source of “If libertarianism means anything…” Hilaritas Press edition · excerpt
- brainpolice, “Questioning Deontological Libertarianism” (Polycentric Order, 2009). Hoppe, Molyneux, and the circle. archived · copy here
- brainpolice, “Thin Libertarianism Is a Vulgar Libertarianism” (2009). Non-aggression without context as cover for domination. copy here
- Kevin A. Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (BookSurge, 2007), ch. 4, opening section. Vulgar libertarianism described as an ideology.
- Kevin A. Carson, “Vulgar Libertarianism Watch” (Mutualist Blog, recurring series from the mid-2000s). Where he coins the term, “as far as I know.” The Anarchist Library
- brainpolice, “On the Relationship Between Libertarianism, Anarchism and Values” (Polycentric Order, 2009). Scale is not content. archived · copy here
- Lance Klafeta, “Ayn Rand and the Perversion of Libertarianism” (Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, no. 34, 1992). Rand’s Hobbesian state. The Anarchist Library · copy here
- Martin Elson, “The Unfinished Exclusions: How the First Exclusion Foreclosed the Other Two.” The public test in place of the axiom. here
- Charles W. Johnson, “Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin” (The Freeman, 2008). The paper that started the thick–thin debate. The Anarchist Library
- Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., “The Future of Libertarianism” (Mises Daily, 2014). The thin case against thick libertarianism. Mises Institute
- Sheldon Richman, “Libertarianism Is Still About More Than Rejecting Aggression” (Reason, 4 May 2014). Reply to Rockwell and Block. Reason
- Walter E. Block, “Thick and Thin Libertarianism and the Non-Aggression Principle” (Etica & Politica XXIV/2, 2022). Thin libertarianism defended against left and right thickness. open access
- Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government” (The Objectivist Newsletter, 1963; collected in The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, 1964). The rule-of-law case for a minimal state.
- Roy A. Childs Jr., “Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand” (The Rational Individualist, 1969). Her premises lead to competing agencies, not a monopoly.
- Ayn Rand, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” (lecture, 1961; collected in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966). Big business as victim.