Not all my investigations and enquiries into aspects of libertarianism were fruitless. Following up a comment on a website led me into e-mail correspondence with decnavda of Decnavda's Dialectic - a 'neo-georgist' blog. With permission I have edited that correspondence into the post below which sets out a particular, personal perspective on libertarianism.
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Continental European libertarianism is vastly different from libertarianism in what I will unfortunately refer to as the Anglosphere. While it does tend to be "left", it also tends to be socialistic, and frankly I do not understand it very well. When I use the term "Left Libertarianism" I am referring to an approach to libertarianism most recently developed by Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne. Also important is Henry George, the 19th century American philosopher most closely associated with the idea of common land ownership in a free market economy. As for my own beliefs:
1. I accept libertarian ideas of individual self-ownership.
2. I accept that freedom is best secured through strong property rights.
3. I accept the labor theory of property. That is, you should have absolute ownership of what you create through your own labor.
4. I accept the free market as (generally) the best way to produce and distribute goods and services.
At this point, most liberals and leftists think I have given away the store. What is left for equality? Plenty. The three biggies:
1. Land, including location and natural resources. No one made them, so everyone has an equal right to use them. Private ownership is most practical, so it should be allowed, but only with compensation at full market value. This is done by having the landholder pay full rental to the community.
2. Inheritance. Self-ownership gives you ownership of yourself to the limits of yourself in all dimensions. You exist in three spatial dimensions, and one temporal dimension. The labor theory of ownership is based on self-ownership. You don't own yourself after you die, because you do not exist to be owned. Without self-ownership, you cannot own things beyond yourself. A society where the living must obey the dictates of the dead is not free. Therefore, there should be a 100% tax on inheritance.
3. Corporate existence. Corporations do not exist in nature and are not created by individuals. They are chartered by the government. This means that:
a. Society should "tax" corporations at a rate designed to maximize revenue. Essentially, we are providing a service in allowing corporate existence, and like any service provider in a free market, we should charge for this product whatever will maximize our profits on a supply and demand curve.
b. Society can create whatever governing rules for the corporation we wish. Shareholder are not owners, they are investors. Corporate boards should be elected by both shareholders and employees, as well as in some cases consumers, and there should be board members appointed by the government/community as well.
There are a lot of other potential areas of community revenue in a left libertarian state, but those are the most dramatic.
What the government should DO with the money is less clear, although most left libertarians support replacing the welfare state with a basic income grant for all citizens as a type of "citizen's dividend". Non-anarchist left libertarians support paying for police, courts, military, etc. Most left libertarians (not me) agree with right libertarians that infrastructure spending should be left to the free market. However, William Vickrey, a Nobel-prize winning Georgist economist, once wrote a paper demonstrating that in a Georgist state, some infrastructure spending by the government could be SELF-FINANCING. He analyzed a few cases of public transportation spending and showed that the increase in rental value of near-by land directly attributable to the new transportion was greater than the cost to the government to build and maintain the transportation. So a Georgist state could sell bonds, build the transportation infrastructure, and pay back the bonds with the increased rental revenue.
Finally I also suggest visiting the entry on Libertarianism in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, written by Peter Vallentyne, which gives an excellent description of the differences between Right Libertarianism (what most Americans just call "Libertarianism") and Left Libertarianism.
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