Libertopias

The variety of ideal libertarian societies is probably as diverse as the variety of libertarian ideologies. This page will examine some of the more common proposed libertarian utopias (or at least their general forms) and especially the mechanisms and institutions they expect to see replace all or large parts of modern governments.

This page may or may not discuss actual attempts at making a go of libertarian society, i.e., the utopia communes of the neoliberal era. There are already a number of resources and analyses of this subject, though, which may be of interest to the reader:
 * RationalWiki's "Libertopias" Category.
 * China Mieville's essay, "Floating Utopias," about various schemes for libertopias at sea.

General Issues
In arguing for an ideal society based on their principles of negative rights and absolute private property, libertarians need to be able to address some important concerns.

Why is this fair?
Libertarians propose to reorder society on the basis of a sort of general "levelling" of government property and benefits derived from the government. While some go as far as suggesting revolutionary tribunals to bring justice on the Year Zero, this is implicit even in minarchy. Why should we accept that all we must do is pare the state down to size (to a minimum size of "zero") to have justice? That the only redistribution that accomplishes a fair starting point applies to government property and advantages derived from the government?

This question is a bit more abstract than any particular model of government and goes to theoretical bases for libertarianism in concepts like homesteading.

How to replace state services?
In as much as libertarians even consider services currently provided by the government as worth preserving, or at least feel the need to pretend they do as a kind of sugar to make the medicine of absolute morality derived from axiomatic truths go down, they have to explain how these would work in the absence of things like taxes and universal laws.

This can go as far as needing to explain how anything resembling law enforcement could work. After all, the police are currently pretty important for protecting property rights (for some)! Two of the items on this page (minarchy and dispute resolution) concern this, although in different ways. Besides that, though, most normal people, even if they are suspicious of government-provided welfare, might see a role for things like that.

Potential Abuses
Each scheme for the ideal libertarian society needs to be able to account for ways in which they might be subverted. All of them, in one way or another, require creating power vacuums of varying sizes. This is always an unstable situation. The most entertaining reactions, here, are those that consider potential abuses features rather than bugs.

Propertarian Minarchy
TBD

Mutual Aid
TBD (how to incorporate this? does it need its own page?)

Dispute Resolution Organizations
TBD

Covenant Communities
TBD