Why Right Wing Libertarianism is Antithetical to a Free Society

There are two kinds of freedom: The negative and the positive kind, with the former being about the freedom from something, and the latter the freedom to something. Actual freedom can only be had through a combination of the two, which is easily illustrated: Someone on a barren desert island may theoretically be free to leave and find sustenance, but they simply don't have the opportunity to, say, gather wood and build a boat. In other words: That person isn't actually free to leave. That freedom is nothing more than an idea. It doesn't exist.

In order to be free to do something, one must have the opportunity to do it (positive freedom) and not be restricted from doing it (negative freedom). As such, the freedom to engage in any kind of action is determined by a positive and a negative factor, with the degree of freedom being equal to zero if one of these factors is zero.

Practically speaking, libertarianism, in its nature as a family of political stances, pertains to society. That makes it reasonable to assess it for its communal effect. In that light, a form of libertarianism that only acknowledges negative freedom only provides freedom to people to the degree that they already have positive freedom: The freedom in a society modeled that way is coincidental with people's overall opportunity.

As right wing libertarianism is exclusively centered around negative freedom, it doesn't offer solutions to the positive freedom problem. Given that sufficiently complex human societies have a propensity to concentrate their resources in ever fewer hands, right wing libertarianism mostly functions as a set of solutions to bring actual freedom to an ever shrinking number of people.

To anyone who would measure a society's architecture by how much it benefits how many people, right wing libertarianism can only be dysfunctional.