My perspective on this, taking a step back, is “what good is it to carry around a conception of social justice?”

Well, the libertarian argument for holding libertarian principles of justice (i.e., justice as self-government, or justice as non-aggression) is usually that you should hold them because they are true. Questions of social good can only be sensibly answered after you’ve answered (tacitly or explicitly) the prior question of what would count as a good social outcome, and a theory of justice aims to supply part of the answer to that prior question.

Justice strieks me as a form of self-governance given the fact that every person is their own tyrant upon the world.

I don’t understand what “fact” you are pointing to here. Could you explain?

What tames the millions of tyrants who then walk the earth?

Judo. Or possibly guns.

In all seriousness, if you are asking how you stop people from violating each others’ rights in a libertarian society, that’s a question for constitutional theory. It’s an important question for libertarians to answer, but there isn’t any single libertarian answer to the question. Minarchists think that the government should take a primary role in stopping crime, along with private citizens acting individually and together for self-defense. Anarchists reject all forms of government on principle, and so favor individual and cooperative private self-defense. Some libertarians think that to build a sustainable libertarian society you need to engage in a process of education and moral agitation to get more people to accept libertarian or individualist ideas. Others think that you just need to give people the right tools and count on them to protect their own self-interest. Different libertarians favor different means of defense (unorganized armed populace, local militias, for-profit specialized defense agencies, martial arts, shifting resources towards security of home and property rather than stopping attacks in-progress or punishing after-the-fact, nonviolent passive resistance on an individual or coordinated level, etc. etc. etc.). A lot of us (myself included) tend to think that libertarians should leave a lot of this up to individual people and particular communities to decide, rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all strategy, on the grounds that if you get out of people’s way, and let them talk with each other and make their own decisions, you’ll usually get a variety of interesting and innovative solutions to the problem that you wouldn’t get if you handed down a central plan from on high.

So what exactly is libertarianism offering the student of political life?

Boundary conditions on the acceptable means for carrying out political or social projects.

Steven: libertarianism violates a principle rule of politics that has been observed as far back as Western civilization has cared to observe it: all parties (individuals, groups, nations) will pursue ends that are ruinous by their own standards if they are not checked in some meaningful way.

This and several other complaints that you lodge against libertarianism above may be answered by pointing out that libertarianism is a theory of justice, not a constitutional theory.

There are lots of different ways that a libertarian society might organize itself politically, and different kinds of libertarians (centralists as against decentralists, constitutionalists vs. moralists, minarchists as against anarchists, anarcho-capitalists as against mutualists and syndicalists and other left libertarians, etc.) have different ideas about what, ideally, that should look like. Decentralists, for example, would suggest that the best way to build and sustain a free society is by decentralizing political power to states, counties, municipalities, etc., thus increasing the number of political units that can check and balance each other and decreasing their unilateral power. Centralists tend to think that keeping political power roughly as it is, or increasing central power, can be alright if it serves the cause of liberty (which they think it sometimes can). Minarchists think that some kind of sovereign state is necessary or desirable for a free society; anarchists think that it’s inconsistent with principled libertarianism. “Panarchists” tend to think that any constitutional arrangement is O.K. as long as people are able to freely leave it and participate in others, and so tend to take the attitude of letting a thousand flowers bloom. There are libertarians who favor anarchy, libertarians who favor direct democracy, libertarians who favor representative legislatures, and even a few libertarians who favor monarchy.

There is at least as much diversity in libertarian constitutional theories as there is in non-libertarian constitutional theories, and probably more, since there are at least two major types of constitutional theory (anarchist and panarchist) that don’t exist outside of libertarianism. Some of them emphasize an extensive system of checks and balances; others don’t, or don’t express much concern about the question in the first place.

Libertarianism, however, is identical with none of these constitutional theories; it is merely the claim that the only just form of violence is self-defense. The question of how to create, sustain, and defend a just society, given libertarian principles of justice, is an interesting question of constitutional theory, but there is no single libertarian answer to it.

Hope this helps.

andrew: At least with the government, if it’s democratic I have a chance of stopping it from punching me in the stomach.

How do you intend to go about stopping it?