リバタリアニズムでは、私的財産権もしくは私有財産制は、個人の自由を確保する上で必要不可欠な制度原理と考える。私的財産権には、自分の身体は自分が所有する権利を持つとする自己所有権原理を置く（ジョン・ロック）。私的財産権が政府や他者により侵害されれば個人の自由に対する制限もしくは破壊に結びつくとし、政府による徴税行為をも基本的に否定する。法的には、自由とは本質的に消極的な概念であるとした上で、自由を確保する法思想（法の支配/rule of law）を追求する。経済的には、市場で起こる諸問題は、政府の規制や介入が引き起こしているという考えから、市場への一切の政府介入を否定する自由放任主義（レッセフェール/laissez-faire）を唱える。個人が自由に自己の利益を追求し、競争することが社会全体の利益の最大化に繋がるとする。この考えは、自由競争こそが「（神の）見えざる手」によって社会の繁栄をもたらすとしたアダム・スミスの『国富論』を源流とする。
^ abcRothbard, Murray Newton. The Ethics of Liberty.
^e.g.:The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science,Chapter 3: Necessity and Volition:4.Free Will.:Man is not, like the animals, an obsequious puppet of instincts and sensual impulses. Man has the power to suppress instinctive desires, he has a will of his own, he chooses between incompatible ends. In this sense he is a moral person; in this sense he is free. However, it is not permissible to interpret this freedom as independence of the universe and its laws....Freedom of the will does not mean that the decisions that guide a man's action fall, as it were, from outside into the fabric of the universe and add to it something that had no relation to and was independent of the elements which had formed the universe before. Actions are directed by ideas, and ideas are products of the human mind, which is definitely a part of the universe and of which the power is strictly determined by the whole structure of the universe. What the term "freedom of the will" refers to is the fact that the ideas that induce a man to make a decision (a choice) are, like all other ideas, not "produced" by external "facts," do not "mirror" the conditions of reality, and are not "uniquely determined" by any ascertainable external factor to which we could impute them in the way in which we impute in all other occurrences an effect to a definite cause. There is nothing else that could be said about a definite instance of a man's acting and choosing than to ascribe it to this man's individuality.
^Comegna, Anthony; Gomez, Camillo (3 October 2018). "Libertarianism, Then and Now". Libertarianism. Cato Institute. "[...] Benjamin Tucker was the first American to really start using the term 'libertarian' as a self-identifier somewhere in the late 1870s or early 1880s." Retrieved 3 August 2020.
^Russel Dean (May 1955). "Who Is A Libertarian". Foundation for Economic Education. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
^Paul Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty Vs. Authority in American Film and TV, University Press of Kentucky, 2012, p. 353, n. 2.
^Carlson, Jennifer D. (2012). "Libertarianism". In Miller, Wilburn R., ed. The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America. London: Sage Publications. p. 1006. ISBN1412988764.
^Rothbard, Murray Newton. For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto: Freedom is a condition in which a person's ownership rights in his own body and his legitimate material property are not invaded, are not aggressed against. A man who steals another man's property is invading and restricting the victim's freedom, as does the man who beats another over the head. Freedom and unrestricted property right go hand in hand. On the other hand, to the libertarian, "crime" is an act of aggression against a man's property right, either in his own person or his materially owned objects. Crime is an invasion, by the use of violence, against a man's property and therefore against his liberty.
