It seems like the debate over where libertarians should make their political home is evergreen, even though I’ve always thought the answer was the rather boringly obvious one: Libertarian individuals and institutions should make whatever tactical alliances on specific issues that best suit their dispositions and concerns.  Still, a couple points about Ilya Somin’s response [...]

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Jacob Sullum has a piece at Reason that is, in part, a response to my Newsweek article on Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act:
Paul’s more sophisticated critics argued not that he was racist but that he was unrealistic. Given the social environment created by centuries of government-backed slavery and oppression, they said, segregation in [...]

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My friend Glen Whitman has an excellent essay over at Cato Unbound that takes aim at what’s been variously called “new” or “soft” or even “libertarian” paternalism. I’ve been relatively open to at least some of the ideas circulating under those banners—at least as libertarians go—but Glen’s arguments certainly provide ample reason for severe skepticism.  [...]

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In the context of health care reform, Ilya Somin puts on a brave face and makes the traditional textual case for reading the Commerce Clause as a relatively narrow grant of power to legislate about actual commercial activity occurring across state lines, rather than an infinitely flexible mandate to Do Good so long as some [...]

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Megan McArdle approvingly quotes Tyler Cowen on the bailouts:
Without the bailouts we would have had many more failed banks, very strong deflationary pressures, a stronger seize-up in credit markets than what we had, and a climate of sheer political and economic panic, leading to greater pressures for bad state interventions than what we now see.  [...]

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I’ve seen conservatives circulating this YouTube clip, in which Andrea Mitchell, discussing polling numbers showing low support for Obama’s health care reforms, notes in an aside that opponents “may not know what’s good for them.” This incredibly tone-deaf choice of words, naturally, prompts cries of “elitism” and “arrogance.”  Insofar as “elitism” has recently been used [...]

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Via Doug Bandow, Theodore Dalrymple makes an argument against a right to health care—though it applies to positive or welfare rights more generally—that I used to find persuasive, and now find less so:
Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, [...]

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Via Peter Suderman, I find Tyler Cowen indulging his inner David Brooks with a brief taxonomy of libertarians:
1. Cato-influenced (for lack of a better word).  There is an orthodox reading of what “being libertarian” means, defined by the troika of free markets, non-interventionism, and civil liberties.  It is based on individual rights but does not [...]

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