QotD: Libertarianism, the scourge of the GOP

Without attempting to untangle the mess of that second graf — seriously, read it again — my question is this: Exactly where and how has libertarianism poisoned "public life"? Certainly not in the modern, Weekly Standard-approved national GOP, which has shot federal spending through the roof, created mammoth new entitlements, rammed through panicky regulatory nightmares, got the feds deep into local education, and lived out the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Of all the many, many things to complain about the party that has run most of the federal government for the past eight years, "dogmatic libertarianism" has to rank somewhere near the proliferation of Esperanto.

It's always flattering that libertarianism — almost uniquely among strains of modern political thought — is constantly challenged to defend itself against its most theoretical extremes.

Matt Welch, " 'The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life'", Hit and Run, 2008-01-25