I had the same initial reaction, - but when I settled down to refute her 'truisms', I once again discovered that empty, well written rhetotic, scattered with snippits of true generalizations, are still empty pap. Why bother nit picking the obvious?
I should just like to repeate your last paragraph, which so well concluding your entire reply.
"Gee-- the product of a religious impulse, or obnoxious? Your choice. For what it's worth, many intelligent people under 30 think that they discovered libertarianism all by themselves and no one has ever understood it before. By the time one reaches middle age, its limitations have become apparent."
I hope their are libertarians at FR who read the entire reply of yours, and were able to chuckle a little at themselves, before getting back to the task at hand.
Sure, - an amusing paragraph. - and at the end, the 'well written'/meaningless observation underlined begs the question. - What limitations? - Unless we are told, it remains merely entertaining rhetoric.
Libertarianism raises the central issue in both life and politics-- the boundaries between individuals and society, and between individuals and the collective expression of society's goals, namely government. Unfortunately, for libertarianism to really work well, people must cease being human and become perfectly rational and highly intelligent thinking machines, which isn't likely to happen anytime soon. It works best in relation to economics and free markets, but even there, it cannot work unless we, as a society, are willing to watch at least some of the less intelligent among us starve, along with their children.
I actually believe that the tension among competing political and social philosophies is healthy for the country as a whole, so while I would never again subscribe to libertarianism, I wouldn't want to see it go away altogether, just as I don't want to see liberalism vanish altogether, because both act as valuable checks on the conservative impulse. The political pendulum in this country swings within a very narrow range which I think is good-- what keeps it in that range is vibrant competition among political and social philosophies. If we ever lose that competition, then we will be at risk of totalitarianism of one sort or another.