Beat the New Boss: D.C. libertarians plot their Obama administration strategies. - Reason Magazine: "With the Bush administration ending in a frenzy of disappointment, most libertarians don't expect much more luck with Obama, outside of a few issues involving drug policy and executive power. The debate in Washington now is on how much effort to spend trying to remake the Republican Party. 'We're fighting for the soul of the GOP,' says Tanner, who adds that libertarians need to look beyond the party, at other reformers, other populists, people who won over Americans as much as Bush has lost them. 'We need to seize that Ross Perot mantle of fighting against these guys.'"
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The article doesn't acknowledge one other fact: the neoliberal economic paradigm has been put through a meat grinder by the collapse of the housing and financial markets and the massive bailout and quasi-socialization strategy that has been put in place. I don't buy the argument that lack of regulation caused the problems, and in fact I think over-regulation has a bigger share of the blame. But the media and policy elites have created a dominant rhetoric that says the federal government must ride to the rescue with vast, expensive, aggressive initiatives. Bush enthusiastically signed on to that agenda and Obama has already said he wants to extend it. And the same thing is happening in Europe. In fact, I don't see any nation that is even remotely interested in laissez-faire economics now.

So as far as I can see, the Thatcher-Reagan era is now over. All this libertarian macho talk about "fighting against these guys" and "winning over Americans" is laughable.

If Libertarians were living in Mom's basement under President Bush, they will be sharing the backyard with the family dog when the new crowd takes over in a couple of weeks.