Fairly or not, the current economic meltdown has been the death knell for laissez-faire thought. Any attempt in the coming decades to put forward old fashioned economic libertarianism will be a tough sell. Note John McCain’s and Sarah Palin’s idiotic shouts of “socialism” and “Obama wants to ‘spread the wealth’” falling on deaf ears. Nobody cares!
Slate had an interesting article by Jacob Weisberg, “The End of Libertarianism.” Weisberg writes,
The libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.
And we have this at Daily Kos regarding Greenspan’s repudiation of everything he has been working at for the last 40 years.