Mike Munger makes the case.

Poverty is what happens when groups of people fail to cooperate, or are prevented from finding ways to cooperate. Cooperation is in our genes; the ability to be social is a big part of what makes us human. It takes actions by powerful actors such as states, or cruel accidents such as deep historical or ethnic animosities, to prevent people from cooperating. Everywhere you look, if people are prosperous it’s because they are cooperating, working together. If people are desperately poor, it’s because they are denied some of the means of cooperating, the institutions for reducing the transaction costs of decentralized VPC.

I think it helps if people understand this. However, progressives will argue that we cannot have VPC without government and that, moreover, government can improve VPC.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

He writes,

But understanding human limitations does not mean we can overcome them. It only means we can’t pretend they don’t exist. It should point us toward humility, not hubris. And in politics and policy, understanding the limitation that Klein highlights should point us away from technocratic overconfidence and toward an idea of a government that enables society to address its problems through incremental, local, trial-and-error learning processes rather than centrally managed wholesale transformations of large systems.

I suggest reading the whole thing. I could have picked about any paragraph at random to excerpt.

He writes,

[Rand] Paul’s challenge is to seek a smaller state while not advocating cuts to anything anybody’s grandmother cares about, to sell a live-and-let-live social policy to busybodies and bluenoses on both sides and to articulate a foreign policy that is less reliant on the projection of national strength without projecting weakness instead. Trouble is, he has to do all that to the satisfaction of an electorate whose members mostly think that a libertarian is somebody who works in a library, courting the debased descendants of Patrick Henry as they shout with one voice: “Give me liberty, or give me a check!”

In 2016, they’re going to vote for the check.

His argument is that when it comes to how they actually cast their votes, the American electorate is opposed to libertarians. If he is right, and I tend to think he is, then the feeling is mutual.

I remember in the 1960s, the opponents of the Vietnam war were divided between those who wanted to work within the system to change policy and those who believed that your best bet was to stay outside the system (“tune in, turn on, drop out”). The folks who took the latter approach started communes. Now, years later, I see libertarians facing the same question. The modern equivalent of communes would be seasteads.

My reader was not satisfied with the answer I offered in Libertarians and Politics. Here are a few more thoughts.

1. For economic libertarians who do seek to engage in politics, I do not think that the current environment is conducive to success. I use the modifier “economic,” because the same dominant progressive ideology that stifles economic libertarianism is quite friendly to libertarian positions on many social issues.

2. Perhaps one way to change the environment is to engage in political action and failing. The old Goldwater-made-Reagan-Possible theory. I am not terribly sold on that one.

3. I think that public schools are a major problem. Whether you think they make a difference at the margin in terms of student learning (I am skeptical), they probably are somewhat effective at progressive brainwashing. If you don’t believe that, consider what an uphill battle one faces trying to explain the beneficial effects of the capitalist system on reducing poverty, conserving natural resources, and so on.

4. The strong component of progressivism in the identity of intellectuals is another major problem. In order to feel welcome among highly-educated people, you have to affirm belief in ideas that are at best dubious and at worst just flat-out wrong. It takes too much courage these days to question progressive dogma in certain segments of the population, including non-Orthodox Jews