by Conor Friedersdorf
Tim Lee has a theory:
One of the more pernicious influences of Rand and Rothbard on the libertarian movement was their tendency to treat every policy problem as almost reducible to a logical syllogism. Too many libertarians act as though they don’t need to know very much about the details of any given policy issue because they can deduce the right answer directly from libertarian principles. The practical result is often to shut down internal debate and discourage libertarians from thinking carefully about cases where libertarian principles may have more than one plausible application. Hayek seems to have written “Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” with the explicit purpose to combat that kind of dogmatism. He thought it “highly desirable that liberals shall strongly disagree on these topics, the more the better.”
And one way to do this is to be more ready to treat modern liberals with bottom-up instincts as potential allies rather than ideological opponents.