Nice little pieces of self-parody

I too fear the overreach of regulation of the free enterprise system due to the global economic collapse. As an aspiring entrepreneur, I sure picked a rotten time to flee the world of the legacy corporation.

But why are some of the biggest voices of libertarianism either in a state of self-parody or fearing, gasp -- socialism! -- because their purist economic beliefs have been put to the test, and have failed?

When The Economist is advocating some interference in the markets, and when the author of "Liars Poker" reveals how nobody on Wall Street could see what the hell was coming on (and those few who did were ignored), shouldn't that be a sign that a certain ideology that, like most when taken to extremes, has gone off the rails?

It's one that I still want to identify with, certainly more than either Bush-style conservativism that lies in wreckage, and quasi-New Deal cries on the left for protectionism, single-payer health care and expansion of entitlements.

But it's embarrassing to read the lunatic prose of "The Libertarian Moment," the first piece linked here, and especially this sequence harkening to the immediate days after Nixon's resignation:

"Yet even during that dark night of the American soul, with all its eerie echoes of George W. Bush’s final miserable days in office, premonitions of liberty-loving life abounded for those who knew where to look. The contraceptive pill, which gave women unprecedented control over their sexual and reproductive lives, had been made legal for married women in 1965, and was on the verge of being legalized for unmarried women too."

The Constitution lay in tatters; but hey, thank God single people could screw their brains out and forget all about Watergate thanks to the pill! Precisely the segue I would have made!

Except that, following that logic, and as Bush has pardoned his last Thanksgiving turkey (fowl freedom!), we have the decision in California -- Ahnuld's Kalifornia, supposedly libertine, if not libertarian -- to roll back marriage rights for gays that had been previously granted. Oops! How did that happen?

Libertarian ideas are still compelling to me, but I do want these folks to grow up and get real. Just a little bit. Please?

"The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. They are bankrupt, and this time, there will be no bailout."