Is libertarianism effectively dead? Daniel McCarthy, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former editor of The American Conservative, certainly thinks so.
"Libertarians have disappeared, just as the national debt has blown past $40 trillion," he writes in an incendiary column for The Spectator that is part lamentation and part triumphalist sneer. "Today the ideas seem exhausted, and there's no libertarian who provokes or inspires to anything like the degree Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or Murray Rothbard once did. Libertarian think tanks and magazines are running on fumes; they're richly endowed but irrelevant."
