The great libertarian hope after all?
This Koffler piece on Obama’s policies is a must read. Spoiler:
In other words and in short, Obama’s slogan, “stand for change”, is not a vacuous message of uplift, but a content-laden token of dissent from the old-style liberal orthodoxy on which Clinton and Edwards have been campaigning. At the same time, Obama is not offering a retread of (Bill) Clintonism, Liebermanism, triangulation, neoliberalism, the Third Way or whatever we might wish to call the business-friendly centrism of the 1990s. For all its lofty talk of new paradigms and boundary shifting, the Third Way in practice amounted to taking a little of column A, a little of column B, and marketing the result as something new and innovative. Obama and GKooolsbee propose something entirely different - not a triangulation, but a basis for crafting public policy orthogonal to the traditional liberal-conservative axis…If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism.
Short of a full fledge Ron Paul rEVOLution, Obama’s got my vote. My man Lessig agrees — and that should count for something!
Hat tip: HnR.