Updating Libertarianism for the 21st Century

A little while ago, I wrote that libertarianism -- the small-government philosophy codified by Robert Nozick and others in the mid-20th century -- is looking a little shopworn. As efforts to slash government yield diminishing returns, and empirical evidence piles up that many government interventions are very beneficial, the minimalist state envisioned by Nozick et al. doesn’t seem up to the challenges of the 21st century.

But it would be a mistake to throw libertarianism out the window -- as many of my left-leaning readers would have us do. The philosophy went too far, but along the way it taught us valuable lessons about the burdens of a heavy-handed state. Those are lessons we shouldn’t forget. The challenge for libertarians, therefore, is to find ways to update their doctrine to address today’s problems, while retaining and amplifying the useful parts.