Are we libertarians so cranky about David Leonhardt’s review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism because he really hit us where it hurts? No. We’re cranky because the review truly is astonishingly clueless. As big government conservative Ross Douthat puts it:
As I said, I hold no particular brief for libertarians, but as evidence that they have a particularly noteworthy “soft spot” for tyranny (compared to whom? the New York Times?), this [i.e., Friedman’s hour with Pinochet; Rothbard’s electoral flightiness; Rand’s HUAC testimony] is thin stuff indeed, and it feels like a lazy book reviewer’s attempt to find some bones to pick with a movement he doesn’t know all that much about.
Lazy and ignorant, yes. But also convoluted and confused! In his embarrassingly incoherent penultimate paragraph, Leonhardt fires away completely indiscriminately in an attempt to score some kind of hit (why the effort, anyway?) by mentioning obscure anti-Semites actual libertarians have never heard of, airing completely baffling claims about Bush’s “free-market approach to rebuilding Iraq,” and making representations about Cato’s stance on global warming that should get the fact-checker fired (if the Times used one). But David Boaz and Gene Healy have touched on all this below. So let me address this choice bit from Leonhardt: