Lots of good thoughts! Several years ago I really appreciated the idea of bridging the gap between libertarianism and liberalism. I even attempted to illustrate that it is, or should be, a continuum…

“Progressive libertarian” really isn’t the best term. “Left libertarian” was already taken though. Maybe I should have used “liberaltarian”. I think the term “liberaltarian” is better than “neoliberal”. “Neoliberal” is way too junked up. You’re trying to compete with too many different and far more popular definitions. Not too long ago I used the term “thinktarian” to refer to thoughtful libertarians. It’s definitely not junked up… there are only 15 search results. I’m sure that you could come up with a better term.

I used to be a libertarian but now I’m a pragmatarian. I believe that people should be free to choose where their taxes go. This would create a market in the public sector.

Lots of people realize that the socialist experiments failed. But they don’t seem to quite grasp that these experiments didn’t just fail with private goods… they failed with public goods as well. It’s not like China under Mao had optimum levels of public education, healthcare and defense.

Just because we use democracy to choose our planners really doesn’t change the fact that we have socialism in our public sector. As long as libertarianism supports some socialism… it will always inadvertently undermine the case for markets.

The problem with anarcho-capitalism is that it tries to downplay the free-rider problem. Downplaying the free-rider problem means trying to pretend that consumers aren’t interested in maximizing their benefit. Except, the market wouldn’t work so well if consumers didn’t try and get the most bang for their buck. This inherent drive works great when consumers are deciding between private goods and private goods… but when it comes to deciding between private goods and public goods… why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free!? However, if people have to pay taxes anyways… then, given a choice, they might as well spend their tax dollars on the public goods which provide them with the greatest benefit. This would be the only way to ensure that society’s limited resources were put to their most valuable uses.

Humans are diverse. So it’s a given that, in a relatively short amount of time, the supply of public goods would reflect the diversity of the demand for public goods. We’d make just as much progress with public goods as we do with private goods.

The challenge is helping people identify all the inefficiencies that exist because we have socialism in the public sector. People blame a gazillion problems on the market when the real culprit is the absence of a market for public goods!