We know your Hayekian street cred is impeccable and beyond reproach... but I'm curious if you agree that this is even more radical than a Friedmanite or a Randian?

That quote you found from the troll isn't Hayekian or libertarian. (And it isn't Randian, either.)It is some species of anarchism, perhaps the anarcho-capitalist variety.

Mainstream libertarians consider themselves "classical conservatives" and accept the political institutions bequeathed us by the Founders. We don't want to privatize the courts, or believe that the state holds no proper functions. Hayek didn't even rule out all social welfare programs, depending on their reach and whether they would distort markets.

I don't object to safe meat standards and inspections, and think the Commerce Clause justifies that federal role. The CDC can and should work to control communicable diseases. The federal government should provide for the common defense. Some things do need to be done by a central authority. (It is just a matter of one aspirin may be fine, but that doesn't make 10 better.)

But that troll thing is way, way out there.

I made an awful boo-boo in my reply. I did not mean to say that mainstream libertarians consider themselves to be "classical conservatives" (whatever that might be); I meant "classical liberals."

Mona: Your correction brought up this idea for me, perhaps because I'm wondering if they nearly meet on the other side of that yin/yang symbol.

Karen, I don't think so. As is pretty well known of me, I take my ideological moorings from Hayek. (Or more to the point, when I first read him I had DING! DING! DING! moments of "yes, this is what makes sense and is what I believe.") But he dedicated a whole chapter in his opus The Constitution of Liberty to the exposition of "Why I am Not a Conservative."

Hayek revered truth and reason, and expected people to change their minds as either empirical evidence mounted, or moral suasion made a particular position increasingly compelling. He didn't care for revolution, because chaos is bad. But he embraced social evolution, including evolution in mores and institutions. He had no patience for those who said a belief or idea ought to be maintained because it supported popular pious notions or that we reached the pinnacle of liberal social evolution in 1776. (For example, he disdained those who rejected the theory of evolution on religious grounds.)

In other words, he didn't think everything ought to be conserved, and felt that new and initially radical ideas play a crucial role in creating tomorrow's accepted, possibly better values. He wouldn't force change, but he would not do a thing to impede free people from peacefully persuading others that change ought to occur.

He certainly wanted to conserve our basic political order, however, including the rule of law and our courts.

Out of 9 candidates in our first wave of interviews, he was the only one who was not pro-choice!

An anti-choice libertarain.

Priceless!

There are quite a number of us, actually. Altho I likely do not qualify as one of that "us" any longer, but did for years. So is Ron Paul, and so is one of my former co-bloggers, D. A. Ridgely. Nat Hentoff is more of a civil libertarian and economically left, but he is also pro-life.

Libertarianism does no better than any other ism in determining what value, if any -- and when -- to vest in the entity in a pregnant woman's uterus. If one is persuaded this is a living human being whose right to life trumps the mother's right to control her body, that is a position a reasonable person could hold. A significant minority of libertarians do, in fact hold that view. (And so do some liberals, altho many had conversions in the 80s when their party made it virtually mandatory to do so.)

As for your disdain over libertarians claiming the classically liberal label, well, Hayek wasn't no arse, and that's how he framed it, and it did and does make sense to me.

Further, I think you might be surprised at how many closet case pro-lifers there are -- or at least those who are highly squeamish on the issue. Unfortunately, the position has become so deeply associated with religious nutcases, many reasonable pro-life people don't want to say much if anything about it.