[panglott]

Libertarians have a lot of cognitive dissonance about things like externalities and information costs, it's true. They have to have considered arguments about externalities because externalities are quite inconvenient for lots of libertarian theory, especially because externalities are one of the most powerful rationales for government intervention in the private sector. It's easier to just handwave them away. But yes, then you're stuck hammering your screws and tapping in the nails with a screwdriver. But the problem there isn't the lack of hammer, screwdriver, nails, or screws.

[kbenson]

My point is that while it appears we can all rationally look at evidence and make decisions, in reality there are far to many quirks of human nature to allow us to do so effectively. How can we expect people to individually come to useful decisions for the group when we've shown time and again that our reasoning skill are not just impaired, but impaired in a way that makes it hard to recognize they are impaired (e.g. confirmation bias, our poor reasoning about future risk/rewards). Our tools are broken, and we know it, yet we continue to assume there's no consequences of this.

I'm not specifically anti-libertarian, I think people of that mindset have a place (frontiers, in all senses of the word), but that putting personal rights on a pedestal in a highly civilized, industrialized and often urbanized society doesn't yield good results. That said, there's problems with the other end of the spectrum as well, where the group cannot focus on the important through petty squabbles, or even agree on importance, or worse yet focus on solutions that do not yield results (all rooted in the same reason as above, mind you). Our own nature is one of our worst enemies at this point.