In the 1990s libertarians were told that their case against central planning had grown stale and irrelevant. That everyone agreed with markets and that, with markets as the baseline, libertarians needed to move on to discuss how markets could be improved upon at the margin. Nowadays the entire panoply of arguments against central planning and unlimited discretionary power for "the public good" are relevant again. So (via John Romano at Big Hollywood) here is a video of Milton Freedman making the comparative case for free markets to a disbelieving Phil Donahue from back in the day. (Note the almost endearing way that one of the inventors of talk TV listened to his guest, with whom he radically disagreed, and let him make his point uninterrupted. A Bill O'Reilly or The View he wasn't.):



Sadly, the likeliest outcome of today's debates is that, in the face of economic insecurity and one party rule, good arguments will not defeat bad policy. Instead, we will have to experience the consequences of these policies and spend decades debating whether the policies were at fault. On a more hopeful note, perhaps the existence of alternative media, along with a more educated cadre of libertarian and conservative advocates for individual freedom and opponents of big government might just be able mitigate the worst of the excesses. That the President seems not to be as charismatic in office as he did as a candidate is also a plus. At this point, he does not seem as capable of inspiring mass enthusiasm for whatever he proposes as one might have feared from the tenor of the campaign.