From Wendy McElroy

• What are libertarians anyway? We’re neither all alike (McElroy is a left-libertarian and I’m not) nor the social Darwinists, selfish monsters and narcissistic arrested-adolescent Ayn Rand fans in the common knowledge of those who’ve heard of us (or why well-meaning Christians are scared away).
• I think we are in for a deep, dark recession that will not improve significantly until the middle or end of 2010.
• Are we reliving not 1929 but 1873?
• The U.S. government has spent as much money bailing out one company as it did to put a man on the moon during a 13-year program... and NASA wasn’t exactly known for its thrift.
• A colourful anti-Obama piece with more than a grain of truth: So here we all are, stuck with a Glorious Leader whose sainthood, conferred by masses of worshippers and by mass media sinking fast and clutching at any straw, threatens to make Jack Kennedy’s beatification — or even that of Father Abraham Lincoln — look like a poor, pale thing. It is up to libertarians to keep our heads up, our vision clear, and to speak the truth at every turn. Barack Obama is the pampered pet of Chicago gangsters. He is good buddies with a murderous African dictator. And his wacko leftist academic background evokes memories of the style of sideways thinking that inspired the death marches in Cambodia. The man burns to have a private army all his own. But Smith holds out the hope of the left’s self-destruction. McElroy disagrees: After being heartened for about 10 minutes by L. Neil’s article, I have come back to the position, “No, Obama, is not a gift to libertarians. Or, rather, he is a gift in the same way a kick in the teeth that reminds to you explore dental insurance is a market service.”