The Overkill Window

In a thread over here I made fun of Arnold Kling because he's a libertarian and he looks funny. Now that's hardly fair because I haven't paid attention to what Kling puts out since this ridiculous nonsense. Perhaps I am a very bad person who oh wait a minute:

However, I do not blame the poor results of President Obama's economic policies on lack of trust. The policies that were enacted when Democrats were in control of the House failed because they were wrong-headed, not because of a lack of trust. I understand that there is an alternative narrative in which the situation was worse than President Obama thought, and then the public stupidly voted in a Republican majority in the House in 2010, so nothing else could be done. But I do not see that narrative as having any merit beyond serving as a comforting bedtime story for those on the left.

My narrative would be closer to that of Walter Russell Mead. I view the left as tapped out, both intellectually and financially. They do not have the money to sustain their big projects (government health care, European integration). They do not have the intellectual fortitude to confront the problems inherent in, say, public sector unions, unfunded public sector liabilities, attempting to manage health care resources using government boards, or attempting to address inequality of economic outcomes by increasing the concentration of political power.

Below, Arnold Kling coping just fine with Libertopia: