Libertarians absorb the lessons of the story of the Bootleggers and Baptists with their mothers' milk. You can read an excellent account in Wikipedia. It is a kind of parable for our time. It shows how policies supported by good people are presented as good for the community but are in fact driven by a narrow sectional interest.
The current enthusiasm for scrappage schemes put me in mind of this parable. The car scrappage scheme is presented as a way to save the planet, but you can be sure that the lobbyists pushing the government to enact it are paid by the car industry. Similarly for the boiler scrappage scheme. The recent Digital Britain report was presented to the press as a noble scheme to roll out cheap broadband connections to remote rural locations (although I'm not quite sure why people who have the not inconsiderable benefits of living in a rural idyll should have the added benefit of the rest of us subsidizing their internet connections). In fact the main impact of the scheme seems to be to punish illegal filesharers, an outcome strongly desired by the music recording industry.
Perhaps I am an old cynic. Perhaps I'm just a realist.
