IMHO the real failure is that Libertarian Types cannot seem to articulate a vision for the future. The linked article explicitly hearkens back to the 19th century; almost every libertarian proposal I have seen consists of nothing more substantial than rolling back to those times.
Like "true" communism you will never see free market principles fully embodied, and nobody can seem to articulate real-world half steps that don't have severely unpleasant side effects.
I don't understand what you mean by "Libertarian types" not articulating a "vision for the future", because it seems to me that that's precisely what this article is doing; Philip Greenspun suggests a course of action which would be advisable for Obama to take.
If, however, you mean to say that Libertarian principles don't change with the times, I think I can address that. It's because Libertarian principles are just that: they're principles. They don't change per the circumstance, which is what makes Libertarianism such a robust ideology.
And as far as hearkening back to the 19th century, I'm curious as to what's so bad about that? The 19th century was a period of rapid growth for the US. A couple of ugly incidences excluded, things fiscal were generally Good.
Greenspun's suggestion is not a serious one. It is certainly earnest, but it is also impractical to the point of being laughable. Can you imagine an politician, of any ideology, seriously taking this suggestion and lasting more than a few months at it before they are overridden by congress, or the courts, or someone else comes in to give it a try? Its purpose is not honest suggestion; it is instead designed to make Greenspun and those who agree with him feel good about their beliefs, and perhaps convince interested readers to entertain a similar belief system as well.
If you really want to give Obama suggestions, and you really want them to be taken, you ought to make them feasible.
The way forward is via productive compromise and incremental progress -- and that's one of the ways in which libertarianism fails completely: when has any of you ever suggested a small step? Instead you snipe from the margins about the philosophical inequity of it all.
Further along the lines of not articulating a vision for the future:
- The vast majority of suggestions are negative -- what we must not do or change -- rather than positive.
- Libertarian policy is exclusively derived from absolute philosophical first principles with zero consideration as to empirical effectiveness, side effects, or how-do-we-get-there-from-here. It's nice for utopian fiction and useless for the rest of us.
p.s. I like how you brush aside so much of the ugliness of that era as "incidences." Assume I take you at your word that things "fiscal" were generally Good: how were things "liberty" then, hmmm? (A rhetorical question.)
Like "true" communism you will never see free market principles fully embodied, and nobody can seem to articulate real-world half steps that don't have severely unpleasant side effects.