Statism, still a cult. A response to Michael Lind.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/11/libertarians_still_a_cult/

Your article "Libertarianism, still a cult" marked the triumph of libertarian thought.  When our enemies make arguments like these it means we have won the logical field.  There are no arguments left against us.
When your main argument is "nobody's done it yet, so it must be bad" you don't get to criticise anyone else's logic, nor call anyone else paid shills. If you really believed that that nobody else having done it means it can't be done you would not be writing for a "progressive" mag. Progressivism by definition adopts programs that haven't been done before. That's why they advocated things like minimum wage laws, which were novel at the time. Should those have been rejected because if they had been workable some other country would have adopted them? Ok, they weren't workable but how about abolition of slavery? At one time nobody had abolished slavery (as far as anyone knew then). Should noble goal have been rejected for that reason?
In any case you yourself admit you don't have any logical reason to believe libertarianism wouldn't work. Otherwise why would it be "The one question" we can't answer? If you had reason why any particular libertarian policy wouldn't work, either individually or in combination with all the others then make it. The fact that libertarians haven't convinced either dictators or the voting public tells us nothing about whether our policies would work.
"But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored."
Ok, firstly if you knew anything about libertarianism you'd know that there are "minarchist" and "anarcho-capitalists" both of whom call themselves libertarian. If you don't know that much then how do you know anarcho-capitalism is utopian or should be ignored? You don't but then since your entire article was based on a philosophy best described as "Reactionary Stupid" that doesn't surprise me. There have been societies that were functionally "anarcho-capitalist" and they seemed to have worked rather well. While I don't expect you to just believe this, the fact that you don't know about the argument suggests you are being paid to ignore facts, not illuminate them.