I’m recording a Bloggingheads conversation with Will Wilkinson on this stuff soon, so I’ll keep most of my powder dry for now. But after reading Ross’s latest post on the subject something just hit me. It is a sign of how profoundly statist a moment we are in that there’s this tempestuous debate — in a teapot to be sure — over whether libertarians — historically the purest of the sane anti-statists — should leave the nominally anti-statist party (the Right) in order to join the proudly statist party (the Left), when just about everyone agrees the net result of such a defection would be to make the anti-statist party significantly more statist. The only debate is whethere libertarians would make the statist party even marginally less statist or whether they would be rolled. And so far, the shaky consensus seems to be that the libertarians would get little to nothing for their defection while the country would (by libertarian standards) lose a great deal. It’s a very weird moment when you really think about it.