Veronique: I don’t really dispute Scott Sumner’s list of accomplishments, but it seems a bit greedy for libertarians to claim that these successes are the exclusive handiwork of libertarians. Lots of people who are not self-described libertarians are nonetheless free marketers and/or persuadable by empirical data. It gives short shrift not just to conservatives but to liberals themselves. We’ve learned a lot through trial and error since 1900, including liberals. No doubt libertarian economists like Milton Friedman, Hayek, von Mises et al. deserve their fair share of credit, but it’s sort of a stretch to simply say any movement toward freer markets and deregulation by the left is because libertarians “knocked some sense” into them.