From a libertarian (and academic economist friend):

Jonah,
I’m glad to see so many moving toward libertarianism as a result of your
book. But your last correspondent misses, I think, a key libertarian
point. Welfare programs that are “small, surgical, capped, etc.” is
certainly better than the status quo, but part of the libertarian point
is that the challenge is *keeping* them that way. And that is very
difficult in the world we inhabit, where the political benefits of
growing the constituency of welfare recipients are huge and the costs,
to politicians and individual Americans, is small, per capita. It is
even harder in a world where the cultural power of the communal feeling
(Klein’s “people’s romance”) of doing the “right thing” is so strong.
Isn’t that too part of the story of Liberal Fascism? On what basis,
either theoretical or historical, should we believe that such “small”
programs will stay small?
A libertarian like myself would argue that we’d be better off doing way
more to foster the Burkean little platoons, which are far more likely to
“stick” and are more effective in any case. The point is that even a
“little” welfare state is likely to grow. Better to not even give the
weed a chance in the first place.