One, vast college campus.

I'VE long thought there's a reason that libertarianism is so popular on college campuses. For many of us, the freest time of our lives was college. We seemed masters of our fate (particularly if we were lucky enough not to pay for school ourselves), free to make what seemed like all of the important choices for ourselves, from drugs to sex to satisfying our intellectual interests. Of course, this freedom was and is a mirage. An informal coalition of parents, taxpayers, administrators, cafeteria workers, janitors, security officers, regulators, professors, and others work behind the scenes or pay the bills so that kids can feel this sense of consequence-free liberty.

Last December, Brink Lindsey, a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote a fascinating New Republic essay calling for a new fusionism between progressives (or liberals, if you prefer) and libertarians. Basically, Lindsey wants liberals to be libertarian on economics the way they're laissezfaire on culture. Put another way, he wants liberals to be libertarians. To which conservatives responded---including yours truly in these pages---"Don't we all?"

Responding to Lindsey, I noted that while libertarians constantly complain that conservatives have become too authoritarian and "theocratic," the truth is that libertarians have been "growing" too. Whereas they used to be obsessed with shrinking government, they're now increasingly concerned with expanding personal choices. Philosophically this represents a change from the classically liberal emphasis on "negative liberty" (restricting intrusions of the state) to the more progressive focus on "positive liberty" (giving people the opportunities and stuff they want or need to feel that they've realized their potential). At first, my point was greeted with considerable skepticism, but it's rapidly becoming conventional wisdom. ...