If anything good came out of the Bush years, it’s that they disabused a lot of people of conservatism. George Will, traditionally a solid conservative, is among them. He has always had a latent liberal streak (“liberal” in the word’s original sense). It began surfacing more frequently early in the Bush years as a reaction to that administration’s illiberalism.
Now, during what policy-wise is Bush’s third term, he has this to say in a column about Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s new book The Declaration of Independents:
America is moving in the libertarians’ direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous. This has, however, opened minds to the libertarians’ argument.
The essence of which is the commonsensical principle that before government interferes with the freedom of the individual, and of individuals making consensual transactions in markets, it ought to have a defensible reason for doing so. It usually does not.
Inertia Wins! 