If you start there, taking a stand on the issues of the day is easy. All efforts to cut government functions - public schools, Medicare, environmental regulation, food stamps - should be supported. Anything that increases government (Obamacare, for example) should be opposed.

In his libertarian manifesto For a New Liberty, economist Murray Rothbard promised a nation characterized by "individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government and a free-market economy." The book concludes: "Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind."

This is where Lind's question comes in. Rothbard freely acknowledges that "liberty has never been fully tried," at least by the libertarians' definition. In an essay in Salon, Lind asks: "If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world ... is organized along libertarian lines?" In other words, "Why are there no libertarian countries?"

The ideas of the center-left - based on welfare states conjoined with market economies - have been deployed all over the democratic world, most extensively in social-democratic Scandinavia. We also had deadly experiments with communism. Lind asks another question: "If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn't libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?"

The answer lies in a kind of circular logic: Libertarians can keep holding up their dream of perfection because, as a practical matter, it will never be tried. Even many who say they are libertarians reject the idea when it gets too close to home.

The strongest support for a broad antistatist libertarianism now comes from the tea party. Yet tea-party members, polls show, are older than the country as a whole. They say they want to shrink government in a big way but are uneasy about embracing this concept when reducing Social Security and Medicare comes up. Thus do the proposals to cut these programs being pushed by Republicans in Congress exempt current recipients. There's no way Republicans are going to attack their own base.

But this inconsistency (or hypocrisy) contains a truth: We had something close to a small-government libertarian utopia in the late 19th century, and we decided it didn't work. We realized that many would never be able to save enough for retirement and, later, that most of them would be unable to afford health insurance in old age. Smaller government meant that too many people were poor and that monopolies were formed too easily. And when the Depression engulfed us, government was helpless, largely handcuffed by this antigovernment ideology until Franklin Roosevelt came along.

In fact, as Lind points out, most countries that we typically see as "free" and prosperous have governments that consume around 40 percent of their gross domestic product. They are better off for it. "Libertarians," he wrote, "seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality. ..."

This matters to today's politics because too many politicians make decisions based on a utopian theory that never can or will be put into practice. They use this theory to avoid a candid conversation about the messy choices governance requires. And this is why we have gridlock.

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E. J. Dionne: The libertarian problem