If libertarian ideas are so good how come they keep on getting rejected?

This was a question I found myself posing in a comment to a posting put up by Andy Wood over on Transport Blog.

The point is that (what with us living in a democracy and all) I see no reason why libertarian ideas should fail. After all, at least one of my claims for a libertarian world is that it would make everyone better off. Or, at least, almost everyone (he says calling to mind some of the more useless recent public appointments).

I know there were a whole bunch of economists in the 1970s who came up with public choice theory to explain just this. And perhaps it's about time I got round to finding out what they actually said. But in the absence of such effort-based knowledge here are a few ideas of my own.

Maybe it's because libertarian ideas are abstract ones and people aren't very good at abstracts. Maybe statist ideas are easier to understand. Well, if that is true and libertarian ideas are best seen rather than heard then maybe we should be seeking to massively increase the amount of devolution in this country. Maybe if local councils and other institutions had much more autonomy they would be prepared to experiment and, if they did so, maybe some of the ideas they would experiment with would be libertarian ones leading to a better world.

Maybe I shouldn't be so gloomy. Maybe we are winning the battle, it's just that it takes a long time. The Thatcher/Reagan (hell, you could even add in Lange/Mulroney/Hawke) Revolution put a broken rail in the path of the Socialist express. It was only partly successful - sure, people stopped believing in state ownership but they started to believe in state regulation with a vengeance - but it was a start.

Maybe it is just a case of keeping going.

Maybe it's that our arguments aren't that good. I often find it deeply disappointing (even in the area of debate, transport, I know well) that bad ideas so often go unchallenged or only challenged half-heartedly. Maybe, we just have to up our game a bit.

Of course, it could be that we are wrong. Surely not.

Nah, it's got to be those shape-shifting reptiles.