Time Magazine thinks Libertarians are not lunatics!

This Time article is mostly about Bob Barr's bid for president. Will average Americans start thinking seriously about the fact that both major parties represent an increasingly expanding version of Leviathan? Probably not. Will the LP shave enough votes off of McCain in the Mountain West to hurt him in the November election? Maybe. Will this lead the Republican Party to pay more attention to its limited government wing? Who knows?

It's tempting to think of Libertarianism as nothing more than old-school Republicanism, but it's always been partially left-wing, drawing from a long history of American anarchism. The modern challenge is to unite those two wings--or, as magician (and stalwart Libertarian) Penn Jillette told me, "Convince the dope guys that the gun guys are O.K., and vice versa." And many Libertarians believe the time is now. It helps that the U.S. has been throttled for a century by two parties whose core differences are narrowing. The current general election has seemed at times a contest about who can crib off the other party's platform more, from McCain's enthusiasm for using government to fight global warming to Obama's hedging on warrantless wiretapping. For an electorate having a harder time distinguishing Coke from Pepsi, there's a thirst for something--anything--new.