I think you'll find the extreme cases (totalitarian economic controls vs. complete laissez faire) to be helpful to look at so as to challenge the way you're framing the spectrum.
Also, politics and economics go hand in hand, economics being - in terms of what it is usually actually used for - the study of how political actions affect the economy. For example, David Friedman argues that courts would produce better rulings if they were not run as a monopoly, and that the same is true with laws and regulations themselves. So at the limit it is not easy to separate them.
Another example is the libertarian argument that pollution is largely enable by weakened property rights due to laws passed in the 19th century (in the US case) preventing torts against polluters, and from the basic fact that the government essentially owns the waters and airways. These types of arguments tend to undercut the whole divide between economics and politics.
[see 'Update' below]
I know discussions of actual applied politics are to be avoided. I don't want to start one.
But I thought LessWrong people might be a source for where the best arguments have been made for libertarianism in the economic sense (not why you should stay out of people's bedrooms). Even better, arguments for some degree of socialism in the same place would be nice. It seems there is a natural continuum. To pick one specific realm: anywhere from 0% to 100% of a person's income could be allocated for redistribution to even things out. Where to put that number will inevitably be a matter of grubby politics (won't it?). But still, arguments for why we should have a low number or a high number must involve some basic disagreements which could be (hopefully) separated into different values, different estimated probabilities, and different attempts to apply a rational analysis.
The world is dripping with partisan analyses along these lines (with "warfare" rules). Where are the best ones that avoid that failing?
I considered posting this under "dumb questions" but I judged that it's not really a question about LessWrong per se.
Update: Thank you to all who took the time to reply. Perhaps I'm learning about how some would start applying consequentialism to a real-life problem. I expected people to point me to discussions about what's right and what's fair -- which is what I'd expect in most other forums. But I guess here my responders so far are taking this to be a sort of question for technocrats who can work out the utility. So my next question will be about consequentialism once I've thought about it a little more.