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thomblake comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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I recommend J.S. Mill's On Liberty - it's not necessarily argued entirely from consequentialist grounds, but that's basically where he's coming from. Online version
You cannot be honestly consequentialist without seeking the best empirical evidence you can get, and I find the idea that there might have been much useful evidence for best organization of government in 2009 back in 1869 extremely unlikely, so I'm going to completely disregard this recommendation.
I'm not at all sympathetic to the libertarian point of view, but I have to say that this does not sound like your true rejection. I find thomblake's Boyle's Law analogy quite apt: if you are really interested in thermodynamics, you have to start with material at the Boyle's Law level. Likewise, if you are truly interested in understanding libertarian thought, it behooves you to start with a basic text.
If someone wants to argue for libertarianism versus status quo on consequentialist and empirical grounds, it stands to reason they should have some idea about status quo, what a person writing in 1869 couldn't possibly have without breaking causality.
I'm not saying Mill doesn't make good deontologist arguments, as these can be timeless, I'm simply not interested in deontology here.
You seem to have missed the part where thomblake claims J. S. Mills more-or-less originated consequentialism.
Seriously, asking for a reference on LW, getting one, and dismissing it without even flipping through it? Lame.
ETA: My bad -- you did not ask for the reference. I am lame.
Wasn't it ciphergoth who asked, not taw?
Your celebration of ignorance angers me. You asked for a recommendation and got one from probably one of the best-qualified here to answer that question.
Really, it's a very short book. And it's one of the basic works on classical liberalism, one of the foundations (along with Locke's Second Treatise on Government) of all current discourse on liberalism.
Mill is arguably the fellow who invented consequentialism (with a hat tip to Bentham, and J.S. Mill's father). It's like if someone referred you to Boyle's Law and you insisted someone from the 17th century couldn't possibly have anything useful to say about physics.
EDIT: correction - as noted above, it was not taw who asked for a recommendation in the first place. Mea culpa.
By this logic, one could also argue in favor of Newton's theories on alchemy because he essentially invented classical mechanics.
Consequentialism is a type of formalization of ideas on ethics, which are inherently arbitrary. Theories of political structure deal with empirical matters of actual results. taw asserts that someone in the 17th century would have had no empirical data relevant to modern govenment, an assertion that is, if not obviously correct, at least defensible to the extent that society has changed since then.