But I think that taw is poisoning the discourse, making it worse than it already is. It's a pretty common tactic to paint anyone outside the mainstream as an ideologue.

In what way is he "poisoning" the discourse? He didn't even use the term ideologue, and he explained in a later post why he thinks libertarianism is essentially deontological in nature. Accusing him of "making the discourse worse" only serves to itself worsen the discussion.

Quite frankly, in my experience with people arguing for libertarianism, it tends to be precisely what he describes--a lot of bottom-line faux-consequentialist arguments about why free market principles necessarily produce better results, combined with question-begging arguments that assume individual economic freedom as the value to be maximized.

As a concrete example, by almost any metric European-style socialized health care systems work empirically, objectively better. Given the high cost of trying untested systems and the general lack of predictive power demonstrated by current macroeconomics, I can't conceive of any coherent, consequentialist argument agaisnt the immediate utility of adopting such a system in the USA, yet most libertarians will argue until blue in the face that socialized health care is a terrible idea, in aparent defiance of reality.

EDIT: This comment was pretty promptly voted down to -2 for reasons not apparent to me. Any reasons other than disagreement?