I think Obama's greatest accomplishment was the overhaul of military spending he worked with Secretary Robert Gates on at the start of his administration. I'm also highly supportive of his executive actions on immigration reform.

I find the Affordable Care Act to be difficult to evaluate. They made so many changes at once that it's hard to ascertain their net effect on health care overall. Yes, increases in health care costs have gone down. Yes, younger people are spending more on insurance that they probably don't need. Yes, there are multiple ways to improve the system which are not politically feasible.

I think Obama's biggest failure was Libya. The US should stop supporting rebellions, or invading countries. It's never clear what's going to happen when the revolutionaries take over, or the new regime is in place, and the war itself is always bad.

The issue I find most perplexing is wiretapping. It seems like Obama didn't do anything about it, and nobody really seems to have cared. Other failures can be explained away as the fault of Congress such as his failure to close Guatanamo Bay, but I don't think the wiretapping issue can.

One thing people don't talk about enough is the unprecedented slowdown in the growth of government spending these past few years. Look at what happened with nominal government spending. I think this is principally due to the Tea Party because it coincides with their rise and fall almost exactly, but I still think Obama's role in this brief change is an important one. Alex Tabarrok's views on the subject from 2008 come across to me as prescient.

Exit is the right strategy because if there is any hope for reform it is by casting the Republicans out of power and into the wilderness where they may relearn virtue. Libertarians understand better than anyone that power corrupts. The Republican party illustrates. Lack of power is no guarantee of virtue but Republicans are a far better – more libertarian – party out-of-power than they are in power. When in the wilderness, Republicans turn naturally to a critique of power and they ratchet up libertarian rhetoric about free trade, free enterprise, abuse of government power and even the defense of civil liberties.