Mainstreaming liberty: how five 20th century economists subtly remade the political landscape.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and Ronald Coase - Column

LIBERTARIANS LIKE to complain that things are going to hell. And they do have some evidence for the claim. The U.S. is six years into a recovery that's worse than most recessions, for example, even as many of the most burdensom new government programs, such as Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, have yet to be fully implemented.

But there's a different story to tell about what's happening in the world, one in which libertarian ideas have subtly entered mainstream thinking in a number of important but overlooked ways. We may or may not be living through a "libertarian moment," as Robert Draper suggested in a prominent New York Times Magazine cover story last summer. But we certainly exist in an era that has been shaped to a surprising extent by a philosophy of limited government and free markets.

Ideas that once seemed crazy are now taken for granted because of the hard work of intellectual entrepreneurs such as Milton Friedman Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Ronald Coase.

In his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman launched an intellectual battle to end the draft, an institution he deemed "inconsistent with a free society?" In a 1995 interview with reason's Brian Doherty, the University of Chicago economist said his role in eliminating military conscription in 1973 was his proudest accomplishment--as it should be. The practical effect that victory had on the lives of millions of young men and their families is immeasurable.

Friedman's ideas also revolutionized America's primary education system. Concluding that parents deserve to be empowered to choose the right school for their children, he broached the idea in "The Role of Government in Education," a 1955 journal article. "The administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education;' he wrote, "nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society." Also in Capitalism and Freedom, he developed the idea further, arguing that "the injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools:' While Friedman would have preferred a totally private system, he called for at least giving parents more control over which schools their children attend.

Back then and for decades afterward, intellectual opposition to school choice seemed insurmountable.Yet today the idea is being implemented in various forms across the land, from Chicago to Philadelphia to the whole state of Nevada and nearly all of New Orleans. In NewYork...