My claim that libertarianism values ideals more than outcomes is based on the fact that one or more of its supporters in this thread have stated or implied it at least three times. One also gets the strong impression from the Libertarian Party platform that they, too, are obsessed with principles – there are few if any statements of social or economic objectives, only statements about “Freedom!”
But if what you say is true, then it does constitute a legitimate debate. My argument there would be that all historical experience seems to show that the kind of anti-government non-regulation proposed by libertarians ends up causing social strife and instability and great injustices, in labor markets, in health care, in the social safety net, in the ability of small businesses to compete fairly with giant multinationals, and throughout society.
There is, for example, as has so often been pointed out, no possible rational justification for running the most expensive yet one of the least efficacious health care systems in the world except the justification that says “Choice! Freedom! Rah!”. It’s one of several libertarian principles that have indeed gone mainstream, to the benefit of no one except enormous and entrenched health insurers and many providers. This is not a matter of political ideology, it’s a fairly objective matter of health care economics, an objective specialized field of economics that demonstrates the value of a broad-based universal collective approach to such an essential service. Libertarianism would never allow such a compromise of its sacred principles, no matter what the evidence, no matter how beneficial the outcome, and no matter how much money it saves.
To use the math metaphor, libertarians are like those who stick with arithmetic despite the fact that it’s been shown again and again that it cannot solve certain kinds of problems, but they stick with it anyway because they like the rules and are impressed as hell that it does solve certain categories of simple problems. So they don’t care that the answers they get for more complex problems lead them to design bridges that fall down and airplanes that can’t fly.