The problem with Peter Suderman's argument

Libertarian Peter Suderman deploys a familiar kind of argument:

No, I don't think this is a failure of leadership so much as a feature of democratic politics -- and a reminder of how unpleasant and unsatisfying to nearly everyone the business of politics can be.

Democratic politics is a messy business. It's disorganized and frantic and unpredictable and frustrating. Politics is a matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise....

...

Given my libertarian streak, I'd also add a final thought: The way to avoid the maddening convulsions of politics isn't to change them, or rise above them, or move past them, or transform them, or whatever the trendy term of art is on any given day. It's to avoid them -- and reduce their power to hold sway over how we live. And the more decisions about our lives and welfare we put in the hands of politicians, the harder that will be to do.

It's kind of a sly move that you get from many small-government types, that goes something like this:

1. Politics--the collective activity of everyone in the country deciding laws--sucks, and ends in sucky results.
2. It is better to have less of a sucky thing.
   
3. Therefore there should be "less" politics. (1, 2)
   
4. We should support policies that make government--and therefore, the sphere of politics--"smaller". (3)

There are a couple of problems with this argument. In the first place, (2) is not necessarily true--you may not want less of a sucky thing, if the alternatives are even suckier. There is ample empirical evidence that health care systems that feature more government involvement than ours are more efficient and lead to better results than our system. This doesn't mean that such a system wouldn't suck: it's just that it would suck significantly less than the status quo. To turn Suderman's invocation of Churchill on its head: single-payer is the worst health care system, except for all the others.

Second, if you delve a little further into (1), it becomes apparent that it doesn't make sense to use this claim about the activity of politics in general (which Suderman identifies as the "matter of shouting, and dissent, and deal-making, and strategy, and slippery rhetoric, and compromise" that accompanies law making) as a stepping stone to a claim about preferring a specific, first-order set of policies (i.e., libertarian ones). The reason is that, after a moment's reflection, we see that what is actually maddening about politics isn't the process itself, so much as the dismal first-order results it produces. If we lived in a world in which the shouting was every bit as loud, the dissent every bit as pitched, the deal-making, strategy, slippery rhetoric, and compromise every bit as unsavory--but political success, for all that, could actually be achieved--then it wouldn't be very maddening at all. The source of the frustration isn't that mean people on TV yell--it's that, despite sweeping Democratic majorities, meaningful health care reform still goes down in flames. Given all this, it hardly solves any problems to say that, hey, we should adopt a libertarian agenda since that will get this unsavory politics business out of our lives--because that's just coextensive with saying that we should abandon the (non-libertarian) first-order policies that I prefer, the very non-enactment of which is causing my resentment of politics in the first place.

So, nice try libertarians. But if you want to make your case for a specific set of policies, it's going to have to be a substantive one made on the merits, not this "hey-ain't-politics-a-drag-I-know-let's-abolish-entitlements-then-there-won't-be-so-much-politics" mumbo-jumbo.