If there’s one thing liberals and libertarians can agree on, it’s Texas Hold-Em, and since the “liberaltarian” meme hit just before Tuesday’s poker night with an assortment of professional lefty types, it inevitably came up around the table. I can’t say I’m any more optimistic about the prospects for collaboration—there’s nothing like six years of a unified GOP Congress taking dictation from George Bush to make you forget how deep the difference in worldviews really is—but the conversation did at least help give me a sense of what issues need to be clarified before we have a sense of whether something like this is feasible. Here’s what’s been kicking around my head since then.

• What are we talking about, anyway?

What exactly does a liberal/libertarian “alliance” mean? Do we all just add each other on MySpace? Because libertarians already advocate for and work toward “liberal” goals like drug reform or “conservative” ones like eminent domain reform when it suits them. So what would change? And who is the target audience here? Is it this an electoral strategy for Democratic politicians? Would there be manifestos?

As Virginia Postrel suggests, I think Brink’s analogy to conservative “fusionism” here is helpful: This is, in the first instance, a question of mutual perception—which sounds trivial, but I think isn’t for reasons I’ll lay out. Libertarians and traditionalists always had differences at least as fundamental as those dividing libertarians and liberals, and often enough that led to straightforward opposition on any number of issues. But the tendency was to approach those disagreements, when possible, as the starting points of a constructive debate over the optimal means to shared goals.

At the grassroots level, maybe this just means that libertarians start working with progressives locally, in support of particular candidates or issues, and see how much common ground there is. At the very least, a bit more personal contact might weaken the tendency of each to regard the other as some sort of abstract bogeyman.

At the level of public policy discussion, it might mean a shift in the kinds of considerations or concerns we each feel bound to address. For liberals, that would mean not taking the position of one Kos commenter that you “don’t give a fuck about the size of government or federal spending, so long as it is effective at what it sets out to do.” It would mean being attuned to how programs can produce their desired outcomes in the leanest and most market friendly way possible. The latter may just sound like common sense: Liberals are going to say that of course they don’t want their favored programs to be just pointlessly bloated or disruptive of markets. But the way the debate’s currently set up, that tends not to be how the discussion runs—precisely because of the sense that . Instead, one side complains that program X is inefficient, expensive, burdensome, etcetera, and the other circles the wagons in order to “save” the imperiled program. I don’t expect liberals to subordinate their other policy goals to an imperative to shrink government, but there’s no reason they couldn’t make it a desideratum within the parameters of those goals.

For libertarians, the shift would, in a way, be more drastic, and it’s not hard to imagine the purists’ complaints to what I’m about to suggest—since, in part, they’re my own too—but here goes: We accept that most of our fellow citizens want government to do be involved in a variety of spheres where we’d rather it weren’t, and try to figure out the most efficient, least intrusive, most autonomy-promoting way to satisfy that desire, with built-in sunsets when appropriate. (I say this bearing in mind the grim irony of the late Milton Friedman having designed income tax withholding.) This is apt to be something of an uncomfortable exercise—we’re in the habit of explaining why government programs should be eliminated, not dreaming up new ones. But then, that’s given us a lot of programs designed by people who don’t particularly care about keeping them small and minimally intrusive. We might call the goal here “elegant government,” by parallel with what programmers refer to as “elegant code“—if not a minimal state, then at least a minimalist one that aims to get more benefit from fewer moving parts.

A few instances of what I have in mind by way of illustration. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein have advanced the unfortunately-named but intriguing notion of “libertarian paternalism.” The idea here is that government can have a role in setting default rules, so that people are more prone to make decisions that reduce the likelihood they’ll need government assistance later, while still leaving people free to opt out of the defaults. Ron Bailey has endorsed a “mandatory insurance” scheme that would both require and subsidize basic private health coverage, which would serve the dual goals of creating universal access to healthcare and shifting us away from employer-based care, which has given us a nominally “free market” medical sector without the benefits of really competitive markets. I wrote an article a while back suggesting that we might have done better in the ongoing smoking ban debates by proactively promoting alternatives to the simple ban/no-ban frame, such as tradeable “smoking variances” for liquor licenses, issued at some ratio that creates a more even balance of environments.

• What’s in this for liberals, anyway?

They just had a big electoral win, after all. Why should they risk alienating any of their existing constituency when, as Matt Yglesias has put it, “to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion.” Which is cute, but irrelevant. “Libertarians” in the sense of “people who talk a lot about ‘self-ownership’ and are steeped in Hayek and Rothbard and Nozick” are pretty thin on the ground. But people with generally live-and-let-live social attitudes who dislike explosive spending growth and stifling regulation? I expect there are quite enough to make a difference at the margin—especially, as Dave observes with the West in play.

Mostly, though, this little team-up might be attractive to liberals for the same reason conservatives have kept our quarrelsome asses around all these years: We’re good intellectual cover. However thin on the ground, we’re overrepresented in the fusionist conservative movement’s intellectual caste. Think of a prominent “conservative” economist—say, the late Milton Friedman, currently adorning the cover of National Review—and there’s a fair chance you’ve actually got a libertarian in mind. The upshot has sometimes been that legislation that’s merely pro-business (which usually means pro-incumbent) passes for “pro-market.” Craft progressive legislation that they can sign onto and you “split the popular front,” as the Leninists used to say, driving a wedge between corporate interests and the economics writers they use to their advantage.

• Where’s the Beef?

Ezra Klein wants some policy specifics. I sketched a few above, but a few more can’t hurt. Since he mentions education, let me repeat a potential compromise that has been suggested before: Let us have vouchers, and you can pick the amount. Make them progressive if you like. Use them to delink education funding from local property taxes. The teacher unions will kick and scream, but every other liberal should see this as an opportunity to make primary education radically more egalitarian.

On the environment, I’m happy to be pretty flexible. Pollution is an externality imposed on others, and so a legitimate target of regulation on any version of libertarianism that allows for a state at all. (Actually, I tend to think a really hardcore libertarian view on which property rights are nigh-absolute would be effectively “green” beyond the wildest fantasies of Al Gore.) I’d just want any regulation to have the sorts of features that are, I think, increasingly conventional wisdom: Make use of markets when possible, specify ends rather than means (giving companies an incentive to find the most efficient ways of meeting targets), and so on.

As for reducing risk and inequality, I suppose I’m inclined to think that if you get policy right when it comes to “root causes,” as the lefties like to say, that will do more to address those concerns than any more specific attempt to remedy symptoms. The really pernicious sort of inequality—which takes the form of a persistent underclass—is bound up pretty tightly with a dysfunctional education system, and I expect focusing attention and resources on that problem will do more good than shuffling money around later. But I need to give this one some more thought and see whether I can spot any with ways of addressing those concerns that Our Folk might find less repugnant than the traditional progressive ones. I might be tempted to gesture in the direction of Charles Murray’s “Plan” if we didn’t already know how Ezra feels about that.

Anyway, for all the coalition talk over the past few days, my sense is that whatever fruit it bears will be more likely to be ad hoc and piecemeal than any grand realignment. Or as Ramesh Ponnuru puts it:

Those libertarians who put more emphasis on economic than social issues will probably vote most often for Republicans. Those who have the reverse priorities will probably vote most often for Democrats. And libertarians will keep sharing their ideas and confabbing with everyone, which is as it should be.

Sounds about right, for better or worse.