Attempts to craft articles with elaborate philosophical rationalizations are the kind of thing that conservatives of the Buckley era used to hate - so it is no surprise that their libertarian descendants are making the mistake of promoting progressive social Darwinism in the name of freedom.
Social Darwinism became eugenics. Yet if you ignore the specifics of staunch progressives like John Maynard Keynes and Oliver Wendell Holmes and H.G. Wells and focus on the intent, you see the sentiment is the same as modern libertarians when it comes to picking winners and losers - the first group wanted to use science to control evolution and the latter does the same thing, by denying science.
Oliver Wendell Holmes made it legal to sterilize prostitutes and retarded people because he believed they would give birth to more prostitutes and retarded people, a libertarian war on science of things like IVF sterilizes women the exact same way, by denying them access to medical care, at their choice, that can fix a problem that is nothing more than bad luck inside cells.
While it sounds like capitalism at work in the natural world, it isn't - you can't be the greatest country in the world and condemn people to illness and death because they were born unlucky. American values are that everyone gets the same chance, what social Darwinism, and the belief that any government involvement is bad, instead leads to is the belief that some people are born to nobility and some are not. That's how dictatorships and monarchies operate, not democracies. America is a 'liberal democracy' but let's get rid of the modern connotation of liberal and recall what that really meant to the Founding Fathers - it meant that everyone should have an equal chance and what they make of it is their own doing.
Condemning children to disease and death or parents to not having kids is not freedom, it is instead in defiance of exactly the thing that America has always aspired toward. When Emma Lazarus wrote in "The New Colossus" about the American version of the Colossus of Rhodes, the Statue of Liberty
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
she was giving hope to people who were condemned by accident of birth. Less invoked is the real take-home message, "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!", which was in reference to the artificial, entrenched social classes of Europe. Yet by denying any science that government or government-funded academics produce, due to them being political liberals, they are promoting the exact culture that made America great.
We have social equality, the CEOs of billion dollar companies still thank busboys for spilling water all over the table three times during dinner, and we have economic equality. Despite what progressive critics think, America is not made up of capitalist swine, you can't be capitalist when government controls 60 percent of the wealth, and despite what conservatives think, that system can work. In hindsight, the Reagan years and the Clinton years, dramatically different in the White House and control of Congress, still worked, though government controlled the bulk of the capital.
Social equality and economic equality has to mean medical equality.
When it comes to raw milk, the social Darwinism is 'we should not protect less educated people from being exploited by rich, educated elites who get paid to promote false science' because, well, they were born less smart. That is the thinking that got us 1920s tests that shuttled young students off into vocational classes and designated young future elites for college preparation. It is not much help to people, it is difficult to argue that the Centers for Disease Control is a bad thing because it is run by the government, and it opens itself up to exploitation of children. The argument that government cannot tell someone whether or not to poison their child is a difficult one to make.
The other argument turns science on its head, and it always goes something like, 'We lived on raw milk for thousands of years'. Sure we did, and a whole lot of people got sick and died. Is America of the libertarian and progressive movements desiring to bring back polio also? A great country keeps people who do not have the best immune system from dying, it does not say 'oh well, Darwin'. That argument would mean there
Strangely, high-profile conservative groups have lost sight of that in the post-Buckley era. Dealing with supposed conservatives in mainstream media corporations quickly shows they are just as bureaucratic and in love with their mechanisms and being social authoritarian as anyone in the Obama administration, they just claim to be conservative because they are too cheap to pay taxes.
