Michael Strong (Be the Solution) converted from left-liberalism to libertarianism due to the unambiguous superiority of, in Hayek’s terms, the creative powers of a free civilization as compared to the public choice process:
My favorite example of the comparison is the fact that by the mid-1980s a University of Chicago computer scientist could point out that any decent university in the U.S. had more computing power than did the entire Soviet Union, despite the fact that the Soviet Union had some of the best mathematicians on earth and had dedicated significant government resources towards developing a supercomputer to compete with the Cray. When one thinks of the thousands and thousands of incremental innovations that resulted in the U.S. IT industry, each of which not only required a scientific and engineering innovation, but also an entrepreneurial innovation to create low-cost, high quality components at scale, one realizes that it is absurd to expect teams of smart, frightened mathematicians in Soviet labs to compete with the U.S. entrepreneurial innovation machine. They didn’t stand a chance, and their obvious failure was not because they weren’t smart enough, but it was because there is no way that one deliberate government-mandated initiative (or four, or five, or twenty, or fifty government-mandated initiatives) can compete over time with a rich, diverse, open entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In the same way, Strong would like to us to move towards a Cambrian explosion in government.