The notion that there is no regulation outside the government is simply wrong. Profit-loss, competition for market-share, and tort law are real regulators, real authorities that protect consumers, enable innovation, and punish offenders without restricting freedom.

The Holy Father avoids this muddled thinking, recognizing that the market is a humanizing place of exchange.

If Mr. Reno wanted to critique libertarians, he could start with those who support abortion (what about the individual?) and gay marriage (marriage pre-dates the State and falls outside legislative revision)

He could even critique the tendency (shared with Progressives) of some libertarians to the Whig Theory of History.

Failing to distinguish dystopian anarchists from libertarians concerned about the COERCIVE authority of the State? Intellectually dishonest.

Beyond that, however, I have found that a great many people with credentials in their particular field are not at all knowledgeable in that field, the result of the collapse of intellectual and academic standards in a great many disciplines as a concomitant of the rise of post-modernist deconstructionism. In my own field of history, for example, I find plenty of Ph.D.s who simply do not have mastery of the basic facts (e.g., chronology) or understanding of historical methods, or the use of evidence. They begin with a conclusion largely determined by an ideological bias and work backwards through the body of evidence to cherry pick and rearrange facts into what appears (to them) to be an irrefutable argument. I end up refuting a lot of those.

What has happened in the last decade or so to undermine the “authority” of the credentialed is broad-based access to a vast array of information via the internet. This makes it difficult for the credentialed idiot to argue from authority, because arguments that appear to defy common sense can be fact-checked, countervailing arguments can be identified and evaluated, and in general, nobody gets by on faith alone, anymore.

Which, overall, is a good thing. Trust facts, not persons.

As that eminent Conservative authoritarian, William F. Buckley famously observed, it would be better to be governed by five hundred names picked at random from the phone book than by the entire faculty of Harvard University.

Also, what’s with these Catholic intellectuals (e.g., Thomas Woods) connected with the Von Mises Institute at Auburn who despise Abraham Lincoln as a tyrant?

It is also a mistake to think of liberals as ‘anti-authoritarian.’ Many libertarians make the mistake of thinking that it is possible for the government to be entirely nuetral on questions of morality. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Liberals are not interested in scrapping authority per se, but rather want to replace traditional authority and its Christian morality with a new and ‘progressive’ authority imposing a new morality.

Finally, conservatism can have national variants. One of the points of being conservative is that there is not a one-size-fits-all form of government. Within the American tradition, conservatism has always comfortably occupied a classically liberal framework. I see no major break from Burke here.

I don’t know that one (Right or Left) is more or less likely to reject authority. I think each rejects authority over differing aspects of life.

“The Right,” for example, particularly those with a bit of a libertarian streak, seem to reject political-and-associated types of authority. As you say, they support the idea that government should just “get out of the way,” particularly when it comes to such issues as the free market. Many (most?) of the Tea-Partiers, however, would probably also identify as social conservatives, and are (or at least profess to be) quite happy accepting divine/Biblical authority over their own lives, and in fact could arguably be said to endorse the advancement government authority on such issues as abortion and gay marriage.

The Left, it seems, is precisely the opposite. While they are (mostly, at least the ones we’re talking about here) loathe to accept authority over their personal lives (say abortion, gay marriage, etc…) they are precisely the ones arguing for greater authority in political-and-associated arenas.

So I’m not sure that the Right or Left is more or less guilty of rejecting authority – it seems that the question is more about whose authority, and in what arenas of life, is being rejected.