I tend to think that the old adage "he who pays the piper picks the tunes" applies in this case as well.

I traced some of the money and connections of the Marginal Revolution bloggers and summarized it in this essay:
Charles Koch and Libertarianism - How to "Buy" a University

Your outlook is sympathetic to people like Cowen so you don't see the intellectually shoddy arguments he supplies. The most damning thing about the libertarian movement as a valid philosophical development is that it has failed to get adopted anywhere else in the world. In the US it is kept alive by the infusion of money from the wealthy backers. If it had something useful to contribute to human thought it wouldn't be on artificial life support.

The fact that it turned out to be useful to the plutocrats who run the US as a way to provide some intellectual veneer to a worldview based upon greed has allowed it to ally with the GOP and sustained it longer than would have happened otherwise. In countries where the plutocracy is not as strong there is no such movement.

On the other hand a real breakthrough like Jefferson's needs no wealthy (and secret) backers to resonate everywhere.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape