Former Cato staffer and software developer Timothy B. Lee argues in The Return of Bottom-up Liberalism that generally speaking, libertarian philosophies have done very well in the policy arena over the past few decades:

Rather, what’s happened is that liberalism in general has internalized key libertarian critiques of earlier iterations of liberal thought, with the result that a guy with a largely Friedmanite policy agenda can plausibly call himself a liberal. And actually, this shouldn’t surprise us at all, because Friedman called himself a liberal too.

I think he’s absolutely right about that, at least in terms of economic policy. Even the much-maligned health care reform bill is very market-oriented in that it sets up a marketplace in which private insurers compete as opposed to establishing a new government-run insurer.