Until recently, I paid little attention to libertarians. Ron Paul's vision of people relying only on family, friends and neighbors for relief from disasters of Hurricane Katrina magnitude strikes me as sheer fantasy. And the Koch brothers' get-government-out-of-our-lives version looks like a rationalization for limitless corporate power.

But thoughtful voices on the libertarian right are offering a penetrating critique of the conventional pieties of both liberals and conservatives and scrambling ideological categories in the process.

Previously in this space, I barely touched on one example: the libertarians' defense of a guaranteed basic income, a more radical redistributive transfer measure than anything currently being touted by liberals. Filling in the story makes clearer how useless the conventional ideological pigeonholes are for really understanding anything.

Writing in Commentary, Arthur C. Brooks, president of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, says it's naive to think that private charity is an adequate safety net. He calculates that if we spread across "the 48 million Americans receiving food assistance" the $40 billion that Americans give annually to human-service organizations, that would "come to just $847 per person per year."

The self-styled "bleeding heart" libertarians understand, as some in Congress seem not to, that no one can feed a family for a year on $847, an agreement with liberals that government has to play a role in guaranteeing a certain minimum standard of living.

But what deeply troubles the pro-redistribution libertarians is the immense, intrusive government bureaucracy cast up by the New Deal, the Great Society and their successors. By treating their clients like children, the faceless bureaucrats administering the government safety net undermine their clients' sense of responsibility, sap their initiative and diminish their freedom.

Liberals react badly when conservatives insist on requirements like mandatory drug testing to qualify for public assistance.

But it's because liberals, no less than conservatives, insist that public assistance programs target certain populations deemed "deserving" that these programs have to be administered by hordes of functionaries making sure that nobody gets away with anything.

Leaving aside the dollar cost of the machinery for policing the boundary between the truly needy and the slackers, the greater cost of doing that, say the libertarians, is a massive invasion of privacy and assault on autonomy. Writes Matt Zwolinski of the University of Dan Diego, thwarting freeloaders requires "states to possess a tremendous amount of information about some of the most intimate aspects of people's lives. It might require knowing how much they earn from work, how much support they ... could receive from relatives, how much effort they have expended on finding a job ... whether they have spent their money on ... frivolous luxuries, etc. The answers to these questions ... could only be uncovered through the analysis of a massive amount of private information. The collection and verification of that information, in turn, would require a large, powerful, and expensive bureaucratic machinery ... which threatens ... values of freedom (and) privacy ... ."

While not in favor of the government cutting a check to Bill and Melinda Gates along with ones to single mothers juggling three jobs, the libertarians propose that we replace the entire crazy-quilt welfare-state structure with a basic guaranteed income and just forget about straining to exclude the undeserving.

This puts them at odds, not only with conventional liberals, but with conservatives like Congressman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who favors draconian cuts in the safety net lest it turn into "a hammock of dependency." The basic-income advocates believe, contrary to the congressman, that it isn't the government check that encourages dependency and irresponsibility. It's the government micromanagement of the recipients' lives that comes with the check. If that's right, then establishing an income floor and otherwise leaving people to their own devices will restore a sense of responsibility, spur initiative and enlarge liberty.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says we already have a highly successful no-questions-asked government transfer program in Social Security, but a better analog to the libertarians' proposal is Brazil's decade-old Bolsa Familia program.

As the Washington Post reported, the government gives poor families enough cash to raise them above the poverty line, requiring only that any children in the family stay in school. When the program was proposed, many objected that it was a massive taxpayer ripoff. Rather than wrestle with that thorny problem, Brazil just finessed it.

Today, the program benefits 14 million people, moderating the economic gulf between Brazil's poorest and wealthiest.

Almost invisibly, outside the venues where political labels masquerade as actual thoughts, the "bleeding heart" libertarians are challenging the bromides of both liberals and conservatives in a way that merits our attention.

Leon Galis, a retiree living in Athens, is an occasional contributor to the editorial page. Send email to lgalis@icloud.com.