I should have added literature.
I was just speaking with my wife, who has an MA in literature. She reminded me of Dickens, whose Oliver Twist was about the very serious limits of private charity in an apathetic government.
Dickens was an effective destroyer of libertarian "ideals". He made a career of skewering the arrogance and penury of private charity. He didn't let people feel comfortable about their motives for helping the poor, instead shining a light on how most of them were in it to make themselves look better at the expense of people who needed their help. Some of his self-proclaimed do-gooders are the most vicious characters in all of his books.
His real takedown of libertarianism came from putting a human face on the poor and ignored in society. He made the haves of society realize that private charity wasn’t enough to help the less fortunate, it never would be, and they started doing something about it. I don't think we can even begin to estimate his influence in making societies start looking for more realistic solutions to helping the poor.
Upton Sinclair should also be mentioned for making libertarianism look like a fraud by showing how a society with zero regulations on the "free market" was literally killing us and making us sick. Teddy Roosevelt read The Jungle and sent a couple of men to Chicago to see if Sinclair was exaggerating about conditions in the meat packing industry. They reported that, if anything, Sinclair understated things. The Pure Food and Drug Act followed shortly afterwards. (TR had no trouble believing it, since he knew from personal experience, that canned meat supplied to the army was sometimes rotten in the can!)
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