RE: “…constantly trying to be something different immediately instead of asking the best route to get there.”

It seems to me you are skipping over the main theme presented in the post.
It didn't advocate for immeidate swings to extremes. In my reading,,it addressed the issue of: how long do you just keep on asking questions while ignoring a growing problem.
Noting in life is a dead certain prediction about the future, so if we insist on it, we'll just stay stuck and allow the problem to overwhelm us.

I'm befuddled by your warnings about extremism while simultaneously admiring the libertarians' call for extreme measures of change. Isn't that self contradictory? Is it possible to be a conservative (as it relates to change) and a revolutionary (as it relates to libertarianism) at the same time?

The article is a typical one that doesn't really analyze the situation at all to come to its conclusions. The irony is that the people I've read that are most pessimistic are the libertarian types and they are calling for extreme measures (like totally changing how everything is done) since their view is that we are at a crisis of historical proportions because we've overreacted to all the little blips in the last 60 years. I have to say I find their exhortations pretty convincing.

Maybe it didn't get that bad because the government intervened to prevent it from getting that bad. Certainly the Treasury Department took unprecedented steps.

Maybe if you're not overreacting, it's because you're not paying attention.

The danger of overreaction is seldom overreaction per se,. It''s locking into irreversible paths due to overreaction. The amount of cautious deliberation before acting at all ougtht to depend, to a considerable degree, on the degree of irreversible consequences, not all risk equally.

The Iraq war did not take irreversible consequences into account enough.

On the other hand, experiments with ethanol, while having produced some negative results, are not irreversible. Risk of that order is acceptable to me, beacuse even where ethanol fails, it's an object lesson in what needs to be adjusted or done differently

This is where the damaging effects of special interests play a huge role.
Their influence interferes with flexibility at every stage: the pre-action deliberative process, the execution of a plan of acton and the change of course when results aren't what was expected.

Making every issue into a political attack weapon rather than a difference of opinion doesn't help either.