FEW INDIVIDUALS HAVE had a bigger impact on the libertarian movement than David Boaz, the long-time executive vice president of the Cato Institute, D.C.’s most prominent think tank. For decades, virtually every idea and policy utterance that Cato published crossed his desk at some point, where it was scanned not just for grammar and punctuation but for coherence, persuasiveness, and ideological seriousness.
He also put his own thoughts out into the world, in innumerable columns, articles, and policy papers. In 1997, he published Libertarianism: A Primer, an encyclopedic yet succinct account of libertarian thought rich with real-world examples of how free speech, free trade, and the free movement of people created a richer and more interesting world. In 2015, he published an updated and revised version called The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom, which covered issues such as post-9/11 surveillance, “forever wars,” the financial crisis, and Obamacare, along with libertarian successes in trade, drug policy, lifestyle issues, and other areas. If libertarians believed in required reading, these two volumes would be on that list.
Boaz recently turned 70 and gave a keynote address in February in Washington, D.C., at LibertyCon, the annual gathering of Students for Liberty. Nick Gillespie caught up with him at Reason’s Washington office to discuss disarray in the libertarian movement, why he thinks the nonaggression principle and cosmopolitanism form the core of the movement, why libertarians can never seem to take wins, and whether there’s anything to look forward to in a rematch of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Reason: Having been in the libertarian movement for nearly half a century, how do you assess the current state of libertarian ideas and the broader libertarian movement?
Boaz: I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. When I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian—but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement—who did we have as intellectuals? [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman and [Ludwig von] Mises.
It was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in ’74—which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. Then in 1975, [Robert] Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put
