David Boaz, the long-time executive vice president of the Cato Institute, died this week at a hospice at age 70 after a battle with cancer.
Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 into a political family whose members served as prosecutors, congressmen and judges. So, as he said in a 1998 interview for my book, he was the kind of guy who “stayed up late watching the New Hampshire primary when I was 10.” Capitalist Radicals: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.
In the early to mid-1970s, Boaz was a young conservative activist writing conservative papers at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student from 1971 to 1975. Working with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the national organization, he held various positions in the office from 1975 to 1978, including editing its magazine; new guard.
In the 1970s, YAF not only viewed itself as College Republicans but also “organized around a set of ideas,” he recalled. When he started joining YAF, he already considered himself a libertarian, but viewed libertarianism as “a brand of conservatism. But during my time at YAF, as I got to know people in the libertarian movement, I began to Believing that conservatives and libertarians are not the same thing, I don’t feel comfortable working in the YAF office.
Now, I fully understand that libertarianism is not the same as right-wing conservatism, “I pestered Ed Crane to get me a job to get me away from it all.” In the mid-1970s, when Crane represented the Libertarian Party (LP) Boaz knew him from the Conservative Political Action Conference and stayed in touch with Crane when he ran Cato in San Francisco from 1977 to 1981. (Clark is officially an independent due to voting rights requirements, but he is a member of the limited partners and campaigns under the limited partner brand.)
Boas then worked from 1978 to 1980 with the now-defunct Council for Competitive Economics (CCE), which he described as “a free-market group of businessmen who opposed not only regulations and taxes but also subsidies and tariffs” …in effect, it was to become the business front group for the libertarian movement. He left CCE to work on Ed Clark’s 1980 LP presidential campaign, in which Boaz wrote, commissioned, and edited campaign issue papers, as well as by various ghosts for Clark. Boaz wrote chapters of the official campaign book and also worked with Clark on speeches and road work.
Boas’s campaign received just over 1% of the total vote, or 920,000 votes cast, a record held until Gary Johnson’s 2012 campaign (counted as raw votes) and 2016 campaign (counted as percentage calculation) was broken. “The Clark campaign was organized around communicating ideas in a way that didn’t go beyond what was politically reasonable,” Boas recalled in a 2022 interview. “When John Anderson came in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized that he would provide a more prominent third-party alternative and perhaps take away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6%. We only get one percent. Even though we said, ‘This is unprecedented, blah blah blah,’ the truth is we were very disappointed.
Boas began working at the Cato Institute in 1981 when it moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as executive vice president and served until his retirement in 2023. ’s leading editorial voice, setting the tone for the best-funded institutes and the institutional voice of widespread liberal advocacy. Cato, under Boaz’s guidance, offered a policy of measured, bourgeois activist outreach designed to appeal to a broad audience of ordinary Americans, not just those steeped in particular liberal movement heroes , style and people in worry.
Boaz, for example, was an early voice in the forward-thinking push for drug legalization in the bastion of cultural power in America in 1988 New York Times The op-ed presciently concluded: “We can either escalate the war on drugs, which will have dire consequences for civil liberties and privacy rights, or find a way to exit gracefully. Exiting should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use. ;This is simply an acknowledgment that the costs of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates, and restrictions on our personal freedoms—are too high.
Boaz has written what is still the best one-volume discussion of liberal philosophy and practice for an outward-looking audience, leaving out practical policy issues while also providing an understanding of the philosophical reasons behind liberal beliefs to avoid violence. A close, welcoming feel. Liberalism: A Primer 1997.
The interpretive style of Boaz’s book is rooted in all the splendor of America’s founding, cooperation, personal responsibility, charity, and a civil society free from coercion. He explains the necessity and purpose of property, profit, entrepreneurship, and how freedom contributes to economic health and a prosperous society, and how government intervenes in the growth properties of the natural free system. He discusses the nature and excesses of government in practice and applies liberal perspectives to many specific policy issues: health care, poverty, budgets, crime, education, and even “family values.” Boaz’s book is detailed, even-toned, erudite, and thoughtful, and its purpose is to persuade, not to sour the normalcy with your radicalism.
I met Boaz while interning at Cato in 1991 (and later as an employee until 1994), a young liberal from a rougher, perhaps less civilized country whom I was preparing to branch of radicalism. As a supervisor and colleague, Boaz was a civilized adult, stylish, almost urbane, but still patient with the wilder young liberals, many of whom he interacted with.
His institutional continuity – even though it was less than two decades old at the time – had a quiet impact on the young crew. It gives a sense that one need not frantically demand immediate victory, no matter how morally urgent the cause of freedom may be. Boaz’s cool sense of historical sweep as a living man and his vast knowledge of the history of classical liberal thought were an antidote to despair and opportunism for the young liberals with whom he worked.
Anthology edited by him Liberal Reader: Classic and Contemporary Works from Laozi to Milton Freeman——Published in 1997 to accompany his primer, this book is a compact testament to the rich and long tradition of liberalism, showing that it is in many ways a core principle of America’s founding and, to a large extent, of the entire Enlightenment and everything good , core principles of what is just and good. This anthology features the best heroes of liberalism, ancient and modern, such as Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Lysander from previous centuries Spooner and Benjamin Constant, as well as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig Ludwig von Mises begins in the 20th century and provides broader context through older sources ranging from the Bible to Lao Tzu. He also rightly sees the liberal tradition of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimke, and Sarah Grimke as central to the struggle for women’s and black liberation. Everyone put forward their own opinions.
In 1998, when asked why he chose to push unpopular and ridiculed ideas to cultural and political heights, Boaz told me: “I think it’s satisfying and interesting. I believe in these values, And on some level, I believe dedication is right—but it does feel right, and on other levels, it’s not just right, it’s right. pleasurethat’s what I want to do.
“I love intellectual combat, polishing arguments, and I also hate people who want to use force against other people, so part of that is I’m motivated to try to fight those people. I wake up every morning and listen to NPR and my partner , “Why do you want to wake up angry every morning? “First of all, I need to know what’s going on in the world, and secondly, damn, I want to know what these people are doing, it’s such an outrage what they’re doing, and I don’t want to! I want to fight them. For decades, David ·Boaz has been at the forefront of the mainstream spread of liberal attitudes, ideas, and concepts.
