David Boaz, the Cato Institute’s long-time executive vice president, left us last week. His passing was an obvious personal loss to his family and friends. It was a professional loss for the Cato Institute. It was political loss for libertarians....
The post David Boaz: Practical Libertarianism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
David Boaz, the Cato Institute’s long-time executive vice president, left us last week. His passing was an obvious personal loss to his family and friends. It was a professional loss for the Cato Institute. It was political loss for libertarians. And for the larger conservative movement as well.
The evidence is overwhelming that … morality is best modeled and taught, rather than imposed with threats of prosecution and prison.
Back in the mists of time — sometime in 1978, I believe — I ran into a Stanford University graduate student by the name of Williamson Evers. I was in law school at the time but was devoting much of my time to journalistic and political endeavors with a libertarian bent. He told me I should visit the Cato Institute in San Francisco. So I drove up into the city, a rare trek for me, and met Ed Crane, Cato’s founding president, Charles Koch, who provided Cato’s seed capital, and David Boaz. (READ MORE from Doug Bandow: Iran Tries To Stem Religious Conversions From Islam)
It was my first contact with organized, institutional libertarians.
It was a transformative experience. Although I signed on with the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign, which brought me to Washington, I was hooked on the libertarianism. While in the campaign I began writing for Roy Childs, editor of Libertarian Review and later Cato’s first foreign policy analyst. When Cato moved to DC I reestablished contact with Ed and David. When my libertarian-minded boss, Martin Anderson, who was Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, left the White House, I headed into what I considered to be the realist libertarian camp, determined to bring a hardline commitment to liberty to the rather barren territory of Washington, D.C.
I started out at Inquiry magazine and soon ended up at Cato. At the latter it was immediately evident that David was essential to the institute’s success. Ed was Cato’s outsize outside face, driven by policy but unconstrained by management theorems. The world incorrectly thought Cato was an acronym, but when it came to operations it really did stand for Crane and the Others.
Except when it came to David. He, too, was driven by a commitment to liberty. And he promoted a free society in multiple ways. For instance, he worked on the Ed Clark presidential campaign in 1980, a serious effort perhaps unmatched until former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson’s run decades later. But it was at Cato where David combined two roles, fleshing out libertarian ideas and turning them into practical policy proposals, and ensuring that their presentation was professional and persuasive.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the latter role. The libertarian movement was by turns enthusiastic, rabid, antagonistic, didactic, passionate, angry, anarchic, careless, revolutionary, and more. David was calm, deliberative, intellectual, thoughtful, principled, and, above all, professional. He introduced many to libertarianism with his seminal books, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and The Libertarian Reader. He also wrote shorter though important pieces throughout his career — an early article in the New York Times before drug legalization was popular fueled the fight against prohibition.
Although David never hesitated to insist that he was a liberal, in the classical rather than modern sense, and not a conservative, his personal life illustrated his commitment to libertarianism, not libertinism. He was quite abstemious: no smoking or drinking, and certainly no illicit substances of the sort that often showed up at libertarian gatherings. I started at his position, but eventually gave in to the temptations of wine.
More seriously, gay and in a committed relationship that lasted three decades until his death, he long ago made the case for gay activists to be pro-family: “Gay leaders would be better off making a pro-family case, playing up their commitment to their partners and their desire for a legal union.” He also challenged social conservatives — especially those once and twice divorced, often adulterous leaders on the right who lecture the rest of us on Western civilization — about the real remedies for very genuine social problems. With some asperity, he observed: “you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and not letting them adopt orphans.”
Disagree with him you may, but this was not a rhetorical flourish. He was pushing conservatives toward better policies. Surely rampant adultery, which rarely seemed to attract the same high decibel denunciations from political social conservatives, was a bigger threat to the family than gay marriage (which, in the interests of full disclosure, I opposed in favor of civil partnerships).
However, it was in ensuring that Cato’s multiple products were serious, persuasive, well-written, and, above all, professional that David was essential. I always did what I could to avoid the office — working at home and traveling often. I was particularly determined to evade dealing with the details of production, preferring to write and speak and leave the rest to others. David, though a fine writer and speaker, recognized the economic principle of comparative advantage and devoted himself to the tougher but necessary work of professionalizing Cato’s work. Without that, the Institute would not have achieved the reputation for scholarship that it enjoys today.
In the battle for the future of conservatism, libertarians might currently look to be the losers. Certainly, David was no Pollyanna, untethered from the reality of current politics. Yet he also looked to the future beyond the next administration and was optimistic. The evidence is overwhelming that economic liberty in its many forms has delivered a freer as well as more prosperous society. That morality is best modeled and taught, rather than imposed with threats of prosecution and prison. And that the promiscuous war-making of establishment conservatives and their Neocon allies is just another form of Big Government social engineering, only far more destructive than the New Deal, Great Society, and other attempts to remake Americans at home. (READ MORE: Leftists Blatantly Celebrate Lenin’s Legacy in New Book)
David continued to work and promote liberty even as his health flagged, a sign of his dedication to creating a better future for other people. His departure is a loss personally and professionally. I remember someone once complimented me on my fine drug legalization piece in the New York Times. I have written (and spoken) a lot on the issue and was tempted to cheerfully accept the accolade. However, conscience got the better of me and I had to fess up that it was written by David, not me. It was not the only time that I wished I had written something that bore David’s name. RIP faithful crusader on behalf of liberty.
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