Archive for David Boaz

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute.

Drug Decriminalization Has Failed?

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.” (He’s starting to repeat himself.) In his May 9 column, “Ron Paul’s Land of Second-Rate [...]

24Aug2011 | David Boaz | 7 comments | Continued

The Politics of Freedom

Thomas Paine said that freedom had been hunted and harassed around the world and that only America offered it a home. Today, it seems to many Americans that freedom is on the run here, too. War and taxes, the nanny state and the Patriot Act, unsustainable entitlements—all threaten the liberty we enjoy as Americans. But [...]

1May2008 | David Boaz | 8 comments | Continued

More Public Investment Needed?

It must be something in the water. Robert Kuttner is the latest writer from the Boston suburbs to complain that Americans don’t spend enough of their hard-earned money on “public investment.” In a column that the Washington Post titled “Public Parsimony, Private Affluence” (November 29, 1999), Kuttner concluded that “paradoxically, a period of unprecedented private [...]

1Mar2000 | David Boaz | 1 comment | Continued

Come to America, John Paul

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and editor of The Libertarian Reader and Liberating Schools. You don’t have to be Catholic to admire Pope John Paul II’s role in undermining communism in Europe and his courageous visit to Cuba last year. Who else in the world could make Fidel Castro broadcast [...]

1Feb1999 | David Boaz | 1 comment | Continued

Libertarianism in Japan

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute. This is adapted from the preface for the Japanese edition of his book Libertarianism: A Primer. The publication of a primer on libertarianism in Japan is another sign of two heartening developments: the continuing process of the world’s people being drawn closer together, and the [...]

1Jan1999 | David Boaz | 0 comments | Continued

Whose Kids Are They?

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer (Free Press). This article is adapted from his foreword to the new edition of The Twelve-Year Sentence: Radical Views of Compulsory Schooling edited by William F. Rickenbacker (Fox and Wilkes). Rereading The Twelve-Year Sentence a quarter-century after it was [...]

1Oct1998 | David Boaz | 1 comment | Continued

Competition and Cooperation

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, is author of Libertarianism: A Primer and editor of The Libertarian Reader (both published by The Free Press, 1996). Defenders of the market process often stress the benefits of competition. The competitive process allows for constant testing, experimenting, and adapting in response to changing situations. It [...]

1Sep1997 | David Boaz | 3 comments | Continued

What Big Government Is All About

This article is excerpted from Libertarianism: A Primer. Government has an important role to play in a free society. It is supposed to protect our rights, creating a society in which people can live their lives and undertake projects reasonably secure from the threat of murder, assault, theft, or foreign invasion. By the standards of [...]

1Apr1997 | David Boaz | 1 comment | Continued

Private Property from Soweto to Shanghai

A trip around the world provides evidence of just how wrong Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in his influential book The Affluent Society. (Granted, one need not go nearly so far to find such evidence.) Galbratith observed that everywhere one looked, privately provided goods and services — homes, automobiles, factories, "handsomely packaged products" — [...]

1Nov1989 | David Boaz | 0 comments | Continued

Liberalism and Change

Mr. Boaz is vice president for public policy affairs at the Cato Institute. The United States is a society based on change. We have no cultural memory of generations or centuries when life remained much the same. The one constant to which Ameri cans have become accustomed is change. Many explanations can be adduced for [...]

1Nov1985 | David Boaz | 0 comments | Continued

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    42 queries. 1.843 seconds