Liberty Matters

The Legacy of David Boaz

By: Andy Craig, Ilya Somin, Tarnell S. Brown, Aaron Powell, and Jonathan Blanks

David Boaz (August 29, 1953–June 7, 2024) was one of the most influential libertarians of the 20th century, and a driving force behind The Cato Institute for many decades.

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The breadth of his interests and his consistent application of his principles to real world challenges were obvious and inspiring to those who knew him. The authors in this series are connected by their work with Boaz and inspired by his demonstrated careful and courageous thought and action. Authors were asked to respond to one of two prompts: "What is an issue that you think David would want to bring forward today and what do you think he would have said about it?" or "What is an issue about which David's influence helped you see the importance, and how does what he taught you shape your thought about it?” On the one year anniversary of his death, we hope to show the continuing relevance of his legacy.

Perspective Essay David Boaz Understood Liberty and the Rule of Law are Inseparable

Andy Craig

I had the privilege of working with David Boaz for four years as his staff writer, the last of a dozen or so he brought into this role over the decades to help launch our careers. Working with David was not just a job, it was an education. It was also an opportunity to become a close friend as we spent the days discussing political philosophy, history, and the ideas to which he’d devoted his life.
I was already an eager young libertarian but David’s influence shaped how I view the world in ways I didn’t expect, deepening my understanding of these concepts as not just a litany of policy positions but a coherent set of fundamental principles.
David also brought a sense of historical perspective, a remarkable way to recognize the through-lines and craft a compelling narrative. I once remarked my favorite of his books was The Libertarian Reader, his selection of historical documents and excerpts. His characteristically deadpan reply was “so, the one full of stuff I didn’t write,” with a wry smile. But I meant it, including his prefatory explanations. We weren’t just promoting a niche 20th century ideology, but a heritage of moral progress stretching back to time immemorial.
One of these principles was a phrase David liked to use in his speeches, including the last one he gave to a Students for Liberty conference shortly before his death.
Asked to define the greatest libertarian accomplishment – and to David, “libertarian” was nothing more than a radical application of liberal principles – he would initially point to the abolition of slavery. Pressed further, he hit upon the true heart of the matter: “bringing power under the rule of law.”
Unfortunately, not everyone in the fractious libertarian movement appreciates this central importance of law. Law, after all, is how the state imposes its will, how it wields its hated monopoly on force. But it is also how we constrain the state, how we replace the arbitrary rule of kings and despots with predictable rules and impersonal due process. Through the rule of law and its ultimate manifestation, constitutionalism, we find the only mechanism which has ever succeeded over the long term at securing human freedom.
The contrary temptation can be alluring to devotees of smaller government and free markets, just as much as any ideology with a firm set of policy commitments. Instead of the tedious process of public persuasion, of legislation and courts, what if we simply vested power in one man to slash the state? Such thinking is reflected in the gullibility many have had for Elon Musk’s chaotic slash-and-burn approach through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. After all, he is indeed slashing agencies and mass firing federal employees. If it were up to us, many if not all of the same bureaucracies would be shuttered. Shouldn’t that be more important to us than the arcane proceduralism of things like the Appointments Clause, the separation of powers, and the congressional power of the purse?
As David was acutely aware, it is all too easy to succumb to the libertarian version of an enlightened despot and join a cult of the presidency, be it in Washington or far-flung capitals such as Budapest, Manila, and Moscow. To paraphrase Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, there is an impulse to cut down all the laws to get at the ‘devil’ of modern big government. But as he always does, the devil has now turned ‘round on us.
A government which can illegally slash programs created by Congress and upheld by the courts (even if we rightly disagree) can just as easily, as this one is, lawlessly create new bureaucracies, seize new powers, levy new taxes. A tyrant is no friend of freedom, even when there is some superficial overlap with your own preferences. The Faustian bargain never works out in the end.
David was not a moderate, as some misunderstand this kind of commitment. He was a proud radical, an unabashed “taxation is theft” libertarian. The kind who was not quite an anarchist, but whose ideal cut as close to it as he thought possible. Nor did he have any love for the Beltway political class, the elites who’d created and maintained the status quo and all its injustices and failures. He would often listen to NPR only to complain about its credulous, left-leaning coverage of the latest big government imposition.
David understood, however, it was ultimately self-defeating to attempt to win policy debates not by persuasion and through lawful, constitutional processes, but through force and arbitrary power. He was appalled by January 6th and the attempt to steal an election, regardless of his dim view of the normal business happening on Capitol Hill. David’s path to freedom was not one built on the ashes of America’s constitutional republic, but as the highest embodiment of its ideals, taking its principles of freedom and power constrained by law to their logical conclusion.
Fundamental principles aside, David was also attuned to how a lawless populist regime does not even deliver on its promises. While he rejected, as any good libertarian would, the bloated taxpayer-funded welfare and administrative state, he understood these were not the state at its worst. The “size” of government is best measured not by a balance sheet, not in dollars and cents, but in the coercive harms it inflicts on innocent people.
In the grand scheme, little tax money is spent on things like denying marriage equality to gay people, or brutally seizing peaceful immigrants for deportation, or waging the war on drugs with all its atrocities. As a portion of the government budget, they pale in comparison to transfer payments and welfare programs. In economic consequences, they matter much less than regulatory policy. But these were, he recognized, some of the most immoral uses of state power, brought to bear against the most vulnerable and marginalized.
Nothing offended David more than picking and choosing some people as more deserving of freedom than others, treating some people’s rights as important and other people’s rights as disposable. He would chastise libertarians for telling a story of ever-shrinking freedom and growing government while neglecting how the age of the Founding Fathers didn’t sound so gloriously free if you were black, or a woman, or gay, or an atheist.
As David put it, with a tone of exasperation at needing to remind people, “We believe that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not just some people.” He knew the first principle of bringing power under the rule of law is every person’s right to equality before the law, from which everything else flows.
David’s deep empathy, his firm conviction all are created equal in our inalienable rights, would never let him trade people away for a reduction in marginal tax rates or a rollback of regulations. He was not afraid to buck the traditional ‘fusionist’ combination of somewhat market-friendly policies paired with social authoritarianism. And in today’s post-fusionist GOP, he saw how the balance was being tipped aggressively towards unrestrained statism and performative cruelty.
David did not indulge mealy mouthed false equivalency, the “both-sides-ism” which equated the threat of an anti-constitutional populist autocracy with the many misguided policy failures of its opponents. He’d much rather have been debating free markets and smaller government with misguided progressives, as opposed to basic human dignity and the perils of dictatorship with those on his right lurching towards fascism. But he had no doubt where his kind of libertarianism belonged in such a contest.
At the end of the day, laws and constitutions are just words. But David, who justifiably prided himself on his extraordinary skills as a writer and editor, knew words are never just words. They represent ideas, and our ability to communicate, share, and ultimately act upon those ideas. They embody our capacity for reason. If language is what separates humans from other animals, the written word is what separates our humanity from the worst of our animal instincts. The rule of law is ultimately about countering the power of violence with the power of words.
Political opportunists and power-hungry madmen come and go. There will always be those who succumb to making a deal with the devil. But the desire for freedom, the great cause of human history, will never be snuffed out completely. David carried that torch, refusing to let it be extinguished, determined to pass it to the future generations. As he concluded in his final public remarks:
And now it's your turn to pick up the banner of liberty. Don't let it go. Fight illiberalism and authoritarianism wherever you find it. Extend liberty to more parts of the world and more parts of life. And make the 21st century the most liberal century yet. Thank you very much and good luck.

Perspective Essay David Boaz on Immigration

Ilya Somin

David Boaz did not write much on immigration. But what he did say on the subject indicates his understanding that breaking down harsh migration restrictions should be a high-priority issue for all who value liberty.
In David’s final public speech, “The Rise of Illiberalism in the Shadow of Liberal Triumph,” he emphasized the enduring value of “equal rights for people regardless of color, gender, religion, sexuality or language. Equal rights based on our common humanity.” He warned that the liberal ideal of “inalienable rights” to a ”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all people is “incompatible with political ideas based on 'blood and soil' or treating people differently because of race or religion.” In our time, there is no greater example of that incompatibility than immigration restrictions, which severely undermine liberty based simply on the fact that would-be migrants were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, or are members of the wrong “race or religion.” Severe immigration restrictions, of course, are central to the ideology of “blood and soil” nationalists in the US and Europe, the greatest enemies of liberty in the Western world today.
In a 2006 article, David praised the immigration policy of pre-Chinese Exclusion Act America, in which “there were no restrictions on immigration and thus no "illegal immigrants". There were rules governing naturalisation and citizenship, but anyone who could get here could live and work here.” That is an ideal we should aspire to return to.
In David’s contribution to National Review's 2016 “Against Trump” symposium, he wrote that "From a libertarian point of view…. Trump's greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule." He was right then, and remains right today. Nativism – the main source of support for migration restrictions – is indeed an offense against America’s founding principles, and those of liberalism, more generally.
Among the grievances the Declaration of Independence enumerates as justification for renouncing allegiance to King George III is the following:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither….
This complaint against the King was aimed at a series of royal orders issued in 1772 and 1773, which forbade the colonies from naturalizing aliens, banned the passage of any laws facilitating that purpose, including laws promoting migration, and overrode a North Carolina law exempting immigrants from Europe from taxation for a period of four years. It's tempting to dismiss this as just a disagreement over policy. But it actually goes further than that, since it is one of the items on the list of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
The King's efforts to restrict immigration to the American colonies were not just a flawed policy, the Declaration claims, but a step towards the “establishment of an absolute Tyranny.”
Nor was it merely a tyranny over the colonial governments' supposed right to determine immigration policy for themselves. It was also a tyrannical action towards the would-be immigrants.
Many of the leaders of the American Revolution saw the new nation as a refuge for the oppressed of the world. In George Washington’s General Orders to the Continental Army, issued at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, Washington stated that one of the reasons the United States was founded was to create “an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.” He expressed similar views on other occasions, including writing to a group of newly arrived Irish immigrants that ”[t]he bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.” Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration, similarly wrote, in 1781, that “It [has] been the wise policy of these states to extend the protection of their laws to all those who should settle among them of whatever nation or religion they might be and to admit them to a participation of the benefits of civil and religious freedom.”
As in the case of slavery and other issues, the founders and succeeding generations of Americans have not always lived up to the high principles of the Founding when it comes to immigration. But that doesn’t make those principles any less valid.
Today, immigration restrictions are among the greatest threats to liberty in America, and many other nations. Most obviously, they block the liberty of millions of would-be migrants, consigning many to a lifetime of oppression and poverty, under the rule of brutal authoritarian and socialist regimes, such as those of China, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. For some, exclusion and deportation are the equivalent of a death sentence.
Immigration restrictions are also a grave menace to the liberty of native-born Americans. By blocking millions of potentially beneficial transactions between potential immigrants and natives who wish to employ them, purchase products they make, or benefit from their innovations, migration restrictions undermine the economic freedom of native-born Americans more than any other US government policy.
Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP, creating vast new wealth, much of which would accrue to native-born citizens of receiving countries. Immigrants also disproportionately contribute to entrepreneurial, scientific, and medical innovations, many of them literally life-saving – such as the development of new medicines and vaccines. The immigrant we keep out today might be one who would have saved your life tomorrow, if given the chance to do so.
Immigration restrictions also threaten the civil liberties of American citizens. Even under relatively conventional administrations, the weak due process protections in the immigration detention and deportation system lead to the mistaken arrest and sometimes even deportation of thousands of US citizens each year, before the mistakes are discovered. Such problems are likely getting more severe thanks to the Trump Administration’s efforts to ramp up deportation beyond previous levels.
Not only do immigration restrictions massively undermine liberty and economic growth, they also do so for terrible reasons. Historically, many immigration restrictions have their origins in racial and ethnic bigotry, as David Boaz recognized was true of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major US federal immigration restriction law, born of anti-Chinese prejudice.
Even immigration restrictions that are not motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice still restrict liberty based on arbitrary circumstances of birth and ancestry. State-imposed racial segregation is a grave injustice because it restricts people’s liberty based on morally irrelevant characteristics over which they have no control. Whether you are born black, white, or Asian is morally irrelevant and says nothing about how much liberty you should be allowed, including where you are permitted to live and work. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously put it, people should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Immigration restrictions are much the same. Whether you were born in the United States or to US-citizen parents is a morally arbitrary characteristic that says nothing about the content of your character, or how much freedom you should have. Yet such arbitrary circumstances of birth determine the fate of millions, condemning most would-be migrants to lifelong oppression and poverty.
David Boaz knew immigration policy must not be an exception to our rejection of “political ideas based on 'blood and soil' or treating people differently because of race or religion.” Almost all of our immigration restrictions run afoul of these ideals.
For these and other reasons, curbing immigration restrictions must be a high-priority issue for all who value liberty and human happiness, especially libertarians. As David Boaz recognized, this issue is also central to promoting America’s “founding principles” in our time.
If David were still with us today, he would be proud of the work on immigration issues done by libertarians such as his (and my) Cato Institute colleagues David Bier and Alex Nowrasteh. But he might be disappointed that too many libertarians continue to underrate the significance of this issue or – worse still – actually defend harsh immigration restrictions based on dubious rationales they would reject in almost any other context.
For example, libertarian-leaning immigration restrictionists love to cite Milton Friedman’s statement that “[y]ou cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and free immigration”; we must keep out many or most immigrants, it is said, lest they increase welfare state spending. This argument simultaneously misconstrues Friedman’s position (ignoring his support for illegal migration), and ignores evidence that immigrants contribute more to the public fisc than they take out. Worse still, consistently applying this reasoning would justify destroying most other types of liberty. Elsewhere, I describe how a vast range of freedoms can be used in ways that might increase welfare state spending:
“You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and legalize alcoholic beverages.”
If alcoholic beverages are legal, some people will become alcoholics, and become unable to hold down a job.  They could end up on welfare. Also, alcoholism often leads to health problems that increase government health care expenditures, in a world where we have programs like Medicaid and Medicare….
"You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and end the War on Drugs."
Like alcoholism and obesity, drug use often leads to health problems that in turn increase government spending on health care. Plus, some drug addicts end up on welfare because they can't hold down a job.
"You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and unrestricted reproduction.".
The children of poor people are disproportionately likely to use welfare benefits. Even those from relatively affluent families are likely to consume public education spending
Examples like this can easily be multiplied.
In my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom (which the Cato Institute co-published with Oxford University Press, thanks in part to David’s support), I describe how many other standard rationales for immigration restrictions have similar liberty-destroying implications. If, for example, governments can keep out immigrants because they have bad political views or harmful cultural values, that implies governments should also have the power to restrict free speech and regulate cultural development among native-born citizens. Otherwise, they too might develop bad views or values! I also outline how nearly all supposed negative side effects of immigration are overblown, can be addressed by “keyhole solutions” that do not require keeping people out, or both.
David Boaz should be remembered as a great champion of universal liberal values, what he called “equal rights based on our common humanity.” Immigration is now a central front in the struggle for the great principles to which he devoted his life.
Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Perspective Essay Invasive Illiberalism: David Boaz and the Russo-Ukrainian War

Tarnell S. Brown

In February 2024, David Boaz gave a speech at LibertyCon International 2024 hosted by Students for Liberty on “The Rise of Illiberalism in the Shadow of Liberal Triumph.” As it would turn out, it was his final speech. He passed away on June 7, 2024, after a private battle with cancer.  It was during this speech that David observed, “bringing power under the rule of law…(is) what our friends in Russia and China and Egypt and Ukraine and Hong Kong fight for in challenging circumstances that we never face. It's what we fight for.”[1] This was quite an important statement given the shift in public sentiment over what, if any, responsibility the United States has regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War.
A report from the Pew Research Center notes that public support for US aid to Ukraine has declined to roughly 44%, with 53% being of the opinion that America has no responsibility at all. Additionally, while 75% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans expressed no confidence in Vladimir Putin to behave properly regarding international affairs in 2024, only 43% of Republicans hold such a negative view of Putin in 2025. The curious thing about this partisan divide is that Republican rhetoric holds Ukraine’s ambitions towards joining NATO at least partially responsible for its invasion. I find this view absurd and it was one that Boaz has something to say about – as only 45% of Republicans believe that the United States benefits from NATO, compared to 77% of Democrats. This partisan view of NATO existed even when a higher proportion of Republicans took a dim view of the treaty organization.
Upon Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor in February 2022, the Biden Administration adopted a policy of sustained but cautious support for Ukraine. The theory behind the Administration’s actions was to obstruct Russia’s military expansion while simultaneously avoiding any direct conflict between America and its NATO allies and Russia. In many ways, this fits with Boaz’ belief in a foreign policy towards Russia that avoids encouraging Ukraine and Georgia to seek NATO membership, acknowledges that Russia, as a regional power, will assert the right to its sphere of influence, and generally steers away from the direction of engendering another cold war.[2]
While it would seem that this would mark the current Administration’s handling of the war more in line with libertarian thinking, it’s more complex than that. In recounting his 1981 visit to the Soviet Union, The Cato Institute’s co-founder Ed Crane observed that while belief in Soviet propaganda was on the wane by that time, Russian nationalism and identitarianism were on the rise. In particular, a good deal of veneration for Czarist Russia seemed to have gained ground among the young men and women he observed in Leningrad.[3] This sense of nationalism even extended to the Soviet apparat who, even if they would not openly admit it, expended a great deal of money the Union could hardly afford in the renovation of Czarist-era museums and palaces that had been damaged during WWII.
During that period of time in which Crane’s visit took place, a young intelligence operative was working at the KGB’s First Chief Directorate in Leningrad. In June of 2022, that former operative, now the President of Russia, began to describe his nation’s invasion of Ukraine as an analog to the mission of Peter the Great to expand Russian territory to encompass lands both men believed Russia had a historical claim to. Indeed, Putin began to reveal Ukraine as the foundation for his imperialist positions in his 2021 essay in which he implied historical dominance over present day Ukraine and Belarus via their descent from Ancient Rus.[4]  While all three nations originated from Ancient Rus, Kiev was the capital of that kingdom. It is Moscow – and Minsk – that owe their existence to Kiev, not the other way around.
In the meantime, Putin played his NATO shenanigans towards the end of 2021, demanding that the organization withdraw to its pre-1997 borders (before the accession of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland), as well as committing to no further expansion, in order to buy itself time before invading Ukraine two months later. Moscow had also strengthened ties with China, Turkey, and much of the Global South prior to the invasion, in part, to serve as the beginning of a multipolar world order which lessens American influence and returns Russia to the sort of hegemony which it enjoyed during the Cold War. All of this made the Biden Administrations’s push to contain Russia without exacerbating Moscow’s tensions with NATO moot, as tensions with NATO were simply a pretext to do what Putin wanted to do anyway.
Prior to Donald Trump’s victory for his second term, he consulted with retired Lt Gen Keith Kellog and former National Security Council Chief of Staff Frederick Fleitz to determine a strategy for ending the war. This plan would have called for a ceasefire based on the prevailing battlelines that existed immediately prior to peace talks. The US was to continue supplying arms to Ukraine if it agreed to both ceasefire and talks, and increase arm supplies and aid if Russia did not. Ukraine would have to agree to delay its plans to join NATO for a period of time, in exchange for not having to formally cede annexed territories to Moscow, although they would remain under de facto Russian control.
Of course, ceding 20% of their territory in exchange for little or less was always going to be a nonstarter for Ukraine, and Trump, in typical Trumpian fashion, has been all over the place in his policy towards Kiev. But I submit that none of that really matters. Recall that, according to Boaz, a libertarian foreign policy towards Russia could entail acknowledging Russia’s sphere of influence, dissuading the accession to NATO of Ukraine and Georgia, and avoiding actions that would lead to another cold war. Putin sees Ukraine as the starting point for his territorial ambitions and would most likely have invaded with or without NATO as a convenient pretext. Putin wants a return to some semblance of the Cold War power structure. This genie has left the bottle.
So, how do we adjudicate a foreign policy in a situation in which such reasonable limits have been upended? Well, one solution is to decide to play no role at all; to decide that the victims of imperial aggression are on their own.  That was certainly the position of The Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014; Bandow even went so far as to minimize America’s security obligations under the Budapest Memorandum of which It was a signatory. Of course, one could argue that if any of the signatories of the Memorandum had pressed their claims in 2014, we wouldn’t be here today, or that if Kiev hadn’t agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions in exchange for those (de facto ineffectual) guarantees, an invasion would have been much less likely.
Another point of view, one which I believe Boaz would agree with, would be to continue to extend support for Ukraine short of direct military intervention. As previously observed, Boaz fervently believed that power should be brought under rule of law. Ukrainians are currently fighting against an invading aggressor to achieve this. The libertarian idea, he notes, is the foundational human right to live one’s life as one chooses so long as they are not infringing upon that very same right of others.[5] More than a discussion about the strategic importance of conquered Ukrainian territories to control of the Dnieper River and Black Sea ports, or natural resources such as rare earth elements, or shifting global alliances which may disabuse American interests, aiding the Ukrainian struggle for freedom is simply the right thing to do, especially given that not doing so is antithetical to the foreign policy aims Boaz identified as critical.
I look forward to further conversation with my esteemed colleagues as this is hardly a complete discussion. I am honored to have been chosen to participate, and pray that I have added something of value to this ongoing debate.
References
Boaz, David. 2008. Cato Handbook for Policymakers. 7th. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.
—. 2008. The Politics of Freedom: Taking on the Left, the Right, and Threats to Our Liberties. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.
—. 2024. "The Rise of Illiberalism in the Shadow of Liberal Triumph." LibertyCon International 2024 . Washington, DC: Students for Liberty.
Crane, Edward H. 2002. "Fear and Loathing in the Soviet Union." In Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World, edited by David Boaz, 165. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.
Putin, Vladimir. 2021. "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." President of Russia. July 12. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/page/224.
Endnotes
[1] (Boaz, The Rise of Illiberalism in the Shadow of Liberal Triumph 2024)
[2] (Boaz, Cato Handbook for Policymakers 2008)
[3] (Crane 2002)
[4] (Putin 2021)
[5] (Boaz, The Politics of Freedom: Taking on the Left, the Right, and Threats to Our Liberties 2008)

Perspective Essay David Boaz and Trans Rights

Aaron Powell


For me, David Boaz began as a writer who gave me an entry point to libertarianism proper, became a boss, then a mentor, then a close friend. I worked with him for twelve years, and for him through most of that. I learned more from him, in such a transformative way, that it’s impossible to imagine who I’d be now without his influence.
Toward the end of his life, after I’d moved out of DC and after David had been diagnosed with cancer, he and I would have dinner every time I was back in town, which was several times a year. On most of those occasions, we’d end up on the topic of trans rights.
We could both see the growing reactionary movement to marginalize trans identities and scale back the rights of transgender Americans. David didn’t live to see the Executive Orders the Trump administration has used to make that the official policy of the United States, by seeking to ban health care, declaring trans identities among children as abuse, compelling speech to out youth against their will, purging trans people from the military, and censoring books (such as Mont Pelerin Society president Deirdre McCloskey’s memoir). But if he had, he would have despised all of it.
David dedicated his life to libertarianism, and understood it as widely and deeply as anyone ever has. He wrote the book on it, after all. And yet, if you can point to the issues within that broad sweep closest to his heart—and which were most represented among the framed magazine and newspaper articles and covers that decorated his Arlington townhome—two stand out.
First was the war on drugs, which David saw not just as an imposition on the free choices of individuals to do with their bodies as they chose, but also a policy of control that inevitably led to the erosion of liberties, abuses of power, and an excuse to oppress society’s marginalized.
The second, though in no sense secondary, was gay rights, which David saw as the demand, by free individuals, to be left alone to love who they wanted to—and do as they pleased with their bodies as part of that. And he saw the crusade against equality, including marriage equality, as nothing more than a campaign by social conservatives to keep marginalized a group they corruptly preferred marginalized.
This is why David, even though he had some worries about some kinds of gender-affirming care for people of some ages, supported trans rights. It’s why he refused to partake in the full moral panic stoked by bad actors manufacturing a new front in the culture war after they lost a gay marriage battle David helped to win.
David was a man of principle, and a clear principle ran through all three issues: People have the right to peacefully do with their bodies as they choose. He saw, believed, and shouted with every opportunity he had, that it is wrong to use the state to oppress to restrict such peaceful freedom, and it is wrong to demand government power be directed in the service of privilege against the unprivileged. “Liberalism is a universal creed,” he said in his final public speech, weak from the cancer that would soon kill him, but strong enough to demand his audience stay strong in their own commitment to libertarianism. “We believe that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not just some people.”
David refused to cede libertarianism to the illiberals. “We libertarians, like most of us Americans, are liberals,” he said. He felt betrayed—and expressed that sense of betrayal every time I saw him—by libertarians, or self-described libertarians, who let an affinity for right-wing social and cultural preferences drag them away from a principled commitment to actual libertarianism as the free choices and free movement of free people.
That liberalism was the framework through which David thought about trans rights. I know this because I was his close friend for fifteen years, his colleague for twelve, and his right hand man for most of those. And, again, we talked about trans rights quite a lot towards the end of his life.
Yet David didn’t say much publicly on the matter. Why? Some of it was likely institutional. While was alive, the Cato Institute was mostly silent about the growing opposition to trans rights and the private medical decisions of trans Americans. But a big part of it was an intellectual trap of asymmetric credulity many like David fall into. He was a boy from Kentucky who got his start in conservative politics before realizing conservatism was as flawed as progressivism in its commitment to the nation’s founding principles. He was a fusionist before, towards the end, he came to see the mistake of tying libertarianism to a political party that cared so little for it that it became the enthusiastic vessel for bringing a man David correctly viewed as an authoritarian and a fascist to power.
Yet David was always skeptical of anything that, for him, was coded as being of the left, and that meant he was far too willing to believe what right-wing sources told him about trans people, and particularly about gender affirming care. On several occasions, he’d raise claims he’d heard, of the harmfulness of procedures, or the prevalence of care for minors, or supposed leaks from people with axes to grind, and I’d point out that the evidence didn’t support them, or they’d already been debunked, or the people with axes to grind had admitted the errors of their claims, and he just wouldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it, because doing so would mean many of the publicans and institutions he’d viewed as mostly reliable in fact weren’t. This was the case even when, as with one study, the institution he cited positively had, during the gay marriage debates, routinely put out studies on the harms of gay relationships on children he’d at the time easily recognized as junk.
But ultimately, I don’t think it matters that David held some false beliefs about the dangers of particular kinds of medical care, or just how many transgender athletes there were, because none of those beliefs, in his mind, pointed toward what he had spent his life pointing people away from: a need for the government to get involved. These were private people leading private lives and making decisions that, even if he disagreed with them, were, he’d say, not the government’s business.
This is another way of saying David wasn’t woke—though in the last couple years of his life he was definitely what we might call “wokening.” David’s skepticism of some kinds of gender-affirming care for people of some ages wasn’t philosophical, and it wasn’t coming from a place of anti-wokeism or sublimated bigotry that motivates many conservatives’—and reactionary centrists’—opposition to trans rights and identities. He never wanted that skepticism, his own or others, to mean abandoning liberalism, just as he never wanted worries, warranted or not, about the harms of some drugs to justify a war on the free use of them. For David, trans rights were human rights, and liberalism took those rights seriously.
David insisted libertarianism was radical liberalism, and that liberalism wasn’t just believing in free market economics. He had nothing but anger for libertarians who happily ignored the majority of liberalism, or happily embraced those who assaulted the majority of liberalism, because they thought it would get them maybe fewer government programs, or maybe lower spending, but at the cost of grave damage to the rest of liberal freedom. In his final weeks, he despaired for the libertarianism project, not just because he was convinced Trump would win and then seek to destroy the rule of law just as he in fact has, but because he saw so many libertarians eagerly calling for Trump’s victory.
There’s a passage in his ultimate speech where David set out a long train of abuses and usurpations, and which I’ve trimmed to highlight those relevant to the topic at hand: “So when you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates … talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy … or joining right-wing culture wars … recognize that for what it is.”
Notice the T. And recognize opposition to its equality for what it is. David would have.

Perspective Essay The Expansion of Liberty makes America Great

Jonathan Blanks

David Boaz was a committed libertarian; he saw freedom both as a means and an end to improving the human experience. No one who knew him could honestly doubt the strength of his convictions or principles. Although he could be dogmatic, he was intensely and incessantly curious. David was also, as many learned the hard way, bitingly honest. He called events and ideas as he saw them.
To his great credit, David would revisit papers, essays, and ideas he and his colleagues at Cato had written to see if they held up to the scrutiny of hindsight. He was as unsparing in these reflections as he was of any poorly thought-out idea that came across his desk. While he was more often right than he was wrong—and would say so—he called on others’ perspectives when he recognized his previous view had been incomplete.
Like many American liberals, David deeply admired the nation’s founders and wrote often about their insights and accomplishments. He was critical of those to his left who were quick to call the founders “racists,” thereby minimizing their achievements and the American project, and downplaying—if not flat out ignoring—the expansion of freedom over two and a half centuries. Yet David also recognized the limits of valorizing the founders—particularly for those of us who can trace our heritages not to Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island, but to property records—because of founding compromises to accommodate slavery:
[T]oo many of us who extol the Founders and deplore the growth of the American state forget that that state held millions of people in chains…[I] want to address libertarians who hate slavery but seem to overlook its magnitude in their historical analysis.If you had to choose, would you rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?
David could have left it there, allowing the contrast of relative unfreedom to speak for itself. But perhaps remembering the writings of Frederick Douglass, who wrote that slavery was corrosive to everyone who came into contact with it, David continued:
I said that white Americans probably considered themselves free. But in retrospect, were they? They did not actually live in a free society. They were restricted in the relations they could have with millions of their—I started to say "their fellow citizens," but of course slaves weren't citizens—their neighbors. They lived under a despotic power. Liberalism seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the "free" states.
David understood that true freedom is universal, and that despotism against some impinges on the freedom of all. The story of how America came from a tainted beginning of liberty to embrace equal rights for African Americans, women, and myriad others who faced social and legal discrimination is a triumph of liberalism, not something to be ashamed of or played down because it may reflect poorly on some American heroes or contemporary American liberals. David wrote:
I've probably been guilty of similar thoughtless and ahistorical exhortations of our glorious libertarian past. And I'm entirely in sympathy with [the] preference for a world without an alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on. But I think this historical perspective is wrong. No doubt one of the reasons that libertarians haven't persuaded as many people as we'd like is that a lot of Americans don't think we're on the road to serfdom, don't feel that we've lost all our freedoms. And in particular, if we want to attract people who are not straight white men to the libertarian cause, we'd better stop talking as if we think the straight white male perspective is the only one that matters. For the past 70 years or so conservatives have opposed the demands for equal respect and equal rights by Jews, blacks, women, and gay people. Libertarians have not opposed those appeals for freedom, but too often we (or our forebears) paid too little attention to them. And one of the ways we do that is by saying "Americans used to be free, but now we're not"—which is a historical argument that doesn't ring true to an awful lot of Jewish, black, female, and gay Americans.
But the current presidential administration is making a point to whitewash the past, to sanitize the evils of slavery, segregation, subjugation, and oppression, in the name of “making America great again.” Removing the achievements of Black veterans like Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Codetalkers from Defense Department websites demeans Americans who served the country honorably, despite their mistreatment. These brave men and many others are now widely recognized as role models for future generations: Americans who believed in the promise of America despite so much evidence in their own lives.
At the end of President Trump’s first term, the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission Report noted that understanding American principles
requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and enobling.’ And a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.
Both the founders and David likely would be skeptical of, if not disturbed by, a required nationalized education ethos in support of any idea, let alone any specific identity. It is likewise hard to imagine a just rationale for removing American literature from military academies’ libraries. Do American servicemen and women really need to be protected from Toni Morrison?
People around the globe flock to America because of the possibilities its freedoms provide, not some magic or innate Americanness—though pride of becoming an American often comes naturally. Indeed, it is curious that this administration’s counter to the ‘identitarian’ left is a nationalism based, in part, on a version of history that diminishes decades of freedom’s expansion, to say nothing of this administration’s work to vastly reduce the number of aspiring Americans across economic strata.
This is not to imply that, generally speaking, our country teaches history well. (Or reading or math, for that matter.) At the grade school level, much of history instruction requires memorizing dates and events, providing—at best—a surface understanding of what the events mean in retrospect, and rarely examining how those events were interpreted by the people who lived through them at the time. Schools should teach history better, but that’s not the same issue as instilling shared civic values of a pluralistic society. It is these values—not “unifying” sanitized views of historical figures—that make America great.
These values include:
1) The rule of law. In pieces marking Thanksgiving, David often listed the rule of law first among several aspects of being an American worth treasuring:
Perhaps the greatest achievement in history is the subordination of power to law…No longer can one man … take another person’s life or property at the ruler’s whim….[Americans] may take the rule of law for granted, but immigrants from China, Haiti, Syria, and other parts of the world know how rare it is.
2) Civic equality. As David wrote in one Thanksgiving piece, “In America some people may be smarter, richer, stronger, or more beautiful than others, but ‘I’m as good as you’ is our national creed.”
3) Freedom of conscience. We don’t need to agree on whether or not Thomas Jefferson and Washington were good men; nor do we want a national religion; nor must we agree whether America is a fundamentally fair or unfair country. Our beliefs are our own.
4) Unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps the core libertarian principle: so long as each respects the rights of others, every person should be generally left to build the life they wish. Although these words are etched in our national history, their meaning transcends the man who wrote them and even the document from which they came.
The current administration’s focus on the past—and the insistent reclaiming of some lost greatness—mirrors a false libertarian argument that yearns for a freer era gone by. David argued vehemently against this idea, writing, “In 1776, 1950, or now, there’s never been golden age of liberty, and there never will be.” He well understood that freedom is precious, and that it is the unending job of the liberal to protect it and to work to expand it to any places and to any people who currently lack its benefits.
Indeed, David explained in 2003:
Limited government is a great achievement, a recent achievement in the sweep of history, and history teaches us that it can be lost. Appreciating where it came from and how rare and fragile it is will help us to preserve it.
A greatness narrative based on national identity threatens liberal freedom; it doesn’t support it. The American expansion of freedom to former slaves, indigenous peoples, women, immigrants, and people whose sexuality and gender identity were once punished socially and legally has been a remarkable victory for pluralism. The administration’s idea of who qualifies as a great American is, by contrast, a narrow one.
Moreover, the assumption of American exceptionalism based on a nationalist worldview is both exclusionary and provides a false sense of safety from traditional threats to liberty: an overweening centralized authority. Although much of the current administration’s actions are made in the name of limiting government, they have, in fact, enlarged the executive's influence and power. Protecting and preserving liberty requires more than invoking “smaller government” through executive decree.
We must not yield to whitewashed versions of history that effectively bowdlerize the past in the name of unity. America’s imperfect development over two and a half centuries is a testament to its greatness, the triumphs of liberalism, and the benefits of pluralism; it is not a reason to turn back the clock and remake the mistakes of years gone by. The expansion of American liberty—not an exclusive collective identity—is what made this country great.

Response Essay Embracing a Liberalism beyond Policy

Jonathan Blanks

The thoughtful essays in this collection are a testament to how important and unique David’s voice was. I will be forever grateful for David’s guidance, encouragement, and all the lessons he taught me over my twelve years at Cato. David’s influence is evident in each contribution, even if we removed his name and quotations.
There seem to be two common threads throughout each of the excellent pieces in this symposium: 1) the universality of liberty: that freedom should benefit all people equally and 2) this universality applies across policy areas, and serves as a holistic prescription for the world. These may seem like different ways to say the same thing, but each has a different application for liberals, particularly those who work in public policy.
Most of us in this symposium have policy specialties and all of us have experience in the professional policy or think tank worlds. We are thus all familiar with the tendency toward policy myopia: “What does X law mean for my policy area?” and “Does X law meaningfully expand freedom to those directly affected?”
These are certainly important considerations but, at times, wonks become too siloed in our particular fields at the risk of missing the larger picture. David—the guiding force that shaped Cato’s voice for more than 40 years—did not have this problem. Rather than focus on one particular issue, he combined Cato’s policy research with his knowledge of history and his commitment to the principles of liberty to make the straightforward case for better lives for everyone on the planet. He was Cato’s ideological conscience, and the intellectual leader of the institute.
Although no one could “replace” David in the sense that he was a singular persona who stood out among many other capable writers and thinkers, it is troubling that there are so few who even try to make the unapologetic case for liberalism writ large now. Many of us trained to be specialists; generalist writers—particularly in D.C. policy circles—have become passé, if not simply dismissed as unqualified. But the case still needs to be made.
In this political moment in which the presidential administration is assaulting civil society in almost every facet of policy, law, and media, there are too few classical liberal voices and institutions who are willing to talk—loudly and openly—about its threats to everything we have written and said we believe. Institutional liberals will talk about the foolishness of tariffs or the importance of markets broadly, but freedom—and our liberal system—remain afterthoughts in most of the commentary.
A marginal improvement in, say, school choice, is not worth the cost of the rule of law. Likewise, committed liberals cannot justify “liberty and justice for all…except trans people.” America cannot be both a beacon of freedom and a country that closes its trade, its aid, and its borders to those fighting or fleeing oppression around the world. Liberal principles and commitments must extend beyond our specific policy areas.
Every essay in this collection stands in direct opposition to the policies of the Trump administration, and rightly so, because these essays are ultimately about the expansion of liberty.
I do not presume to speak for David or any of my fellow contributors. But it is not a coincidence that many of the loudest and boldest liberal critics of this administration and its actions spent considerable time in David’s orbit. I, for one, am proud to count among that number.

Response Essay Liberal Universalism and the Menace of Nationalism

Ilya Somin


I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium in honor of David Boaz. But I want to take this opportunity to highlight some common themes that run through all our essays. Most notable is the imperative of extending liberty to as wide a range of people as possible, breaking through morally arbitrary distinctions such as those of race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigrant status. The struggle for liberty also cannot stop at national boundaries, but rather must include liberal states working to oppose oppressive regimes internationally, in some cases by force.
Like most libertarians, David Boaz advocated protecting a wide range of liberties, both “economic” and personal. But he went further than many in emphasizing the importance of extending those rights to all people, without distinction. Central to David's thought was the idea that libertarianism requires both a broad conception of the range of liberties that must be protected, and a broad view of the range of people entitled to that full protection.  As Andy Craig puts it, “[n]othing offended David more than picking and choosing some people as more deserving of freedom than others, treating some people’s rights as important and other people’s rights as disposable.”
As Jonathan Blanks shows, this principle led David to reject nostalgia for an imagined past, a nostalgia which ignores the deprivation of liberty entailed by racially based slavery and segregation. Aaron Ross Powell makes similar points about the liberties of transgender people, and Andy Craig on the need to enforce a rule of law that covers everyone, regardless of identity. My own essay focuses on the injustice of migration restrictions, which deny liberty to immigrants and would-be immigrants.
Our different contributions also highlight ways in which excluding various groups from full protection for liberty harms not only them, but even members of the seemingly privileged group that the exclusion is supposed to benefit. Blacks were the principal victims of slavery and segregation. But, as Blanks explains, whites’ liberty was also severely curtailed. And the stifling of black opportunity made society poorer and less innovative, thereby also harming whites. If, for example, segregation confines a black man who might have become a great scientist or entrepreneur to the role of a janitor, that obviously hurts him. But whites are deprived of the benefits of his innovations. Similar points apply to the impact of immigration restrictions on native-born citizens of the US, as explained in my contribution.
As David Boaz recognized, denying liberty to LGBT people has a similar dynamic. If they cannot live freely and realize their full potential, “cisgender” heterosexuals suffer as well. Ultimately, denying liberty and opportunity to some groups necessarily also imperils the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us, even if to a lesser degree.
For many libertarians, the most controversial issue addressed in this symposium is that raised by Tarnell Brown’s essay on the Russia-Ukraine War. Most libertarians agree that liberal democratic states are justified in defending themselves against attack. They recognize such efforts, despite their costs, are often essential to the defense of liberty. But many are inclined to isolationism when it comes to almost all other foreign policy issues, such as countering expansionism by authoritarian states, or even just providing arms to more liberal states that resist them (as Western nations have assisted Ukraine in resisting Russia’s brutal war of aggression).
Elsewhere,  I have explained how even non-defensive military intervention against authoritarian states is often compatible with libertarian principles. I have also written on why Ukraine’s fight against Russia is a just cause that deserves Western support for both moral and pragmatic reasons. This is actually an easier case than direct military intervention, because it only requires us to provide arms and supplies, not risk American lives in combat.
Just as the struggle for liberty within any one nation must not be limited by morally arbitrary identity categories, so the international version must not be limited by morally arbitrary boundary lines on maps. The struggle for freedom is global and liberal states must sometimes use force to advance that cause. Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression is just not because state borders are somehow sacred (they aren’t), but because Ukraine, despite serious flaws, is a far more liberal polity than Putin’s brutal dictatorship. A Russian victory and resulting conquest of Ukraine means death or brutal oppression for millions. Victory for Ukraine, by contrast, means victory for much greater – even if still incomplete – liberty.
On these issues, I differed somewhat with David Boaz, who was more sympathetic to foreign policy isolationism. But he at least avoided two major international relations fallacies to which some other libertarians fall prey. One is offering excuses and justifications for America’s authoritarian enemies. Thus, David never promoted Cold War “revisionism,” which held that the Soviet Union and other communist states had no expansionist agenda, and the entire conflict was the fault of the US. Unlike Murray Rothbard, David did not celebrate the fall of Saigon, and the resulting expansion of a mass-murdering communist totalitarian regime. Even if US intervention in the Vietnam War was a mistake, the triumph of communism there was nothing to celebrate. In a 2022 podcast, David unequivocally condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supported rallying international opinion against it, even as he also opposed US military intervention.
The other pernicious fallacy is an embrace of so-called “realism,” the incredibly unrealistic view holding that all nations basically pursue similar foreign policies, regardless of regime type, with variation dictated only by such factors as relative power and geographic location. In domestic policy, almost all libertarians recognize there are fundamental differences between liberal democracies with constitutional constraints on government power (even if imperfect ones), and authoritarian and totalitarian states. The same is true in international relations. If Russia were a liberal democracy, there would be no Russia-Ukraine war. And this case is just one of many examples of the difference that regime type makes. David understood that, even if he didn’t always appreciate its full implications.
No one is right about everything, not even David Boaz. But in emphasizing the universality of liberty, he set an example we would do well to emulate.
Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Response Essay Beyond Hobbes: A Reaction to Andy Craig’s Observations on David Boaz and the Rule of Law

Tarnell S. Brown

The rise of governments where officials have constitutionally limited powers is one of the greatest successes in the long human history of fighting against oppressive reigns and regimes. David Boaz recognizes and highlights this in the preface to the 2025 Edition of The Libertarian Mind.
It is what John Adams spoke of when he described a republic as a nation of laws, not men. We are flawed, every one of us, which necessitates rules of engagement which both allow us inherent personal freedoms, and some form of protection from violations thereof. David understood this, admonishing his readers not to forget how much of their lives are lived in freedom. There are no planning boards dictating where one may work or permits needed to buy a new computer. Many of the decisions we make in our everyday lives are free from the coercion and interference of others, which is the foundational concept of rule of law.
However, as Andy has noted, laws are how the state imposes its will through its legal monopoly on force. How then, can the rule of law be equated with freedom? As I remarked earlier, the protection of our individual liberties against the claims and violations thereof of others requires some sort of larger, mediating force to protect everyone’s freedom. While many within the libertarian movement chafe at such a concept, as David would point out, it’s how we preserve such things as cosmopolitan tolerance, equal protections and freedom from legalized bigotry. Imperfect, sure, and it might be a different case if we all lived far apart in extended family units of hunter-gatherers who depend on one another for survival (although the story of Adam and Eve, the original hunter-gatherers, might suggest otherwise). But we do not, nor would we likely want to. That life was often, as Hobbes indicated, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” However, so would living in large civil societies such as ours without the rule of law.
Before moving on to some of Andy’s other points, it might be instructive to define what rule of law actually is, beyond philosophical generalities. To Samuel Adams, it meant “one rule of justice for rich and poor, for the favorite in court, and the countryman at the plough,” while today, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts defines it as holding all people, institutions and entities accountable to laws that are publicly known, equally enforced, adjudicated by unbiased parties, and consistent with the international principles of human rights. This is where a constitutionally limited government with defined separation of powers comes in.  Elected officials, bluntly speaking, have to win elections. This creates a moral hazard to cater to the will of the electorate, and interest groups that can aid in appealing to large segments of the electorate. This opens the door to not only a tyranny of the majority, but also, because interest groups can exert a disproportionate amount of influence on both legislators and the Executive branch, a tyranny of the minority. This makes an independent judiciary not subject to political whims a critical necessity, and such independent judiciaries only exist in systems with constitutional orders which respect rule of law.
Of course, we live among men and not angels, and even constitutional limits rely upon the goodwill of men and women to enforce them. To paraphrase David’s own words, whatever its proper role, the government is just people using force against other people, and people are imperfect, corruptible, and sometimes evil. When we deal with this reality, as Andy astutely notes, it can lead to the willingness to compromise with someone who promises to slash the evils of the state as a benevolent dictator. There are a number of issues with this compromise, the least of which is the fact that process matters. The road from shuttering alphabet agencies while ignoring constitutionally prescribed legal processes to kidnapping legalized immigrants for shipping off to El Salvadoran penal gulags is a short one.
This is because, and this is the second issue, the concept of the benevolent dictator is an illusion. Even the Caesars - Hadrian, Nerva, Trajan, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius – that history hold as the “Five Good Emperors” most responsible for the Pax Romana would stand out as terribly autocratic in today’s liberal, cosmopolitan societies. For this reason, David took a dim view of the January 6th insurrection – and it was an insurrection – as well as the attempts to game the judicial system to hold on to power. He would have been rightfully appalled by such apparatuses such as DOGE and the consolidation of ostensibly independent agencies under the sole purview of the Executive branch. Benito Mussolini did not, after all, make the trains run on time. He simply built ornate stations with dedicated lines to serve the elite and left the working-class dependent on trains for transportation to their own devices.
Even were the centralization of power into the hands of one, or few, not prone to corrupt even the best among us, there would be a knowledge problem. Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or the fictional Jed Bartlett of The West Wing would need to utilize dispersed knowledge, often held privately, to achieve social goals and make rational decisions. This is hardly possible when power is held by many, and even less so when held by few. The end result would be the same as a system run with despotic intent. It is adherence to the rule of law that protects us from charlatans who would rule as kings or tyrants.

Response Essay Preserving Truth: Thoughts on Jonathan Blanks’s Discourse on David Boaz’ Views on the Misuse of History in Politics

Tarnell S. Brown

On March 10, 2025, Wellesley College history Professor Ivan Kurilla, began a lecture at Brandeis University’s Center for German and European Studies by showing a clip of conservative mouthpiece Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir. In this interview Carlson highlights how Putin used his own version of a shared history with Ukraine to justify Russia’s invasion of that nation. Kurilla is an expert on Russian history who previously taught at the European University at St Petersburg. The lecture was titled “The Use and Misuse of History in Russia and Everywhere Else.”
After a detailed discussion of how history and politics often intersect to evolve political views in a direction that aligns with the chosen narrative of those in power, Kurilla doubled back to Russia, observing how Putin used the collective memory of Russians fighting the Nazis during WWII as propaganda to rouse the ire of Russians against their neighbor with claims that Ukraine was a hotbed of Nazis in need of purging.
Robert Horvath, another specialist in Russian politics who plies his trade at Australia’s La Trobe University, would agree. Horvath wrote an entire book - Putin's Fascists: Russkii Obraz and the Politics of Managed Nationalism in Russia – on Putin’s ties with the neo-Nazi group Russkii Obraz and his utilization of them to stoke national sentiments in the early 2010s (it’s a fascinating, well-written analysis; I recommend it to anyone interested in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, no matter which side of it they may fall on).
If it seems that in responding to Jonathan’s essay I am comparing the current Administration’s “removing the achievements of Black veterans like Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Codetalkers from Defense Department websites,” to an autocratic regime rewriting the history between itself and its neighbors to justify a war, then you have read this correctly.
As both David and Jonathan have pointed out, there is often among libertarians a tendency to gloss past the failures of our nation’s classical liberal antecedents to both venerate them with a sainthood that is unmerited, and to appeal to some Platonic ideal of a libertarian society which has never existed. This tendency sometimes exists even among libertarian/classical liberal scholars whom I greatly respect, much to my exasperation. In failing to recognize these flaws possessed by our predecessors, or to acknowledge the tragic, somewhat broken history of our march towards greater liberty and justice for all, we have opened the door for populist blowhards who appeal to the lowest impulses of large segments of our society to claim that regressive policies can “Make America Great Again.”
After all, how can the keepers of the flame of classical liberalism cry foul about discriminatory policies when our scholars opine that the apex of freedom in America was a time in which my forebears were chattel, or indigenous peoples were forced onto the Trail of Tears, or women couldn’t vote, own property or pursue education. But taxes were lower! The EPA didn’t exist! Small comfort to those who were disabused of the most basic natural rights.
This is why the conversations like those between David and Jacob Hornberger that Jonathan references in discussing David’s caution against lionizing the Founding Fathers are quite salient. History, or rather, the parties who write or rewrite history, have a huge impact on the institutional and collective memory of a nation. While the old adage “history is written by the victors” isn’t completely accurate, it’s not all that far off. Our concept of history often even changes our belief about who the victors were. Why acknowledge that Russia was born of the collapse of the Ancient Rus empire that was centered around Kiev (modern-day Ukraine)? Perhaps so you can change the perception of that history to create a narrative of a historical Ukraine that was always dominated by Russia.
Why face the sins of America’s past to continue building a freer society when we can ennoble them and create a more autocratic one? As Boaz noted in The Politics of Freedom, “In a free society, citizens don’t turn to the national government to solve every problem. Indeed, a free society is measured by the amount of life that remains outside the control of government.” This has been the foundation of America, however imperfect, since the Revolution, warts and all. If we continue to allow – and contribute to – the misuse of history in setting the political narrative, we may indeed be dooming our descendants to a belief that autocracy was always the way of America, and worse, that it is actually liberty.

Response Essay Of Scots, a French Nobleman and the Fortune 500: A Response to Ilya Somin’s Thoughts on the Views of David Boaz on Immigration.

Tarnell S. Brown

In the 2006 article Ilya Somin mentions, which is reprinted in David Boaz’s 2008 work The Politics of Freedom, David recounts the 1747 arrival in America, from Scotland by way of Ireland, of one Thomas Boaz. This ancestor of Boaz - and any number of Boazs, Booses, Boozes, Boas, Boses, Boases, and Bowles now inhabiting America - was instantly a legal immigrant. Without the onerous and often Byzantine restrictions contemporary immigrants face, Thomas arrived in the Virginia Colonies simply an American. “Ah,” but the enterprising nativist might say, “but that was under the British Empire and the laws of colonial Virginia! It happened before America was America.”   That may be true, but the foundation of what became America came from the laws and norms practiced in the colonies, before America was America.
America has often benefitted from foreigners. One of the greatest contributors to the Revolutionary cause was the young Frenchman Gilbert de Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette. Bored with his life as a member of the King’s Musketeers, and intrigued by the classical liberal ideas of the American rebels, the 19 year old nobleman heard that French officers were being sent to the colonies. He demanded to be among them; his request denied, he went anyway. He even went so far as to purchase his own ship for the princely sum of 112 thousand pounds upon being informed that the Continental Congress had no funds for his journey. Initially denied his own command due to his foreign birth, Lafayette made himself useful as an aide to George Washington, and when he was finally allowed into the field, he performed ably. His performance at Yorktown was crucial in forcing Charles Cornwallis’ surrender.
Even with all of Lafayette’s battlefield success, his greatest contribution came by way of his diplomacy; in 1779, he returned home to rally further support for the American cause. After a brief period of house arrest for disobeying a direct order of the King, he was allowed to begin making his case to Louis XVI under the guise of a hunting trip. Initially, he favored a direct invasion of Britain, but circumstances having caused that idea to be abandoned, he turned his attention towards convincing  his countrymen that the colonists had a reasonable chance of winning with increased support. He worked with Benjamin Franklin to secure additional monetary and military support before returning to the Revolutionary battlefields. That diplomacy was responsible for, among other things, 6,000 French soldiers under the command of the Comte de Rochambeau that also proved crucial in securing a victory at Yorktown.
While this is all a nice jaunt down a historical memory lane, the point of this recollection is to complement Ilya’s point regarding the disproportionate contributions immigrants make in scientific, entrepreneurial and medical innovations; before founding 46% of Fortune 500 companies that employ millions of native-born Americans, or winning 35% of Nobels awarded to scientists based in America, foreign nationals were key in helping America win independence in the first place.
So why the drift towards nativism? After all, many nativists give lip service to free trade, which includes the free movement across borders of human capital. A 2021 study in the journal Foreign Policy Analysis finds that the attitudes of most Americans towards trade is sociotropic in that their main concern isn’t aggregate effects, but how trade – which, again, includes immigration – impacts their immediate community. In communities wherein most individuals are highly educated/highly skilled, these individuals are likely to benefit from trade and are more receptive to it. Given the dearth of job opportunities for those who are considered low-skilled, communities populated by these individuals are, at least on the surface, negatively impacted by trade, and they tend to take a dim view of immigration.
As such, this causes many of those right of center who should be open to the aggregate benefits of trade to sublimate their lower-order economic beliefs to their higher-order concerns about protecting their in-group. In their view, free markets stop at the border, which acts as a detriment to us all. This is why David, and Ilya, and so many thinkers within the classical liberal sphere, have rejected the noxious compromise that some “libertarians” have made in holding that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance .” To paraphrase Boaz in Toward Liberty, immigration restrictions are a misguided exemplification of the protectionist impulse, as America’s vibrant markets attract the world’s most talented and ambitious newcomers. This is a source of strength, of growth and of progress for us all.

Response Essay The Virtuous Selfishness of Caring About Everyone’s Freedom

Andy Craig


David’s approach to trans rights, where any personal misgivings or hesitation didn’t compromise the principle of the matter, is emblematic of an essential strain running through much of his thinking. While it’s true he had a profound moral sense of empathy, there was also a rationalist, even selfish grounding for it.
Deeply influenced by F. A. Hayek as David was, it brings to mind a point from The Constitution of Liberty. As Hayek put it, "The benefits I derive from free­dom are thus largely the result of the uses of freedom by others, and mostly of those uses of freedom that I could never avail myself of. It is therefore not necessarily free­dom that I can exercise myself that is most important for me."
Supporting the rights of others wasn’t just a nice moral gesture. Rather, it was the bedrock of the kind of world David wanted to live in. It was no mere altruism (and he was enough of an Ayn Rand fan to bristle at that), an act of noble self-sacrifice purely for the benefit of others. It was also rational self-interest, thus there is no conflict.
Take, for example, marriage equality. He fought for it, making no small contribution to its eventual victory. But he and his partner never availed themselves of the opportunity. To be sure, that’s a deeply personal decision people might make for all sorts of reasons, and I never asked him why. Instead, he once asked me why my husband and I had opted for it, as in the practical paperwork benefits. It was somewhat amusing, how these things were almost an incidental curiosity, not at all central to why he’d supported it. It was something some people wanted to do, there was no good reason to stop them, and that was more than enough.
Beyond the fact that he was gay, and lived to see radical progress on that score, David would readily acknowledge his life was one of relative comfort. An upper-middle class professional, decidedly bourgeois, from a family of successful lawyers back home in Kentucky, including an uncle who had been a congressman. White, male, well-educated, and perhaps the biggest privilege of all, an American. There were few if any things in life he wanted to do and couldn’t because it was illegal or he was in any way marginalized. But that wasn’t the point.
One of his most passionate causes was opposition to the war on drugs, though he abstained from anything harder than caffeinated soda. He similarly regarded the repeal of Prohibition as an anniversary to be celebrated as a kind of libertarian holiday; that he was a teetotaler was hardly relevant. Immigration, likewise, was an issue where he had no personal stake in wanting to move to a different country. Nevertheless, it was essential to both the America he wanted to live in and the libertarianism he wanted to advocate.
There was, of course, an economics side to it. He would sometimes remark how the life of business and finance, people he interacted with a lot, held little appeal to him. The same would obviously be true of many other professions, from blue collar to white collar. But the economic freedom of everybody else was essential for his ability to lead the life he wanted, as could only be afforded by the dazzling prosperity of modern free markets.
You saw this in David’s intellectual approach, too. He wasn’t one to shy away from debate, as his discussions with Aaron show. He relished the push and pull of ideas, in his personality as much as his philosophy. Often, the best way to hit it off with David was to argue with him. He’d quickly grow bored and annoyed if he sensed you were simply agreeing with him, and he was genuinely open to being convinced. He didn’t want to “win,” he wanted to come to a better understanding. Nor did he put up any barriers of credentials or status or seniority around who he could learn from.
For David, freedom was a kind of network effect: the more people have the liberty to make choices and pursue their own paths, the better life becomes for everyone. Just as the market thrives on the myriad choices and innovations of individuals, so too do we as social animals thrive when we extend freedom to cultural and personal choices. Variety is the spice of life, so to speak.
Too often, we tend to think about concern for the well-being of others and taking care of yourself as a kind of trade-off. Instead, David knew we should embrace it as an essential part of how you can live your best life. Liberty for all and the individual pursuit of happiness are not just complementary, they’re inseparable.

Response Essay Liberalism as Expansive Regard

Aaron Powell



You can find ethical claims that point in a liberal direction pretty much as far back as you want to go back in the history of ethical claims. Ancient philosophy and religion are full of them. What changed, what turned “ethical claims in a liberal direction” into “liberalism,” is a broader sense of who they applied to. When the only people freedom is owed to are the ranking male members of your tribe, you’re not really talking freedom, you’re talking privilege. When you respect the freedom of women, of other races, of other tribes, of other sexual and gender orientations, then you move from privilege to liberalism.
This means the future of liberalism depends upon expanding further. It depends upon cultivating a perspective that sees all others, and not just those you favor, as deserving equal regard. This expansion, this relentless push towards universality, grounded in uncramped empathy, is the core of David Boaz’s libertarianism, particularly as he confronted the spread of its opposite in his final years.
Illiberalism arises when we arbitrarily draw lines, refusing to see some people as inside the circle of equal regard. The trouble with nationalism, particularly the "blood and soil" variety David explicitly condemned, is that it says equal regard is only for those on this side of a border or belonging to this national identity. As Ilya Somin points out, harsh immigration restrictions are perhaps the starkest contemporary example, denying freedom based merely on the accident of birth, directly contradicting the principle of “equal rights based on our common humanity” David championed. Restricting movement and association based on origin is a fundamental failure of equal regard.
Similarly, the trouble with being anti-trans, as I discussed in my initial contribution, is it says equal regard is only owed to the cisgendered. While David may have had questions about specific medical interventions, his core principles pointed away from state interference in the private lives and bodily autonomy of peaceful individuals. He recognized the danger in allowing social conservatives or reactionaries to dictate whose lives and choices were worthy of respect (and freedom)—a pattern he had fought against for decades in the context of gay rights and the war on drugs.
Jonathan Blanks reminds us of David’s critique of a sanitized, nationalist history. Such narratives often achieve a false sense of unity by failing to extend regard to those who were historically excluded or oppressed—enslaved people, women, racial and ethnic minorities. David understood that America’s greatness lies not in pretending these exclusions didn’t happen, but in acknowledging the expansion of liberty, the very process of extending regard, as the triumph. Refusing to grapple honestly with the past, or actively erasing the contributions and struggles of marginalized groups, is another way of restricting the sphere of concern, implicitly suggesting that only certain stories, certain people, truly matter.
Andy Craig emphasizes how David saw “bringing power under the rule of law” as a paramount achievement of liberalism. Rules that apply differently based on status, identity, or political expediency—is the antithesis of the rule of law. It inherently involves an inconsistent regard for others, often tilting the scales in favor of the powerful or the preferred group. David recognized the temptation, even among libertarians, to endorse lawless actions if they seem to achieve desired policy outcomes. But he knew liberty cannot be built on the ruins of legality, because the rule of law is the wall that protects the many from the powerful.
We can even view Tarnell Brown’s discussion of Ukraine through this lens. David advocated for a cautious and restrained foreign policy. But he still saw that Vladimir Putin's aggression was grounded in a narcissistic disregard for the Ukrainian people’s dignity—and that Ukraine’s fight, against authoritarianism and fascism, is part of liberal universalism.
David Boaz dedicated his life to a libertarianism rooted in the universalist promise of radical liberalism. He was dismayed by those, including some self-proclaimed libertarians, who seemed willing to trade away this universality, this principle of equal regard for all, in favor of alliances with illiberal political movements or in service of narrow cultural or nationalistic prejudices. He understood that liberty isn’t privilege and liberalism isn’t selective. Illiberalism demands we contract our empathy and respect. The task David left us, the task of liberalism itself, is to instead keep pushing the circle outwards.

Response Essay The Lesson of David’s Method

Aaron Powell


I’d like to take a step back and give a sense of the way David Boaz thought about political and policy questions in general. If David got things right, and people who think about those questions in ways other than his got them wrong, then if we want to carry on David’s legacy of liberty, we should try to bring our thinking more in line with his.
David was an analytic guy. He thought carefully, and held himself to high standards of both argument and evidence, because political action is a big deal. You’re authorizing the state to use violence. You’re saying yay or nay to policies that will impact the daily lives of millions. You better get it right. You don’t want to be the one breaking things—or cheering on those who do.
David came at this through a two-step process. It didn’t lead him to get everything correct, and he was always willing to admit error or be persuaded away from a conclusion he’d landed on, but this thoughtfulness meant he at least had strong reasons for those conclusions, and rarely missed relevant features of the political and moral landscape.
First, will this policy expand or contract the sphere of freedom? By “freedom,” he meant our liberty to make choices free from coercion. But he didn’t stop there. You couldn’t look at individual policies in isolation and make the whole of libertarianism be calling balls and strikes. The mistake in that approach is that it misses the game. For David, the game, or the whole of politics and how it impacted the lives of everyone subject to it, was what mattered.
Second, he’d ask, “How do all the pieces fit together to expand or contract freedom? And are there gaps in liberty we’re not noticing?” This gets to his frustration at libertarians who’d call the middle of the 19th century the high-water mark of liberty, as others in this symposium have discussed. Yes, you can point to some metrics (e.g., government spending or total number of laws on the books) and talk yourself into believing 1850 was freer, but in doing so, you don’t so much make a case that it was freer as you demonstrate that your perspective on whose liberty counts is limited to those classes you analogize to your own.
Asking how the pieces fit together demands both a holistic sense of politics beyond individual policy questions and an understanding that politics is a significant determiner of the social environment. And, because our lives happen within that social environment, the extent to which we are free, in a meaningful sense, is the extent to which the social environment enables or limits the variety and contours of the choices genuinely open to us. A policy, such as DOGE denying funds to a particular program, can be looked at in terms of the merits of that program, but it must also be looked at in terms of the environment it creates for the exercise of other liberties, or the concentration of power that will inevitably threaten them. Likewise, a holistic understanding of the social environment means seeing those within it who don’t yet have as full a freedom as others—and then demanding they get an equal share of liberty.
Where many go wrong in their political analysis, then, isn’t in advocating policies that will, on their own, limit freedom, but in not recognizing the effects of the way those policies are brought about, or in not seeing those on the margins who are harmed. This is the lesson we should take from David’s work, beyond his thoughtful critiques of particular state actions. Doing politics well, and doing libertarian politics well, asks of us more than calling balls and strikes.

Response Essay David Boaz Knew to Reject Entangling the Cause of Liberty with Rank Bigotry

Andy Craig

In his landmark essay “Why I Am not A Conservative,” F. A. Hayek opened with an epigram from Lord Acton, the great 19th century classical liberal: "At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition."
This insight carries immense weight today, particularly for advocates of liberty confronting an era rife with hateful rhetoric and authoritarian impulses masquerading under the banner of a populist anti-establishment crusade. Lamentably, the broader libertarian movement has too often provided exactly the “just grounds of opposition” which so concerned Acton and later Hayek.
David Boaz understood this all too clearly. He spent his career making the case for liberty while fiercely rejecting any alliance with bigotry, prejudice, or hatred. David recognized that liberty is, at its core, a universal value grounded in the equal dignity and rights of every individual. To compromise these foundational principles by partnering with hatemongers was, in David’s view, both morally repugnant and strategically disastrous.
The rise of the alt-right, with its ugly presence on social media and increasing visibility in mainstream politics, underscored the urgency of David’s message. He openly expressed disgust for those who claimed to see a path to smaller government or greater freedom through racism, sexism, homophobia, or other forms of vile and ignorant supremacism. He understood profoundly that liberty is indivisible—that one cannot credibly advocate freedom while simultaneously embracing ideologies fundamentally opposed to human dignity and equal rights.
In his final public speech, David emphatically stated:
"So when you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates talking about blood and soil or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy, or saying we shouldn't care about government racism against Black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars and supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up, fight back, tell people that's not America and it's certainly not libertarianism."
David's clarion call is unmistakable, and he found plenty of foundation for it in the leading figures of 20th century American libertarianism. As Ayn Rand put it, sincerely even if she didn’t always live up to it, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Ludwig von Mises also derided the idea of “racial polylogism” as he called it, the notion that there is any inherent difference in the principles of human thought and action based on arbitrary categories like race. But it wasn’t a spotless record and David didn’t whitewash that. He often expressed his regret that libertarians were almost entirely absent from the fight for civil rights and the dismantling of segregation even though they had been on the vanguard of just causes like abolishing the draft and gay rights. It was a tragic mistake then, and it’s a mistake now when free marketeers look the other way at assaults on the individual rights of society’s most marginalized and oppressed.
To build alliances with the purveyors of humanity’s basest impulses is to poison the very foundation of our radical liberal principles. Such alliances betray the moral clarity essential to advocating for genuine freedom and give ammunition to those who wish to caricature libertarianism as a veneer for reactionary or oppressive ideas. To put it bluntly, that accusation has been proven true for many of our erstwhile friends and allies.
To embrace liberty authentically is to embrace human dignity in all its diversity. The fight for smaller government and greater individual freedom is inseparable from the fight against prejudice and intolerance. Following David’s example means holding ourselves and our allies accountable, even when it is painful or inconvenient. Freedom is for all or it’s not freedom at all. David knew that, and we should never forget it.

Response Essay What Loving Liberty Means

Jonathan Blanks

David Boaz was very much an optimist, particularly in his speeches and writings. Given his decades of experience, he knew that working in public policy to limit the power of government is, most often, a losing proposition. It seems that almost every new law is at least a small policy loss, and among those many small defeats are peppered very large ones. Yet, as we’ve discussed in these essays and reflections, David would invariably talk about the gains for freedom, explaining how much better millions of people were than just a generation ago, let alone centuries or longer, even if lamenting some new law or regulation that would impinge on liberty in some way.
It would be wrong, however, to say that David viewed the world with rose-colored glasses. Indeed, his last public speech—that each of my co-authors cited in their initial essays—serves as much of a challenge and warning as it does a reflection on the triumphs of liberty. It is fitting, of course, because David would consistently challenge his audience, his readers, and his colleagues to think harder about liberty.
Although David deftly fused celebrating liberty’s achievements with the seriousness needed to expand and protect it, these perspectives largely remain in tension in the public square.
There are those who spend much of their energy celebrating the triumphs of capitalism and its role in reducing poverty, hunger, and disease around the world. Bestselling books and high-paying lecture circuits feature feel-good reminders of how good we have it. And there is certainly a role for this recognition, because simple examples of real progress and success make freeing policies easier to promote and defend.
Too often, though, these examples help downplay criticisms of the status quo today. Advocates for those who have not yet fully reaped material benefits or who face other challenges can be greeted with a smiling complacency and a dismissal of their legitimate grievances.
I’ve read, listened to, and even edited libertarians who complain that certain Black writers are too negative about the freedoms America provides, as if libertarians—of all people—should be the one to tell others when they’ve enjoyed enough freedom.
I recall this not to call anyone out. Indeed, the notable dearth of Black voices and faces among American libertarians bothered David and, over a period of years, we discussed ways to remedy that.
But when there is a tension between speaking to what is great and complaining about what remains to be done, I will invariably focus my efforts on the latter, because the country has a long way to go. As James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
I’ve written before about how my grandfather James, born in the late 1800s in Mississippi, owned a revolver to protect his family from the Indiana Klan, who controlled much of the state in the early 20th century. My father grew up in the Great Depression and was buried with military honors for serving in the years immediately following World War II, part of which he spent in Jim Crow New Orleans. While my father lived into his early 80s, the U.S. government had only affirmed its recognition and protection of his right to vote under the 15th Amendment when he was 37 years old. In my own life, growing up in the 1980s, my first elementary school was a magnet program created, in part, to continue desegregating schools in my northern Indiana hometown, almost 30 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
To me and many Americans like me, the expansion and protection of freedom has a more visceral meaning than the “liberty” that is too often a political prop for conservative policy preferences. Put simply, I do not take my liberty for granted because my family hasn’t had it very long.
In honor of David, and his love of the Declaration of Independence, I challenge you—dear reader—to re-approach the most famous words in American politics, as we confront an egregiously illiberal presidential administration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
American liberals and libertarians tend to think of the phrase “all men are created equal,” either as a given, as the term “self-evident” would suggest, or as a demand for colorblindness. Either are defensible positions, but let us also consider it a demand for a defense of universal dignity, when the president picks and chooses who gets sanctuary in our country, or perhaps more pointedly, who does not. Let liberals recognize that using governmental decrees to attack political rivals is an attack on equality before the law, and that is unacceptable. When the government moves to make some people less worthy of liberty than others, to deny them the due process that is a bulwark of our liberties, those actions definitionally undermine foundational principles of our country and must be opposed.
I do not possess David’s optimism, but I hope these words do his memory justice. It was an honor to reflect on his work and his life with such a distinguished group of writers. Many thanks to the Liberty Fund for hosting these essays.

Response Essay The Nationalist Threat to Liberty

Ilya Somin


Once again, I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium. So I will take this opportunity to draw out a few common themes, and their implications. As before, a common theme of the various contributions is the need to extend liberty to all, without arbitrary exclusions based on factors like race, immigrant status, gender, sexual orientation, and the like.
In one of his response essays, Tarnell Brown mentions the Marquis de Lafayette as an example of the cosmopolitan nature of the struggle for liberty, and how immigrants and foreign allies contributed to the founding and growth of America. It’s worth noting that, in addition to fighting for liberty in the American Revolution, Lafayette was also a longtime advocate of the abolition of slavery who unsuccessfully urged George Washington and other Founding Fathers to do more for that cause. Lafayette understood that liberty must be extended to all, regardless of race and ancestry. So should we.
Another, at least implicit, common theme, is the menace to liberty posed by the resurgence of illiberal and authoritarian nationalism. This is most obviously true in the cases of nativist and xenophobic attacks on immigration and trade, and Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine (motivated primarily by Russian nationalist imperialism). In addition, nationalists often (though not always) ally with social conservatives in seeking to repress the liberty of LGBT people, and others who deviate from rigid traditional social mores. That is obviously true in Putin’s Russia, and (at least with respect to transgender people) in Donald Trump’s America.
Nationalism obviously threatens liberty by restricting the range of people allowed to enjoy it. It also imperils freedom by promoting government central planning of the economy, through a combination of protectionism (as with Donald Trump’s massive new trade war), immigration restrictions, and industrial policy. In these respects, nationalism is – as my Cato Institute colleague Alex Nowrasteh and I explained in “The Case Against Nationalism,” – very similar to libertarians’ other traditional rival: socialism. As Alex likes to put it, nationalism is socialism with more flags. Despite differences in rhetoric and emphasis, nationalist central planners are little better than their socialist counterparts.
Libertarians of my generation (I was born in 1973) and even more so those of David Boaz’s generation, came of age in a world where socialism and the progressive left more generally were the greatest threats to liberty. It may be psychologically difficult for some to adjust to the new reality where the greatest threat to our values now comes from the political right, in the form of nationalism. That adjustment may be especially painful for those most emotionally attached to the old “fusionist” alliance between libertarians and conservatives. But adjust we must. Elsewhere, I have made the case that the nationalist threat to libertarian ideals is now a far greater one than that of “woke” leftism. David Boaz, especially in his later years, understood this reality.
David also understood that addressing the danger from the right doesn’t entail blinding ourselves to the flaws of the left. The “democratic socialism” popular on the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party and in some European nations remains dangerous, sharing many of the flaws of its authoritarian counterparts. It is, today, less widespread – and thus less immediately threatening – than right-wing nationalism. But that could change.
David Boaz knew that libertarians must be alert to dangers to liberty from both right and left, and that we should strive to avoid becoming too emotionally attached to either side of the conventional political spectrum, even though tactical alliances on particular issues are often useful. On this, and much else, we should learn from his example.
Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Response Essay From Antiquity to Now: A Few Final Thoughts on Boaz and Liberty

Tarnell S. Brown

The knowledge that free will is a necessary component for human flourishing is hardly a new revelation. Aristotle’s rejection of determinism – which has impacted two millennia of theological as well as political theory – led to the great Peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisius concluding that instead of human events being causally determined by some predetermined necessity, they are instead the result of a chain of cause and effect precipitated by human action. As such, individuals have both free real and moral responsibility for the outcome of their actions. As David observed in The Libertarian Mind, the sixth century BCE Chinese philosopher Lau-Tzu noted that “without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony.” Roughly 200 years later, Chuang Tzu, a student of Lau-Tzu’s philosophy, surmised that maybe men shouldn’t be governed at all.
While this notion of limited government has existed for a long time, it was rooted in the belief that it should be subordinated to the natural law. The issue with this, of course, is those limits are determined by one’s interpretation of what natural law is saying to us. This idea that men will form governments, under whichever set of justifications, because it’s just what men do, and that those governments need to be restricted by written laws, became a core part of the rise of classical liberalism around the 13th century CE. This was when England’s Magna Carta and Hungary’s Golden Bull restricted the powers of those respective kings, while small towns such as Magdeburg in Germany began experimenting with laws that emphasized self-determination at a local level.
This shift in ethical, philosophical and legal thinking towards written limits on government power led us to the concept of rule of law, in which government prerogatives are written, separated so that these powers can be checked, and are adjudicated by a body of judges. This concept permeated the works of David Boaz, and is a common thread among all of the essays included in this series. Andy Craig explains why power is antithetical to freedom unless it is brought under the rule of law. Even if one is a philosophical anarchist – as am I – governments exist, and as long as this reality exists, concentrated power that must be limited by the rule of law will also exist. Jonathan Blanks tells us how the manipulation of history can be utilized to engender a form of nationalism that endangers the rule of law. Such rank populism, which has certainly become an issue in Hungary, large segments of France and Germany, and even here in America, must constantly be guarded against.
Rule of law presupposes that all those within a nation’s borders must receive equal protection under the law. As Aaron Ross Powell details in his essay regarding the current atmosphere surrounding transgender individuals, this applies to those  whose lifestyles we may not approve of for whatever reason we may not approve of it. It also applies to immigrants, as Ilya Somin demonstrates in great detail. Not only is the idea of treating foreigners humanely as old as Judaic law, the Crown’s failure to do so was one of the reasons behind the American Revolution.
Quite naturally, when legal philosophers began determining what governments could not do to their own citizens, these concepts extended to what they could not do to the citizens of other nations as well. Jurists such as Grotius and Pufendorf began extending the notions underpinning the rule of law to conduct between nations, giving rise to rules for international relations. David was no fan of wars of conquest, because they made the world a less free place on net, an observation which serves as the foundation for my own essay regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War. There are, naturally, other concepts found within David’s works that have been explored in this series, and I hope the reader benefits from all of them.  David was a great communicator of libertarian ideals, which are needed in mainstream thought now more than ever.
I am grateful to Liberty Fund for allowing me to participate in honoring such an accomplished, important individual, and for allowing me to dialogue with this impressive collection of distinguished, accomplished scholars. The fight for liberty – not just at home, but across the globe – is far from over, and there are many miles to go before we may sleep.

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