The Lesson of David’s Method

   

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.