David Boaz

The Libertarian Mind may be out of stock at Amazon, but the Kindle is selling pretty well (numbers change constantly, of course):

It’s also available at other online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores (walk down the block, why don’tcha), and the Cato Institute. There are links to some of those outlets here.

Thanks to Nick Gillespie and Reason.tv for allowing me to talk at length in this interview about my path to libertarianism, self-evident truths, Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and a lot of other topics related to The Libertarian Mind. About one hour:

There’s a mostly accurate transcript here.

You can find the transcript of last night’s Reddit AMA here.

The Libertarian Mind is out of stock at Amazon! Of course, you can still get it on Kindle. Or you can buy it at many other fine bookstores, both storefront and online, some of which are linked here.

Some people think libertarians only care about taxes and regulations. But I was asked not long ago, what’s the most important libertarian accomplishment in history? I said, “the abolition of slavery.”

The greatest libertarian crusade in history was the effort to abolish chattel slavery, culminating in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement and the heroic Underground Railroad. It’s no accident that abolitionism emerged out of the ferment of the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution.

How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? They could not, of course. The ideas of the American Revolution — individualism, natural rights and free markets — led logically to agitation for the extension of civil and political rights to those who had been excluded from liberty, as they were from power — notably slaves, serfs and women. As the great English scholar Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

The world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia that same year. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, yet he included a passionate condemnation of slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence the following year: “[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” The Continental Congress deleted that passage, but Americans lived uneasily with the obvious contradiction between their commitment to individual rights and the institution of slavery.

“Racism is an age-old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women.”

As the idea of liberty spread, slavery and serfdom came under attack throughout the Western world. During the British debate over the idea of compensating slaveholders for the loss of their “property,” the libertarian Benjamin Pearson replied that he had “thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.”

In the United States, the abolitionist movement was naturally led by libertarians. Leading abolitionists called slavery “man stealing,” in that it sought to deny self-ownership and steal a man’s very self. Their arguments paralleled those of John Locke and the libertarian agitators known as the Levellers. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that his goal was not just the abolition of slavery but “the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force.”

Frederick Douglass likewise made his arguments for abolition in the terms of classical liberalism and libertarianism: self-ownership and natural rights. After the Civil War, he continued his fight for equal freedom, campaigning against Southern states’ efforts to avoid following the new constitutional amendments. And he applied his belief in liberty and equal rights universally: He backed women’s suffrage, saying “we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.” He defended Chinese immigrants, pointing out that there are “no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.” In Great Britain he joined campaigns for free trade and Irish freedom.

Just as a better understanding of natural rights was developed during the American struggle against specific injustices suffered by the colonies, the feminist and abolitionist Angelina Grimké noted in an 1837 letter, “I have found the Anti-Slavery cause to be the high school of morals in our land — the school in which human rights are more fully investigated, and better understood and taught, than in any other.”

Racism is an age-old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women. As Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1963 essay “Racism,”

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage … which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

What Locke, Garrison, Douglass and many others were fighting for is the ethical basis of libertarianism, a respect for the dignity and worth of every individual. This is expressed in the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s dictum that each person is to be treated not merely as a means but as an end in himself.

Black history is American history, a story of oppression and liberation rooted in the libertarian idea of individual rights. Much of the progress we have made in the United States has involved extending the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — to more and more people. The emphasis on the individual mind in the Enlightenment, the individualist nature of market capitalism and the demand for individual rights that inspired the American Revolution naturally led people to think more carefully about the nature of the individual and gradually to recognize that the dignity of individual rights should be extended to all.

The struggle for freedom is never finished. Today libertarians work for economic freedom that would mean more growth and more jobs, for the freedom for all families to choose better schools for their children, for an end to the counterproductive war on drugs and for criminal justice reform. Respect for the dignity of each person is the foundation of moral and social progress.

In The Libertarian Mind, which is officially published today, I have a chapter titled “What Big Government Is All About” that aspires to be applied Public Choice analysis. Much of it relates to what I think Jonathan Rauch first called “the parasite economy,” the part of the economy that involves getting through government what you can’t get through voluntary market processes. Reason.com has just published an excerpt from that chapter, with a few recent examples added, such as these all-too-typical stories:

Lobbying never stops. One week in December, the Kaiser Health News reported that “growth opportunities from the federal government have increasingly come not from war but from healing.” That is, “business purchases by the Department of Health and Human Services have doubled to $21 billion annually in the past decade.” And who showed up to collect some of the largesse? Well, General Dynamics was having trouble making ends meet with defense contracting, so suddenly it managed to become the largest contractor to Medicare and Medicaid. “For traditional defense contractors,” wrote Kaiser Health, “health care isn’t the new oil. It’s the new F-35 fighter.”

Of course, the old F-35, despite a decade or more of running behind schedule and over budget, is still doing pretty well. That same week Congress passed the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” spending bill, including $479 million for four F-35 fighters from Lockheed that even the Pentagon didn’t want. The Wall Street Journal reported that the bill “sparked a lobbying frenzy from individual companies, industries and other special interests”—pretty much the same language you could have read in earlier stories about Porkulus and Obamacare. Every provision in the bill—from the $94 billion in Pentagon contracting to $120 million for the Chicago subway to an Obamacare exemption for Blue Cross and Blue Shield—has a lobbyist or several shepherding it through the secretive process.

And I also talked about the parasite economy on John Stossel’s television show last Friday night:

For more on the parasite economy, and everything else you wanted to know about libertarianism, read The Libertarian Mind.

I’m delighted to announce that my new book, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom, goes on sale today. Published by Simon & Schuster, it should be available at all fine bookstores and online book services.

I’ve tried to write a book for several audiences: for libertarians who want to deepen their understanding of libertarian ideas; for people who want to give friends and family a comprehensive but readable introduction; and for the millions of Americans who hold fiscally responsible, socially tolerant views and are looking for a political perspective that makes sense. 

The Libertarian Mind covers the intellectual history of classical liberal and libertarian ideas, along with such key themes as individualism, individual rights, pluralism, spontaneous order, law, civil society, and the market process. There’s a chapter of applied public choice (“What Big Government Is All About”), and a chapter on contemporary policy issues. I write about restoring economic growth, inequality, poverty, health care, entitlements, education, the environment, foreign policy, and civil liberties, along with such current hot topics as libertarian views of Bush and Obama; America’s libertarian heritage as described by leading political scientists; American distrust of government; overcriminalization; and cronyism, lobbying, the parasite economy, and the wealth of Washington.

The publisher is delighted to have this blurb from Senator Rand Paul: 

“They say the libertarian moment has arrived. If you want to understand and be part of that moment, read David Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind where you’ll be drawn into the ‘eternal struggle of liberty vs. power,’ where you’ll learn that libertarianism presumes that you were born free and not a subject of the state. The Libertarian Mind belongs on every freedom-lover’s bookshelf.”

I am just as happy to have high praise from legal scholar Richard Epstein:

“In an age in which the end of big government is used by politicians as a pretext for bigger, and worse, government, it is refreshing to find a readable and informative account of the basic principles of libertarian thought written by someone steeped in all aspects of the tradition. David Boaz’s Libertarian Mind unites history, philosophy, economics and law—spiced with just the right anecdotes—to bring alive a vital tradition of American political thought that deserves to be honored today in deed as well as in word.” 

Find more endorsements here from such distinguished folks as Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, John Stossel, Peter Thiel, P. J. O’Rourke, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, and author Jonathan Rauch. And please: buy the book. Then like it on Facebook, retweet it from https://twitter.com/David_Boaz, blog it, buy more copies for your friends.

Libertarianism — the philosophy of personal and economic freedom — has deep roots in Western civilization and in American history, and it’s growing stronger. Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz talks about the renewed appetite for smaller government and more freedom.

The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom by David Boaz