David Boaz, leading voice of libertarianism, dies at 70 - The Boston Globe (2024)

In practical policy terms, that means small government, low taxes, free enterprise and school choice, among other positions associated with the political right. It also means robust civil liberties, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the repeal of bans on drugs and prostitution, and the rejection of censorship, among stances traditionally taken by the left.

“There are only a few rules: You can’t hit other people and you can’t take their stuff,” Mr. Boaz once quipped to The Washington Post. “After that, you have to make the important decisions for yourself.”

Mr. Boaz said he was drawn to libertarianism during his adolescence in western Kentucky, where he acquired a twang that never fully left him. His mother had studied economics and kept on her bookshelf a copy of “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt, a best-selling 1946 volume that articulated in layman’s terms the case for an unfettered free market.

The young Mr. Boaz also consumed works such as the 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, a cult classic among libertarians, and “The Conscience of a Conservative” (1960) by US Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide but invigorated the conservative movement.

(In his office at the Cato Institute, Mr. Boaz kept a Goldwater poster and two busts of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher associated with laissez-faire capitalism.)

By the end of his life, Mr. Boaz was one of the writers to whom people of his persuasion turned for their political moorings. He was the author of books including “The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom” (2015) and “The Politics of Freedom” (2008) and edited the volume “The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman” (1997).

Mr. Boaz helped shape the course of libertarian thought from his longtime intellectual home at the Cato Institute, which he joined in 1981.

He quickly scaled the leadership ranks and was widely described as one of the key leaders who helped grow Cato from a scrappy operation into a significant presence in the Washington policy world.

Mr. Boaz contributed prolifically to newspapers including the Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He drew wide notice with a 1988 commentary published in the Times in which he argued against the criminal laws, immigration regulations, and other policies enforced under the umbrella of what was often described as the “war on drugs.”

“An antiwar song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the ’60s went this way: ‘We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on,’” Mr. Boaz wrote in the op-ed. “Today we’re waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time it’s a war on drugs.”

In his personal life, said Tom G. Palmer, a longtime friend and colleague at Cato, Mr. Boaz was a teetotaler. He drank no alcohol, smoked no cigarettes, used no pot. His “only vice,” Palmer said, was Coca-Cola, which he preferred so strongly that he avoided restaurants that offered Pepsi products.

But Mr. Boaz saw anti-drug laws as a violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy. He compared them to Prohibition, which officially banned but failed to actually stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. He argued that alcohol and tobacco — both legal — accounted for many more deaths per year than illegal drugs did.

For libertarians, the growing contemporary movement toward the legalization of marijuana represented a significant victory; the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes in 38 states and the District and for recreational purposes in 24 states and the District.

Mr. Boaz counted another victory in the expansion of rights for same-sex couples — most notably the US Supreme Court decision in 2015 finding a constitutional right for gay couples to marry, a cause that he had worked toward for decades.

But mainstream American politics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, remained, in his view, woefully distant from foundational notions of liberty.

He criticized Democrats for seeking to raise taxes and Republicans for attempting to censor books and television. Liberals who oppose school vouchers, as he interpreted their position, would deny parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, while conservatives opposed to gay rights would constrain an individual’s right to marry and build a family.

He conceded that the Libertarian Party was “not a very successful” political party but posited that most Americans support at least some libertarian ideals.

“Millions and millions of Americans, if you ask them, ‘What do you think about drug laws; what do you think about Social Security; what do you think about taxes?’ they’re going to come out in a libertarian direction,” he said. “But they’re not going to call themselves libertarians, because libertarianism really is the basic theme of America.”

David Douglas Boaz was born in Mayfield, Ky., near the Mississippi River, on Aug. 29, 1953. His mother was a homemaker. Mr. Boaz described his father, a circuit court judge, to the Washington Examiner as a “Jeffersonian conservative Democrat.” Reflecting on his own political evolution, Mr. Boaz said that he was a conservative before he was a libertarian.

Mr. Boaz enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1975. He landed one of his first jobs with the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization, before working as a campaign staffer for Ed Clark, a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 1978 and for US president in 1980.

Besides Miller, of Arlington, Mr. Boaz’s survivors include a brother and a sister.

Mr. Boaz did not join the Libertarian Party, telling NPR in 2002 that he preferred to think of himself as an independent.

He found stark flaws in the Democratic Party platform and during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, remarked that among libertarians, the view was that “if someone puts a gun to your head and says you have to choose between Clinton and Trump, the correct answer is, take the bullet.”

But in that election, Mr. Boaz also condemned Trump for making “racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign” and for “vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.”

Mr. Boaz expressed deep distress about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, in which he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and opposed the appearance of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at the Libertarian Party’s 2024 national convention in May.

“I have friends who say Biden is the biggest spender ever and he’s regulating and he’s woke and how can anyone consider voting for him over Trump?” Mr. Boaz told CNN in April.

“And I’ll say that one reason is that Biden has not tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. That’s a very fundamental issue. You can add up all these [other] issues and weigh them. But the big freedom issue that Biden has over Trump,” he continued, “is that Trump tried to steal an election.”