Group of 24 research program

This is a collection of discussion papers prepared under the research program of the Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs (G-24). The program aims at enhancing the understanding of policy makers in developing countries of the complex issues in the international monetary and financial system, and at raising awareness outside developing countries for the need to introduce a development dimension into the discussion of international financial and institutional reform. The research carried out under the program is coordinated by Professor Dani Rodrik of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Complete List of Papers

Dr. David Thomas MBA Professor-Harvard Bussiness School

David Thomas is the H. Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Complete List of Publications

Racial Diversity Initiatives in Professional Service Firms: What Factors Differentiate Successful from Unsuccessful Initiatives?Authors: Modupe Akinola and David A. Thomas
Published: September 2006
Feature: Working Papers


What organizational factors are needed for racial diversity initiatives to succeed? While diversity continues to grow in importance in organizations, very little research has focused on the processes that underlie diversity management. Modupe Akinola and David A. Thomas propose a study intended to explore management initiatives that focus on racial diversity in professional service firms. Given that such firms rely on the high level of skills, expertise, and diverse perspectives offered by their professional staff, these firms may be ideal laboratories for examining diversity initiatives.
Unfinished Business: The Impact of Race on Understanding Mentoring RelationshipsAuthors: Stacy Blake-Beard, Audrey Murrell, and David Thomas
Published: June 2006
Feature: Working Papers


Race is a critical component of relationships in organizations, particularly in the United States and, due to shifting demographics, particularly for the future. As a socially embedded phenomenon, race also provides a lens for research on mentoring. This paper discusses why race and mentoring are important, how race has been studied or omitted in research to date, and what is known about the intersection of mentoring and race in organizations. The authors then discuss their own model, which aims to guide future research.
Writing the Case for Public School ReformAuthor: Julia Hanna
Published: May 8, 2006
Feature: Lessons from the Classroom


Professor David Thomas discusses his case studies on how the School District of Philadelphia is recruiting and retaining teachers and improving its human resources department. From HBS Alumni Bulletin.
IBM Finds Profit in DiversityAuthor: David A. Thomas
Published: September 27, 2004
Feature: Research & Ideas


Former CEO Lou Gerstner established a diversity initiative that embraced differences instead of ignoring them. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt, professor David A. Thomas describes why IBM made diversity a cornerstone strategy.
Racial Diversity Pays OffAuthor: Martha Lagace
Published: June 21, 2004
Feature: Research & Ideas


Diversity has been a buzzword in organizations for at least fifteen years. How much is really known about its effects on performance? HBS professors Robin Ely and David Thomas investigate.
Tales of the Newly-minted MBAAuthor: Julia Hanna
Published: February 17, 2003
Feature: Report from the Field


One moved back home. Another said his career subscribed to "chaos theory." The career paths of new Harvard Business School MBAs have wandered, some very far, from where the young executives had anticipated.
Manager or Mentor? Why You Must Be BothAuthor: Martha Lagace
Published: November 26, 2001
Feature: Research & Ideas


In a frank discussion on diversity with a large group of Harvard University managers, HBS professor David A. Thomas explains why managers need to do more than just mentor.
Race Does Matter in MentoringAuthor: David A. Thomas
Published: May 29, 2001
Feature: Research & Ideas


In studying the different career paths of whites and minorities, HBS Professor David Thomas finds one characteristic of people of color who advance the furthest: a strong network of mentors and corporate sponsors.
What Makes a Good Leader?Authors: Deborah Blagg and Susan Young
Published: April 2, 2001
Feature: Research & Ideas


Leadership comes in many shapes and sizes, and often from entirely unexpected quarters. In this excerpt from the HBS Bulletin, five HBS professors weigh in with their views on leadership in action.
Wired and Black: Focus on CareersAuthor: Carrie Levine
Published: March 12, 2001
Feature: Research & Ideas

What It Takes: Minorities in the Executive SuiteAuthor: Judith A. Ross
Published: October 12, 1999
Feature: Research & Ideas


For diversity to take hold in America's corporate boardrooms, companies need to find new ways to develop more conducive environments for minority advancement and opportunity. But minority executives who want to move up can't simple wait for their work environment to be perfect. HBS Professors David Thomas and John Gabarro are studying what it takes — on both sides — to make corporate diversity a reality.

White Paper of the Moment:-When Learning and Performance are at Odds-

November 2006
Authors: Sara J. Singer and Amy C. Edmondson

Complete White Paper
Executive Summary:
While most people agree that learning leads to improved performance, there are several ways in which learning and performance in organizations can be at odds. First, when organizations take on a new learning challenge, performance often suffers in the short term, because new behaviors or practices are not yet highly skilled. Second, by revealing and analyzing their failures and mistakes—a critical aspect of learning—individuals or work groups may appear to be performing less well than they would otherwise. This paper reviews research that describes the challenges of learning from failure in organizations, and argues that these challenges can be at least partly addressed by leadership that creates a climate of psychological safety and that promotes inquiry.

Key concepts include:
In organizations, the costs of learning may at times be more visible than the benefits. Therefore, leaders must publicize this idea broadly, or else learning may not happen.
Experimentation, by its nature, will inevitably result in failures; yet without these failures learning cannot occur.
Leadership is essential for fostering the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments that promote learning now and invest in performance later.

Article of the Moment: -Grooming Next-Generation Leaders-

Published: December 18, 2006
Author: Martha Lagace


Finding and nurturing future leadership talent is a primary concern for most organizations. How can they identify top people, train them, and—here's the catch—retain them? And do so in the face of ever-increasing global challenges?

W. Earl Sasser and Das Narayandas, Harvard Business School professors, are experts on the subject as co-chairs of the School's "Program for Leadership Development: Accelerating the Careers of High-Potential Leaders." PLD invites executives with ten to fifteen years of experience to attend four modules that focus on such areas as foundational skills, critical business functions, strategy formulation and implementation, and personal leadership.

For the organization, according to Sasser and Narayandas, talent is key to competitive advantage. And for the talented employee, a huge challenge is to rise above a single function and gain a broad understanding of the business, especially as it operates globally.

In separate interviews, Sasser and Narayandas discussed talent identification, leadership in action, and what PLD does to help hundreds of executives grow.

"Leadership by definition is a multifaceted term," says Narayandas, a professor of business administration with a specialty in marketing. "Are you managing yourself, are you managing upwards or the people below or laterally, or the firm, industry, society? You can lead at so many levels. That complexity is only going up. It's just not a question of leading a small team. It's about leadership in ideas, in actions.

"Add that to the fact that in most situations people are dealing with the global economy, rapid commoditization, and hyper-competitive environments. So to be able to be flexible and use the right approach at the right time and change as the situation demands is going to be tough. Not everybody can do it. That's going to distinguish the true leaders from people who are capable but not leaders."
Targeting talent

Employees in large and small organizations share one advantage, according to Sasser, the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management and a member of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. These employees enjoy access to talent-identification systems. Big organizations can point to formal programs led by individuals whose sole responsibility is to find and mentor up-and-comers. And small companies can shine in talent identification too, as CEOs take note of future stars. But medium-sized organizations have the most difficulty with talent identification because these companies often lack the infrastructure and human resources capabilities, says Sasser.

With or without talent identification programs, how likely are future leaders to recognize leadership qualities in themselves?

"There are some that can see it in themselves; there are some that need to be informed," says Narayandas. "Talent needs to be nurtured: Many times it takes someone else who can recognize that an individual can think beyond their job, can think bigger, and has the potential to make a bigger impact. It's a combination of the environment, talent seekers, and raw talent together that bring the right kind of people to our program."
What should future leaders learn?

People often have a true deficiency in finance and quantitative methods, says Sasser. While PLD students learn a variety of business specialties including strategy, finance, marketing, and innovation, the point is that future leaders often need to break out of a function where they excel and aim for a bigger picture of the organization and its world.

"If they are not trained the right way, they can spend the next twenty years building deeper and deeper skills in a narrow aspect," Narayandas says. "What they might not be asking themselves, or pushing themselves to ask, is: 'What if I had knowledge of other aspects of the business? It would actually inform my decisions in a better way. I could pursue more productive lines of action for the firm.'

"Business is only getting more complicated. Understanding the interactions of various aspects of business becomes very important."

"Let's assume we have fantastic R&D people," he continues. "They are building ideas. They might never ask the question, 'Is this relevant to the company, customers, and marketplace?' Sometimes they might just work with the budget they have on a potential innovation rather than frame a problem in a more informed way and be able to go to management and say, 'Look, here's the business plan. Here are the resources I would like. This is what I think we can show.'

"So someone who has an understanding of the capital budgeting process would be immediately more likely to go down that line of action rather than say, 'I've been given $50,000, now let me try to do the best I can.'"

You have to understand what you're leading, adds Sasser. Expertise in only one area—think John Sculley's unsuccessful jump from Pepsi consumer marketing to the top of Apple—can be a handicap.

After your organization trains and mentors leaders, how can it retain them? Talented employees thirst for challenging assignments, and they need to be listened to, says Sasser. "If you invest in these people, you must give them significant work. In a top management group there are never enough leaders. Something is always a stretch for someone.

"There are often conflicts between how fast you can move and how fast the organization can move you. If someone doesn't see mobility, they may leave."
Adapting a leadership style

Not everyone is going to be another Jack Welch, nor does everyone want to be, says Sasser. Not everyone will be CEO some day, and having an enjoyable and challenging career doesn't have to mean becoming CEO. The key to career success is to draw on a variety of leadership styles at appropriate times. Actionable Leadership, PLD's fourth and last module, effectively holds a mirror up to students and, with input from coaches and self-assessments, encourages them to move out of their comfort zone and explore the personal complexities of leadership.

"The unit of analysis is themselves," says Sasser.

"The people we are training are in positions of power, not running companies so much as executing the vision," explains Narayandas. "What is critical for them is to understand different leadership styles that apply in different situations. It's actionable and adaptive. 'When should I be a good follower, a team member; when should I lead from the front?' Those are the kinds of skills that we want to build in our PLD program.

"Many a time strategy gets set [several] levels above and has to get implemented effectively. These are the people who execute it. So leadership in their context is as much about following as it is about leading. It's all about managing change, but change in a given context. They're not at the stage of changing companies. What they're doing is challenging status quo. And so what we teach them is that there is no unique leadership style; there are different styles, each of which applies in different situations."
Teaching leadership

Teaching in PLD is a highlight of his work at Harvard Business School, says Narayandas. This is due to the students' depth of knowledge, their professional experience and energy, and their desire to learn. "PLD is unique in that it is more 'MBA-ish' that any other executive program and yet at the same time more 'executive-ish' than the MBA program. The people who come to PLD have the same hunger for learning all aspects of management that the MBAs do. They are open to new theories; they're not focused on specific problems.

"Yet at the same time, compared to the average MBA class, the PLD class has richness. There are decades of experience in each class. People share contexts; they live many of the problems. It's exciting in that manner in how it is different from an MBA class. I just thoroughly enjoy it."

Even a marketing class becomes an opportunity to explore the complexities of leadership, he reflects.

"I walked into class last week in my first session of PLD for the first case, and I said, 'Who would like to open this case discussion? What I'd like from the opener are the answers to three questions:
What do you want to do in this situation?
Why do you do it?
What concerns have you with your own plan of action?

"I said, 'The reason why I'm asking you to do it in that way is that it's a way to build up the unique characteristics of a leader. A leader has vision: Here's what we're going to do. A leader has reason: Here's why we're going to do it. And a leader has concerns. Every journey is fraught with issues and troubles. A good leader is someone who anticipated them.'

"People like to follow people who have vision. People like to follow leaders who can explain why we're doing something. And people like to follow people who have said, 'You know what, it's not going to be an easy journey; we're going to have a lot of adversity, but here's why I think we can get it done.'

"And this resonated with the students. You could see when they began to discuss cases later in the program that they were following the framework. We were doing marketing that day, yet we were doing leadership that day too."
About the author

Martha Lagace is Senior Editor of HBS Working Knowledge.

Article of the Moment:-Globalization Good for Whom?-

Globalization for Whom? - Globalization Good for Whom?
7/29/2002
The rules of globalization aren't fair to poor countries, says Harvard University professor Dani Rodrik. In this article from Harvard Magazine, Rodrik, a specialist in international political economy and a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, shares his belief that rich and poor can bridge the gap. "Economic development often requires unconventional strategies that fit awkwardly with the ideology of free trade and free capital flows," he says.

by Dani Rodrik
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Globalization has brought little but good news to those with the products, skills, and resources to market worldwide. But does it also work for the world's poor?

That is the central question around which the debate over globalization—in essence, free trade and free flows of capital—revolves. Antiglobalization protesters may have had only limited success in blocking world trade negotiations or disrupting the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but they have irrevocably altered the terms of the debate. Poverty is now the defining issue for both sides. The captains of the world economy have conceded that progress in international trade and finance has to be measured against the yardsticks of poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

For most of the world's developing countries, the 1990s were a decade of frustration and disappointment. The economies of sub-Saharan Africa, with few exceptions, stubbornly refused to respond to the medicine meted out by the World Bank and the IMF. Latin American countries were buffeted by a never-ending series of boom-and-bust cycles in capital markets and experienced growth rates significantly below their historical averages. Most of the former socialist economies ended the decade at lower levels of per-capita income than they started it—and even in the rare successes, such as Poland, poverty rates remained higher than under communism. East Asian economies such as South Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia, which had been hailed previously as "miracles," were dealt a humiliating blow in the financial crisis of 1997. That this was also the decade in which globalization came into full swing is more than a minor inconvenience for its advocates. If globalization is such a boon for poor countries, why so many setbacks?Look closer at the Chinese experience, and you discover that it is hardly a poster child for globalization.
— Dani Rodrik


Globalizers deploy two counter-arguments against such complaints. One is that global poverty has actually decreased. The reason is simple: While most countries have seen lower income growth, the world's two largest countries, China and India, have had the opposite experience. (Economic growth tends to be highly correlated with poverty reduction.) China's growth since the late 1970s—averaging almost 8 percent per annum per capita—has been nothing short of spectacular. India's performance has not been as extraordinary, but the country's growth rate has more than doubled since the early 1980s—from 1.5 percent per capita to 3.7 percent. These two countries house more than half of the world's poor, and their experience is perhaps enough to dispel the collective doom elsewhere.

The second counter-argument is that it is precisely those countries that have experienced the greatest integration with the world economy that have managed to grow fastest and reduce poverty the most. A typical exercise in this vein consists of dividing developing countries into two groups on the basis of the increase in their trade—"globalizers" versus "non-globalizers"—and to show that the first group did much better than the second. Here too, China, India, and a few other high performers like Vietnam and Uganda are the key exhibits for the pro-globalization argument. The intended message from such studies is that countries that have the best shot at lifting themselves out of poverty are those that open themselves up to the world economy.

How we read globalization's record in alleviating poverty hinges critically, therefore, on what we make of the experience of a small number of countries that have done well in the last decade or two—China in particular. In 1960, the average Chinese expected to live only 36 years. By 1999, life expectancy had risen to 70 years, not far below the level of the United States. Literacy has risen from less than 50 percent to more than 80 percent. Even though economic development has been uneven, with the coastal regions doing much better than the interior, there has been a striking reduction in poverty rates almost everywhere.

What does this impressive experience tell us about what globalization can do for poor countries? There is little doubt that exports and foreign investment have played an important role in China's development. By selling its products on world markets, China has been able to purchase the capital equipment and inputs needed for its modernization. And the surge in foreign investment has brought much-needed managerial and technical expertise. The regions of China that have grown fastest are those that took the greatest advantage of foreign trade and investment.

But look closer at the Chinese experience, and you discover that it is hardly a poster child for globalization. China's economic policies have violated virtually every rule by which the proselytizers of globalization would like the game to be played. China did not liberalize its trade regime to any significant extent, and it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) only last year; to this day, its economy remains among the most protected in the world. Chinese currency markets were not unified until 1994. China resolutely refused to open its financial markets to foreigners, again until very recently. Most striking of all, China achieved its transformation without adopting private-property rights, let alone privatizing its state enterprises. China's policymakers were practical enough to understand the role that private incentives and markets could play in producing results. But they were also smart enough to realize that the solution to their problems lay in institutional innovations suited to the local conditions—the household responsibility system, township and village enterprises, special economic zones, partial liberalization in agriculture and industry—rather than in off-the-shelf blueprints and Western rules of good behavior. [Poor countries] are being asking to implement an agenda of institutional reform that took today's advanced countries generations to accomplish.
— Dani Rodrik


The remarkable thing about China is that it has achieved integration with the world economy despite having ignored these rules—and indeed because it did so. If China were a basket case today, rather than the stunning success that it is, officials of the WTO and the World Bank would have fewer difficulties fitting it within their worldview than they do now.

China's experience may represent an extreme case, but it is by no means an exception. Earlier successes such as South Korea and Taiwan tell a similar story. Economic development often requires unconventional strategies that fit awkwardly with the ideology of free trade and free capital flows. South Korea and Taiwan made extensive use of import quotas, local-content requirements, patent infringements, and export subsidies—all of which are currently prohibited by the WTO. Both countries heavily regulated capital flows well into the 1990s. India managed to increase its growth rate through the adoption of more pro-business policies, despite having one of the world's most protectionist trade regimes. Its comparatively mild import liberalization in the 1990s came a decade after the onset of higher growth in the early 1980s. And India has yet to open itself up to world financial markets—which is why it emerged unscathed from the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

By contrast, many of the countries that have opened themselves up to trade and capital flows with abandon have been rewarded with financial crises and disappointing performance. Latin America, the region that adopted the globalization agenda with the greatest enthusiasm in the 1990s, has suffered rising inequality, enormous volatility, and economic growth rates significantly below those of the post-World War II decades. Argentina represents a particularly tragic case. It tried harder in the 1990s than virtually any country to endear itself to international capital markets, only to be the victim of an abrupt reversal in "market sentiment" by the end of the decade. The Argentine strategy may have had elements of a gamble, but it was solidly grounded in the theories expounded by U.S.-based economists and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF. When Argentina's economy took off in the early 1990s after decades of stagnation, the reaction from these quarters was not that this was puzzling—it was that reform pays off.

What these countries' experience tells us, therefore, is that while global markets are good for poor countries, the rules according to which they are being asked to play the game are often not. Caught between WTO agreements, World Bank strictures, IMF conditions, and the need to maintain the confidence of financial markets, developing countries are increasingly deprived of the room they need to devise their own paths out of poverty. They are being asked to implement an agenda of institutional reform that took today's advanced countries generations to accomplish. The United States, to take a particularly telling example, was hardly a paragon of free-trade virtue while catching up with and surpassing Britain. In fact, U.S. import tariffs during the latter half of the nineteenth century were higher than in all but a few developing countries today. Today's rules are not only impractical, they divert attention and resources from more urgent developmental priorities. Turning away from world markets is surely not a good way to alleviate domestic poverty—but countries that have scored the most impressive gains are those that have developed their own version of the rulebook while taking advantage of world markets. Rules on foreign workers have been relaxed only in those rare instances where there has been intense lobbying from special interests.
— Dani Rodrik


The regulations that developing nations confront in those markets are highly asymmetric. Import barriers tend to be highest for manufactured products of greatest interest to poor countries, such as garments. The global intellectual-property-rights regime tends to raise prices of essential medicines in poor countries.

But the disconnect between trade rules and development needs is nowhere greater than in the area of international labor mobility. Thanks to the efforts of the United States and other rich countries, barriers to trade in goods, financial services, and investment flows have now been brought down to historic lows. But the one market where poor nations have something in abundance to sell—the market for labor services—has remained untouched by this liberalizing trend. Rules on cross-border labor flows are determined almost always unilaterally (rather than multilaterally as in other areas of economic exchange) and remain highly restrictive. Even a small relaxation of these rules would produce huge gains for the world economy, and for poor nations in particular.

Consider, for example, instituting a system that would allot temporary work permits to skilled and unskilled workers from poorer nations, amounting to, say, 3 percent of the rich countries' labor force. Under the scheme, these workers would be allowed to obtain employment in the rich countries for a period of three to five years, after which they would be expected to return to their home countries and be replaced by new workers. (While many workers, no doubt, will want to remain in the host countries permanently, it would be possible to achieve acceptable rates of return by building specific incentives into the scheme. For example, a portion of workers' earnings could be witheld until repatriation takes place. Or there could be penalties for home governments whose nationals failed to comply with return requirements: Sending countries' quotas could be reduced in proportion to the numbers who fail to return.) A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that such a system would easily yield $200 billion of income annually for the citizens of developing nations—vastly more than what the existing WTO trade agenda is expected to produce. The positive spillovers that the returnees would generate for their home countries—the experience, entrepreneurship, investment, and work ethic they would bring back with them—would add considerably to these gains. What is equally important, the economic benefits would accrue directly to workers from developing nations. There would be no need for "trickle down."

If the political leaders of the advanced countries have chosen to champion trade liberalization but not international labor mobility, the reason is not that the former is popular with voters at home while the latter is not. They are both unpopular. When asked their views on trade policy, fewer than one in five Americans reject import restrictions. In most advanced countries, including the United States, the proportion of respondents who want to expand imports tends to be about the same or lower than the proportion who believe immigration is good for the economy. The main difference seems to be that the beneficiaries of trade and investment liberalization have managed to become politically effective. Multinational firms and financial enterprises have been successful in setting the agenda of multilateral trade negotiations because they have been quick to see the link between enhanced market access abroad and increased profits at home. Cross-border labor flows, by contrast, usually have not had a well-defined constituency in the advanced countries. Rules on foreign workers have been relaxed only in those rare instances where there has been intense lobbying from special interests. When Silicon Valley firms became concerned about labor costs, for example, they pushed Congress hard to be allowed to import software engineers from India and other developing nations.

It will take a lot of work to make globalization's rules friendlier to poor nations. Leaders of the advanced countries will have to stop dressing up policies championed by special interests at home as responses to the needs of the poor in the developing world. Remembering their own history, they will have to provide room for poor nations to develop their own strategies of institution-building and economic catch-up. For their part, developing nations will have to stop looking to financial markets and multilateral agencies for the recipes of economic growth. Perhaps most difficult of all, economists will have to learn to be more humble!

Thoughts To Ponder....

By: OneTuffChick...


I find it mocking that most people willingly agree that college is not for everyone, but rarely does a discussion take place that really answers the question, “What does the typical American public high school experience really prepare a student to do after graduation other than get a minimum wage job that really does not enable them to live independently or adequately take care of their basic needs?”. I cringe at how I think some people would answer the question, “Does a couple, in which both parties work full-time minimum wage jobs, have a right to have children when they have no health insurance?” I am alarmed when I ask myself, “As each country’s economy becomes more globalized, what will happen to employees, even those with academic credentials or strong skill-sets, in industrialized countries whose jobs are increasingly outsourced to companies in countries that permit them to pay their employees next to nothing?”.

I do not have the answers to my questions, but I fear what will happen if there is no discussion of these and related issues. I believe it is easy to lose perspective on basic human needs under the guise of trying to sift the deserving poor out from among the undeserving and too little political will to address the structural social inequities that, I believe, will increasingly stress our current systems to the point of eventual exhaustion and collapse.

University of Tennessee Commencement Rita Geier December 17, 2006

You may consider this next part of my remarks to be Rita Geier’s version of “This I Believe,” the NPR segment that has inspired me and I am sure many of you to articulate your core beliefs. I’d like to share some of those with you today in the belief that they can be as meaningful for you today as they have been for me. You either have or will find your own guiding principles, but I ask you to consider these on this occasion.

Approach life with an attitude of humility and thanksgiving.
You are indeed the fortunate ones who have come this far. Some of you came from Appalachian towns and inner cities where the odds were against you standing here today. You have been privileged to be educated and to earn its benefits, not just to make more money and to live more lavishly, but you have had the chance to acquire knowledge from many disciplines of the individual, of society and the world in which we live and to gain the understanding and technological skills to apply that knowledge and make the future better and brighter for yourself and others. Never forget that you did not get here by your deeds alone, or that there are others who yearned for this opportunity, but were not so fortunate. Each of you had someone, probably many, who have supported and sacrificed for you, who have been with you all the way or just when you needed someone the most… who never let you give up, give in or lose your way… and to those dear ones you should be eternally grateful and be sure today that they know you know what they have done for you.

You are not owed anything. You owe.
You have all heard that of those to whom much is given, much is expected. I believe that. My son and I mentor 8th graders in the Higher Achievement Program in Washington, D.C. where the mentors are mostly young professionals who universally say they want to “give something back.” But those who practice ethical altruism get back far more than they give. The opportunities are everywhere, in every community, virtually on every street corner. I encourage you to consider “pro bono publico” -- serving the public good -- as a career and discover as I have some of the most challenging and rewarding work that your profession has to offer. Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, a person I greatly admire, put it this way: “Service is the rent each of us pays for living.” But Dr. Albert Schweitzer said it best to young people like yourself when he said: “I can’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

Never be blind to injustice or accept it.
You must not become hardened to injustice because there is so much of it in the world. One can not watch the news or read the papers without being overwhelmed with the hardships that so many suffer at home and abroad. We must not accept as inevitable the suffering of others, whether from war, homelessness, lack of medical treatment, hunger, child abuse and more. Do not deceive yourself that you are powerless. You can indeed be an army of one. Every reader can fight illiteracy. One parent can galvanize a PTA and then a school board; one parishioner can help a church find its voice against injustice. Sadly, the opportunity to fight injustice is everywhere. Mahatma Gandhi and his successors taught us that noncooperation with evil is just as much a duty as cooperation with good. What I did as a 23 year old instructor at Tennessee State 38 years ago was not special or heroic, it was opportunistic…I was in the right place at the right time to do what needed to be done, and I did it. There was no lofty moralizing or in making that decision… it was simply the choice to do the right thing or to acquiesce in a status quo that was unjust. There are daily opportunities in your lives, small and large, to make ethical decisions and it takes will, not heroism, to do what you know is right. I challenge you to assume the leadership role that your education has prepared you for to fight injustice where you find it, whether in the boardroom, the classroom, or the locker room.

Live in the Moment.
This is not a call for self-gratification or existential nihilism. Rather it’s a call for fully exploring and enjoying the experiences of life as they present themselves …in real time. Not to see the world through rose-colored glasses, but to experience it as a kaleidoscope of shapes, colors and textures igniting your spirit and sparking your imagination. I have learned that so much in life is missed if we hurry past it….like the character said in the great film “Postcards from the Edge,” “Having a great time, wish I were here.” It is a gift we can freely bestow upon ourselves, it is as Thomas Merton said, the ability to see “the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us.” Only if we are open to the possibility of learning from our own thoughts and feelings can we find wisdom and inspiration in our everyday experiences. The “Aha” moments never announce themselves, we must be ready to perceive them.

Never forget the Importance of Relationships.
We all have the need for others in our lives, to know and be known, to trust and be trusted. To be united with other human beings is primordial, it’s spiritual, it’s kept the human race going, it’s “all good.” You must let nothing interfere with your building and nourishing strong and lasting relationships with your family and with friends. They will sustain you when all else fails. Toni Morrison’s character Sixto describes such a relationship in plain language in Beloved: “It’s good you know whenever you get a woman who is a friend of your mind…She gather me up, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” We all need special people in our lives who can help us stay centered and hold it all together, who accept us without question and love us unconditionally. Never ever delude yourself that you can go it alone. Sharing your life gives it exponential quality. So don’t ever get too busy, too tired, too self-absorbed or whatever to forego or neglect this essential for living a full and satisfying life. I believe it is true that nobody on their deathbed ever said: “Oh, I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

Do the work you love.
We spend too much of our lifetime in work for it not to be an extension of our souls. So chose carefully and keep searching for the work that you can do with passion. “Work is love made visible,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, and “if you bake bread with indifference, you will bake a bitter loaf that will feed only half your hunger.” There is no pride or satisfaction to be had in such labor. President Roosevelt (Teddy that is) summed it up perfectly in words with which I have often exhorted my staff. He said: “One of the greatest prizes that life has to offer is the opportunity to work really hard for something that really matters.” Don’t settle for less for if you do it will poison the spirit that allows you to enjoy all the other facets of your life.

Finally, Live in Community.
There is a Zen concept of “interbeing” that compels us to be engaged in our communities and the world. It recognizes that community is not just a spatial concept, but that we should be involved in communities of faith, shared vision, and common interests…becoming stronger in our faith, vision or interests because we have the encouragement and support of others. We know that it’s a small world after all and that neither nations nor individuals can exist in isolation; that the world has finite resources and they must be shared and preserved for all of us; that wars between tribes can destabilize whole regions and threaten world peace. Through the wonders of technology, we have instant images in horrific detail, and as one commentator graphically put it, a drop of blood spilled in Darfur or Iraq can splash upon the hem of our best dress. It will take an intelligent, compassionate and engaged world community to move nations to take responsible action to make a better world for all peoples who share this planet. There are really no sidelines, our interbeing means that we are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

University of Tennessee Commencement Rita Geier December 17, 2006

You may consider this next part of my remarks to be Rita Geier’s version of “This I Believe,” the NPR segment that has inspired me and I am sure many of you to articulate your core beliefs. I’d like to share some of those with you today in the belief that they can be as meaningful for you today as they have been for me. You either have or will find your own guiding principles, but I ask you to consider these on this occasion.

Approach life with an attitude of humility and thanksgiving.
You are indeed the fortunate ones who have come this far. Some of you came from Appalachian towns and inner cities where the odds were against you standing here today. You have been privileged to be educated and to earn its benefits, not just to make more money and to live more lavishly, but you have had the chance to acquire knowledge from many disciplines of the individual, of society and the world in which we live and to gain the understanding and technological skills to apply that knowledge and make the future better and brighter for yourself and others. Never forget that you did not get here by your deeds alone, or that there are others who yearned for this opportunity, but were not so fortunate. Each of you had someone, probably many, who have supported and sacrificed for you, who have been with you all the way or just when you needed someone the most… who never let you give up, give in or lose your way… and to those dear ones you should be eternally grateful and be sure today that they know you know what they have done for you.

You are not owed anything. You owe.
You have all heard that of those to whom much is given, much is expected. I believe that. My son and I mentor 8th graders in the Higher Achievement Program in Washington, D.C. where the mentors are mostly young professionals who universally say they want to “give something back.” But those who practice ethical altruism get back far more than they give. The opportunities are everywhere, in every community, virtually on every street corner. I encourage you to consider “pro bono publico” -- serving the public good -- as a career and discover as I have some of the most challenging and rewarding work that your profession has to offer. Marion Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, a person I greatly admire, put it this way: “Service is the rent each of us pays for living.” But Dr. Albert Schweitzer said it best to young people like yourself when he said: “I can’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”

Never be blind to injustice or accept it.
You must not become hardened to injustice because there is so much of it in the world. One can not watch the news or read the papers without being overwhelmed with the hardships that so many suffer at home and abroad. We must not accept as inevitable the suffering of others, whether from war, homelessness, lack of medical treatment, hunger, child abuse and more. Do not deceive yourself that you are powerless. You can indeed be an army of one. Every reader can fight illiteracy. One parent can galvanize a PTA and then a school board; one parishioner can help a church find its voice against injustice. Sadly, the opportunity to fight injustice is everywhere. Mahatma Gandhi and his successors taught us that noncooperation with evil is just as much a duty as cooperation with good. What I did as a 23 year old instructor at Tennessee State 38 years ago was not special or heroic, it was opportunistic…I was in the right place at the right time to do what needed to be done, and I did it. There was no lofty moralizing or in making that decision… it was simply the choice to do the right thing or to acquiesce in a status quo that was unjust. There are daily opportunities in your lives, small and large, to make ethical decisions and it takes will, not heroism, to do what you know is right. I challenge you to assume the leadership role that your education has prepared you for to fight injustice where you find it, whether in the boardroom, the classroom, or the locker room.

Live in the Moment.
This is not a call for self-gratification or existential nihilism. Rather it’s a call for fully exploring and enjoying the experiences of life as they present themselves …in real time. Not to see the world through rose-colored glasses, but to experience it as a kaleidoscope of shapes, colors and textures igniting your spirit and sparking your imagination. I have learned that so much in life is missed if we hurry past it….like the character said in the great film “Postcards from the Edge,” “Having a great time, wish I were here.” It is a gift we can freely bestow upon ourselves, it is as Thomas Merton said, the ability to see “the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us.” Only if we are open to the possibility of learning from our own thoughts and feelings can we find wisdom and inspiration in our everyday experiences. The “Aha” moments never announce themselves, we must be ready to perceive them.

Never forget the Importance of Relationships.
We all have the need for others in our lives, to know and be known, to trust and be trusted. To be united with other human beings is primordial, it’s spiritual, it’s kept the human race going, it’s “all good.” You must let nothing interfere with your building and nourishing strong and lasting relationships with your family and with friends. They will sustain you when all else fails. Toni Morrison’s character Sixto describes such a relationship in plain language in Beloved: “It’s good you know whenever you get a woman who is a friend of your mind…She gather me up, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” We all need special people in our lives who can help us stay centered and hold it all together, who accept us without question and love us unconditionally. Never ever delude yourself that you can go it alone. Sharing your life gives it exponential quality. So don’t ever get too busy, too tired, too self-absorbed or whatever to forego or neglect this essential for living a full and satisfying life. I believe it is true that nobody on their deathbed ever said: “Oh, I wish I had spent more time at the office.”

Do the work you love.
We spend too much of our lifetime in work for it not to be an extension of our souls. So chose carefully and keep searching for the work that you can do with passion. “Work is love made visible,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, and “if you bake bread with indifference, you will bake a bitter loaf that will feed only half your hunger.” There is no pride or satisfaction to be had in such labor. President Roosevelt (Teddy that is) summed it up perfectly in words with which I have often exhorted my staff. He said: “One of the greatest prizes that life has to offer is the opportunity to work really hard for something that really matters.” Don’t settle for less for if you do it will poison the spirit that allows you to enjoy all the other facets of your life.

Finally, Live in Community.
There is a Zen concept of “interbeing” that compels us to be engaged in our communities and the world. It recognizes that community is not just a spatial concept, but that we should be involved in communities of faith, shared vision, and common interests…becoming stronger in our faith, vision or interests because we have the encouragement and support of others. We know that it’s a small world after all and that neither nations nor individuals can exist in isolation; that the world has finite resources and they must be shared and preserved for all of us; that wars between tribes can destabilize whole regions and threaten world peace. Through the wonders of technology, we have instant images in horrific detail, and as one commentator graphically put it, a drop of blood spilled in Darfur or Iraq can splash upon the hem of our best dress. It will take an intelligent, compassionate and engaged world community to move nations to take responsible action to make a better world for all peoples who share this planet. There are really no sidelines, our interbeing means that we are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

CSpan-BookNotes: Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz-

Author: David Boaz
Title: Libertarianism: A Primer
Air Date: January 26, 1997


BRIAN LAMB, host:


David Boaz, author of "Libertarianism" and "The Libertarian Reader," can you
remember the first moment you thought that's what you'd call yourself
politically?


Mr. DAVID BOAZ (Author, "Libertarianism: A Primer"): I'm not sure I remember
it exactly. It was probably when I was a high school senior, and I probably
read Ayn Rand and started thinking of myself that way. It might have been
when I was in college, when I really felt what these ideas amount to that
I've--developing here is libertarianism.


LAMB: Why Ayn Rand?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, a lot of people read Ayn Rand when they're young. I was
interested in politics. My father was involved in politics, and so he got me
thinking about it. Actually, I think the first political book I read might
have been "The Conscience of a Conservative" by Barry Goldwater, and then I
read "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, which is just a brilliant
discussion in 100 pages or so of what economics is, what it means to think
like an economist, and that got me thinking in that direction. And then when
I was a senior, Ayn Rand wrote great novels. I mean, whether you were
interested in the politics or not, they were fun to read. And I pulled one
off the shelf, and I ended up reading it all through spring break, and that
really kind of made me think about what I thought the nature of freedom was
and what individual rights were supposed to be. And that put me on
the course, I think.


LAMB: Which one of her novels did you like the best?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, it's hard to say. I think "Atlas Shrugged" is probably the
most comprehensive, the one she thought was the fullest presentation of her
ideas. But a lot of people think "We the Living" is a more--more of a real
novel. The characters are less political; it's more realistic. It's probably
the one that was most autobiographical. But if you kind of want the political
message that Ayn Rand is putting out, then I think "Atlas Shrugged" is the
best.


LAMB: Tucked in "The Libertarian Reader" is a name associated with Ayn Rand,
Alan Greenspan.


Mr. BOAZ: Alan Greenspan...


LAMB: Where were they ever together?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, Alan Greenspan became very close to Ayn Rand when he was a
young man in New York, was a great admirer of her philosophy and personally
close to her, and contributed one or more essays, I think, to one of the books
that she edited that were mostly her essays and some other people. And I
assume that he still maintains that admiration.


LAMB: Did you ever meet her?


Mr. BOAZ: I did not, no.


LAMB: This--I got two of--books. It's the first time that we've ever done
two books. One's called "The Libertarian Reader." What's this?


Mr. BOAZ: That's a collection of--really, I think, the first time this has
been done--a collection of all the greatest libertarian writings ever. I
generally say from John Locke to Milton Friedman but, in fact, there are a few
below--before John Locke, including an excerpt from the Bible. It's one of
the first indications of libertarian thought. And it does go right up to
Milton Friedman and people younger than he is, Richard Epstein and some of my
colleagues at the Cato Institute. All the greatest writings on libertarianism
ever.


LAMB: And what's this?


Mr. BOAZ: "Libertarianism: A Primer" is an introduction to the ideas, the
history of libertarianism, the way libertarianism approaches the relationship
of the individual and the state, and also the way it approaches contemporary
issues. It's all written by me; the other one is all written by people of
much greater stature.


LAMB: What's the Cato Institute?


Mr. BOAZ: Cato Institute is a public policy research organization. That's
sometimes abbreviated to `think tank.' We're in Washington. We'll be
celebrating our 20th anniversary this spring. And it is devoted to the ideas
of individual liberty, free markets, limited government and peace.


LAMB: Where'd you get the name Cato?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, that's a complicated story. The institute is named for
"Cato's Letters," which were a series of pamphlets published in the 18th
century that were very popular with the people who made the American
Revolution. They were published in England, but they were classical
liberal--which is ideas we would now call libertarian--essays on contemporary
issues. The reason we picked that name is that we perceive that the authors
of "Cato's Letters" were taking the ideas of philosophers like John Locke and
applying them to the issues of the day. And that's what the Cato Institute
does. We take the ideas of people like John Locke and Adam Smith and
Friedrich Hayek and apply them to issues of the day.


LAMB: How big is the Cato Institute?


Mr. BOAZ: We have a budget of about $8 million. We have 50 staff members.
We have maybe 60 scholars around the country and even a few around the world
that we work with as adjunct scholars. We publish 10 books a year, 30 studies
a year.


LAMB: Now I remember talking to Adam Bellow, who is the editorial director of
The Free Press that published this. Why did you go to him to do this instead
of publishing the books yourself?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I think that The Free Press, being a part of Simon &
Schuster, has great reach. They can reach bookstores, they reach reviewers.
They can distribute books better than the Cato Institute can. And after all,
I'm the senior editor at the Cato Institute, so if I'd been editing my own
book, I'm sure it wouldn't have come out as well. I got some good editorial
help from The Free Press.


LAMB: When did you get the idea that you wanted these two volumes to come
out? How long ago?


Mr. BOAZ: About a year and a half ago. It was actually a pretty quick
schedule. The Free Press was very good about turning books around much
quicker after the manuscript was done than usually happens. It was, I would
say, in '95 that I really got interested in writing a book. If I--if I'd done
it my way, it probably would have been more of a manifesto and less of a
primer. It was Free Press' idea that a primer was what was really needed,
that people would like to read an introduction that was not just sort of my
opinion about the issues of the day but that does introduce a tradition that
goes back, really, to the Bible and "Antigone" right on through the
Renaissance, the Levelers, John Locke, Adam Smith, the American Revolution, up
to the present day. So there's sort of a chapter of history and then the
ideas of those people are woven throughout the book.


LAMB: On the cover of both books, of course, is your name, and the--the
person to see this for the first time would just jump in there and say,
`That's David Boaz (pronounced Bow-az),' but you pronounce it Boaz (pronounced
Bows). How come?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I have no idea. That's what my father told me to pronounce
it. We are eighth-generation Scotch-Irish Americans and we claim that in
Scotland we're related to all of the people who spell it B-O-W-E-S, so maybe
that's the reason that--200 years ago nobody could spell and people--when
we--when people learned to spell, they wrote it down different ways.


LAMB: What town were you born in?


Mr. BOAZ: Mayfield, Kentucky. It's almost on the Mississippi River.


LAMB: What was your childhood like there?


Mr. BOAZ: Oh, pretty standard "Leave It To Beaver" childhood, I guess.
Actually, I think "Leave It To Beaver" was set in Mayfield, although I never
assumed it was Kentucky. My father was a lawyer, my mother was a homemaker.
I have a younger brother and sister. We all went to college. Pretty typical
childhood.


LAMB: What kind of reading did you do early?


Mr. BOAZ: I did a lot of reading, all sorts of things. I read a lot of
novels. One of my earliest passions was astronomy, when I was about six,
seven years old, and that was the beginning of the space program, and I did a
lot of that reading. I'm sure I know less about astronomy now than I did when
I was seven years old, but at the time, it was very important to me. When I
got to high school, I was very interested in politics and I read lots of big,
thick political novels. And then I got more interested in political
philosophy, and I started reading things like Henry Hazlitt and Friedrich
Hayek and Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman.


LAMB: Can you point to anybody that got you interested in that stuff?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, my father, certainly. My father was very interested in
politics. He was a...


LAMB: He--was he a politician?


Mr. BOAZ: He was a judge in our local community, and he was very interested
in political ideas and he talked about the role of the government. He felt
the federal government was way too big and I guess that got me thinking in
that direction. And then as I started reading, I found a lot of evidence that
I felt that was true, and I now probably think it's a lot
more too big than he would have thought.


LAMB: Why?


Mr. BOAZ: I think, probably--well, for one thing, it's gotten a lot bigger,
and we can see more of the problems than, say, we would have when my father
was my age. But for another reason, I think, I just perhaps read different
things, thought about things differently and decided that there was a more
fundamental indictment of the size of government, that there is something
about human beings that means they ought to be free to live their lives the
way they want to and that intrusion by government into that process is wrong.
And that came to seem very consistent and very right to me.


LAMB: Where'd you go to college?


Mr. BOAZ: Vanderbilt University, just sort of the closest, big--good school
to western Kentucky.


LAMB: Nashville?


Mr. BOAZ: Right.


LAMB: What'd you study?


Mr. BOAZ: I started out studying political science and then I decided that I
wasn't very impressed with what one studies in political science. It seemed
to me they took a very interesting subject and made it pretty dry and
uninteresting. So I ended up with a degree in American history, which I think
is a great background for doing anything.


LAMB: What'd you do after school?


Mr. BOAZ: I came to Washington almost immediately. I edited a magazine
called New Guard, which was sort of a political magazine for young people.
Then I moved to a group called the Council for a Competitive Economy. And
then it wasn't very many years after college that I ended up at the Cato
Institute, and I've actually been there for 15 years.


LAMB: How old is Cato, by the way?


Mr. BOAZ: Twenty years.


LAMB: In the back of your primer, you have a little question and answer
thing, a little game...


Mr. BOAZ: Yes.


LAMB: ...that you can play to find out if you're a libertarian or not. And
you have two categories, personal freedom and economic freedom. And it might
be interesting to just go down the list of the questions you ask. What was
the purpose of this, by the way?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I--it's really the publisher's idea and I think their view is
that it's an involvement device, it's something you might pick up on a
shelf and decide to look at, and maybe that would cause you to buy the book.
I'm a little uncomfortable with it because I think I've tried, in the book, to
give a whole sense of a tradition--as I say, running back to the Greeks and
the early Israelites, running through the Renaissance, the American
Revolution, through great 20th century thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and
Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and I think it's awfully simplistic to
try to sum it up in 20 questions. So it's--it's not my favorite part of...


LAMB: So you're not real happy with this? Yeah?


Mr. BOAZ: It's not my favorite part of the book.


LAMB: Well, in the fir--you say you're supposed to take the quiz and then you
apply--give yourself 10 points if you think you decide that you des--five
points if you're--you're not sure. Anyway you say, `Who should decide whether
or not you wear a seat belt? Own a gun? Serve in the military? Smoke
marijuana? Use a risky medical treatment? Engage in a homosexual
relationship? Buy a pornographic video? Buy a sexist book? Send your child
to a particular school? Have uncensored access to the Internet?'


Mr. BOAZ: Well, each one of those, I think, does make a libertarian point.
Question's not whether these are good things to do. There are a lot of the
things on that list that I don't want to do, that I wouldn't really want my
friends to do. The question is: Who should make the decision? If you're an
adult, should you make the decision whether to wear a seat belt or use an
untested medical treatment, or should the government make that decision for
you? And the libertarian answer is that individuals--adult individuals should
be able to make those decisions for themselves.


LAMB: What's your favorite thing that's libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: The wonderful, modern society we live in.


LAMB: This society's libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: Sure. It's not quite as libertarian as I would like, but the
modern world--since the American Revolution and since Adam Smith sort of
summed up the--the notion of spontaneous order in free markets, the modern
world is built on the ideas of John Locke and Adam Smith. We do have a
society in which people are largely free to make their own decisions, in which
free markets have created tremendous prosperity. I'm sure you have people on
your shows every day complaining that some people are poor, that we can't get
certain things, that health care is not good enough, that--all kinds of
problems with the economy.


But if you look at it in historical perspective, for tens of thousands of
years, people were desperately poor. They suffered back-breaking labor. And
about 250 years ago, we had the Industrial Revolution. We started having free
markets. Karl Marx called it capitalism because he thought capital was the
point, but that's not the point. The point is people working freely, allowed
to trade and exchange, and they created this tremendous wealth so that we can
sit here in this television studio, and you're going to film this and be able
to broadcast it nationally, internationally. Millions of people are going to
be able to watch this. You have put some of this information on an Internet
site, and people can access it any time of the day. Tremendous advances in
society and the economy, and that's because we've had a relatively libertarian
society.


So I guess what I like best about libertarianism is the fact that I can live
here at the end of the 20th century, and have unprecedented access to ideas
and music and goods and travel and all those things that make life really
worth living.


LAMB: Legalized drugs?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, that's another little aspect of it. Yes, I think that adults
should be able to make decisions about what they put in their own body.
And--and it's interesting you say `legalized drugs' and you didn't say whether
you meant pharmaceutical or recreational. But I think the rule applies either
way. If I wanted to use marijuana or cocaine, I don't think it's Bill
Clinton's decision whether I should do that. Similarly, if I have a disease
and my doctor recommends a drug, but the FDA hasn't approved it, I think I
should be able to use it without a bureaucrat's permission.


LAMB: Same-sex marriages?


Mr. BOAZ: I think that if the government is going to recognize marriage, then
it should do so on an equal basis. And if two people love each other, two
adult individuals, then it is good for them to be able to make a committed
relationship.


LAMB: Peace--the word `peace' comes up in your books here. What ...


Mr. BOAZ: I like peace.


LAMB: But what about military and peace and all that? How does--what's the
libertarian view there?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, we need a--we need a government to protect our rights. We
need a government to protect us from people who might hurt us on our own
streets. That's why we have police. We have courts to settle disputes. And
we need a national defense to protect us from people who might hurt us
overseas. But if you look at the history of the world, there have been so
many instances of governments getting into wars to aggrandize themselves, to
gain land, to gain power. It used to be that kings would say, `I did it
to get better known.' Fortunately, the liberal libertarian impulse in
modern life has been so strong that a king can't say that anymore. But we
still have too many countries getting into unnecessary wars, sending off kids
to die, exploiting the society, seizing money to be spent on military
expenditures. We need a strong national defense. We need to be secure from
our enemies. But in the present context, I don't think that means that we
need American boys in Somalia and Bosnia and all the other places around the
world that our government seems determined to meddle.


LAMB: Million and a half men and women under--or in a uniform today in the
United States. How big an Army, Navy and Air Force would you keep?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, that's a prudential thing. I don't think it follows directly
from libertarian theory or anything. But my colleagues at the Cato Institute
who study military and defense matters say that we would be perfectly well
protected with an Army of about a million people--Army, Navy, Marine Corps,
etc.


LAMB: On page 279 of your primer, you say that, `Most of our political
leaders are still living in the Washington that Roosevelt built, the
Washington where if you think of a good idea, you would create a government
program. Consider a few examples.' And you start right out by saying,
`Senator Bob Dole reads the First Amendment...'


Mr. BOAZ: The 10th Amendment.


LAMB: I'm sorry. Thank you--`the 10th Amendment on the campaign trail but
introduces bills to federalize criminal law, welfare policy and the definition
of marriage.' Bob Dole's not your candidate.


Mr. BOAZ: Bob Dole's not my candidate. I think that's a problem with
people who talk about the 10th Amendment. There's a lot of talk about the
10th Amendment protecting the rights of states and the people and limiting the
powers of the federal government. It absolutely does. But politicians who
talk about that--nevertheless, when a popular issue comes up, they pass a
federal crime bill. I don't think there's any authority in the Constitution
for the federal government to be setting up most things as federal crimes.
They pass a bill to make church burning a federal crime. Church burning is a
terrible thing, which is why it's illegal in every one of the 50 states. You
don't need a federal law about that.


LAMB: Your second one is, `Vice President Gore announces a plan to tear down
public housing, saying, "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are
killing the neighborhoods around--around them." He reminds his listeners in
the years past Washington told people around the country what to do, dictating
wisdom from on high. And let's be honest, some of that wisdom really wasn't
very wise. And then he announces a plan to build new public housing
projects.'


Mr. BOAZ: I think a lot of this reinventing government initiative of the
Clinton administration shows a sort of disconnect between understanding that
the current government structures have failed and then basically rebuilding
them, recapitulating them. `Public housing has failed, so let's build more
public housing.' I think it's a real unwillingness to face the fact that
coercive intervention in people's lives doesn't work as well as markets do.
If we had freer markets, we'd have better housing for the rich and for the
poor.


You know, the way poor people get housing in a capitalist economy, generally,
is they get used housing that rich people built, lived in for a while and
passed it on. And that's not--you know, used clothes, maybe, are getting a
little threadbare. That's not usually true with used housing. You'll see ads
in New York City advertising prewar construction. And what they're saying is
those buildings were built so well because they were built for wealthy people
that they're still better today than a lot of newer housing. So let the free
market work. You'd get better housing than the Housing and Urban Development
is going to build.


LAMB: Is there any regular columnist in any newspaper that is a libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, it's difficult to say exactly what a libertarian is a lot of
times. People have libertarian attitudes on a lot of things. In America,
almost nobody is totally un-libertarian. I think Stephen Chapman, whose column
appears in the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Times and a lot of other
newspapers around the country, I'd call a libertarian. And I'm sure that
there are a few others that haven't sprung to mind right away.


LAMB: Is there anybody in television that you know that's either a reporter
or a commentator that's libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, in general, of course, reporters don't want to have political
opinions and so I'm not sure. There may well be some of them, but--but they
try to keep it to themselves. As far as television commentators, I'm not sure
that I think of one right off. I think there are a lot of radio talk show
hosts around the country who are libertarians.


LAMB: The--the most visible?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I think David Brudnoy in Boston would admit to that. I think
Neal Boortz in Atlanta probably would, Gene Burns, who I believe is now in San
Francisco. I think those people put out a pretty solid libertarian message
from time to time.


LAMB: Is there a place to go if you want libertarian thought every week?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, if you want libertarian thought every week, you could go to
the Cato Institute Web site every day. Other than that, Reason magazine is a
monthly; Liberty magazine is a bimonthly. Those are probably the places that
you'd be most likely to get it. Although, as I say, if you have a newspaper
that has Steven Chapman's column, he's pretty consistently libertarian.


LAMB: Who owns Reason magazine?


Mr. BOAZ: It's owned by The Reason Foundation, which is a sort of competitor
of the Cato Institute, another libertarian-oriented think tank.


LAMB: Are there different kinds of people involved in The Reason Foundation
than are involve in the Cato foundation?


Mr. BOAZ: Not exactly. The Reason Foundation--a big part of what they do is
publish a monthly magazine, and so they have journalists involved there. And
we don't really have journalists at the Cato Institute. Also, The Reason
Foundation has really specialized in the issue of privatization, especially of
state and local services, so they have a lot of privatization experts, and we
don't really have--we don't do so much on that issue. We do more national
issues. So it's a matter of emphasis and so on but not really different kinds
of people.


LAMB: What's Liberty magazine?


Mr. BOAZ: Liberty magazine is a bimonthly. It's a younger magazine than
Reason, been published for a few years. It's published out of Washington
state. I think you might find it a little more movement-oriented, more for
people who really are self-consciously libertarians and think of themselves
that way, and they want to read hard-hitting libertarian analysis. Reason is
more of a current affairs magazine, like The New Republic, but with a
libertarian perspective on issues.


LAMB: And what about Harry Browne, the candidate for the Libertarian Party?
Do you--did you support him?


Mr. BOAZ: I'm an independent. I don't really do politics. And, of course,
at the Cato Institute, we're not supposed to get involved in politics.


LAMB: But do people at the Cato Institute, you know, on their pri--I mean,
from what you've heard around the--you know, your organization, do they like
the idea there's a Libertarian Party? And does someone like Harry Browne
represent their thoughts?


Mr. BOAZ: I think it's certainly fair to say that Harry Browne was an
articulate exponent of ideas that most of the people at Cato would also agree
with. Some people at Cato are Republicans because they think that's the best
place to advance ideas of free markets in civil society. A few are Democrats
because they're more interested in issues of civil liberties, of peace. Some
are members of the Libertarian Party, and a lot of us, as I say, are
independents. We find ourselves kept pretty busy putting out books and
studies and talking about ideas without getting involved in electoral
politics. And I think a lot of libertarians these days are particularly
interested in issue politics, rather than candidate politics, so they're
active in taxpayer groups, in drug policy reform groups, in term limits
advocacy, things like that.


LAMB: Who's the best-known academic today that's a libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: I would say probably Milton Friedman. Richard Epstein at the
University of Chicago Law School is certainly another. Robert Nozick at
Harvard University wrote a book called "Anarchy, State & Utopia," which is
very important, which is excerpted in "The Libertarian Reader." I'm not sure
if he calls himself a libertarian these days. Nozick is a very interesting
guy. He writes a book, he gets intensely into a subject and then he moves on
to different subjects. So in the 20 years since he wrote "Anarchy, State &
Utopia," he hasn't written about political philosophy. He's written about
other things.


LAMB: In this primer that you have, the--I mean, not the primer, "The
Libertarian Reader," you have a lot of different articles in here, and
you have something from The Nation magazine.


Mr. BOAZ: The Nation was a libertarian magazine in
the first half of its life. I believe it was founded around the time of the
Civil War. And throughout the 19th century, it was a classical liberal
magazine. It advocated free markets, the rule of law, decolonization,
international peace but very much free markets. And so there's an essay there
actually written in The Nation in 1900, looking back on the 19th century and
saying, `Look at the tremendous achievements that free people, freed from
vexatious meddling of governments, have been able to produce. But alas, today
it seems that people have forgotten the principles of the Declaration of
Independence that brought us to this happy state. And we are going to be
doomed to a century of war and statism before we get back on the path,' and
that was pretty prescient. We have been through a 20th century with a lot of
war and a lot of statism because we forgot the principles of the Declaration
of Independence.


LAMB: Thomas Paine has a piece in here.


Mr. BOAZ: Thomas Paine, one of the great libertarians of all time. One of
the interesting things about Tom Paine--he's known as a rabble-rousing writer.
Everyone reads "Common Sense" when they're in college. "Common Sense" is a
great essay. One of the great things about Thomas Paine is that he put
together two elements of libertarian theory. One is the theory of justice, of
individual rights, that adult individuals have the right to live their life
the way they want to. The other is a theory called spontaneous order, the
theory of the self-regulating society. It's academics would say it's not
the normative theory, it's the positive theory. It observes the world and
says, `If you leave people alone to trade and--and exchange and make their own
decisions, a self-regulating order will emerge. You don't need the government
to create order. Order emerges.' Thomas Paine put those two ideas together,
and so in that sense he's a really key libertarian thinker.


LAMB: You also have the Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson.


Mr. BOAZ: One of the greatest pieces of libertarian writing ever.


LAMB: Why?


Mr. BOAZ: I think that the second paragraph of the
Declaration, `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.' That is a
beautiful, succinct, eloquent statement of what libertarianism is. And it
goes on to say that, `It is to secure these rights that governments are
instituted among men.' That's why we have government, not to give us midnight
basketball, not to tuck us in at night. We have government to secure our
rights. And that paragraph goes on to say, `When any government ceases to do
that, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.' That was where
you got from the libertarian theory to the right to rebel against an
oppressive government.


LAMB: What's "Federalist" Number 10? And why did you include that in the...


Mr. BOAZ: "Federalist" Number 10 talks about the dangers of faction and how
the Constitution was designed to limit faction--we might say special interests
today. The Constitution was designed to keep any of us from being able to use
the government to get what we want at the expense of other people. That's in
a section called Skepticism About Power, which is the first section of "The
Libertarian Reader." And in a sense, the first principle of libertarianism
is, as Lord Acton said, `Power tends to corrupt.' So libertarians are very
skeptical about anybody having a lot of power. That's why we like federalism.
That's why we like separation of powers within the federal government. That,
in fact, is why libertarianism really arose in Europe. Why didn't it happen
in Africa, Asia, Latin America, wherever? One reason is that Europe was a
very divided civilization. It has, obviously right now, many countries;
through the Middle Ages, it had more countries and city-states and polities
than it does now. And I think it was the fact of one civilization divided
into so many different governments that kept any government from getting so
powerful that it could stamp out the ideas of liberty and the expressions
of--of people living their own lives.


LAMB: On page 193, why government gets too big, `Bureaucrats and politicians
are just as self-interested as the rest of us,' you say.


Mr. BOAZ: Does that require explanation?


LAMB: Yes.


Mr. BOAZ: I think a lot of us learn in our civics books in college that,
you know, there are two kinds of institutions. There are the self-interested,
profit-seeking institutions of business, and then there's the public interest
and that's government. But some great actually, Thomas Jefferson sort of
refuted that 200 years ago, but more recently, James Buchanan and Gordon
Tullock and some of their colleagues in the public choice school of economics
in politics said, `Well, wait a minute. Two roommates graduate from college.
One goes to work for General Motors, one goes to work for the government. Are
we supposed to believe that, starting the day after college, the one who goes
to General Motors is self-interested and the other one is public-interested?
What if, just as a hypothesis, we said, "People who go into government are
also self-interested, like any normal human being"? What would happen if that
was the truth?' And what they found, of course, was when you spell out
the implications of that, you see a government pretty much like the one
we have.


So the argument that I'm making there is people in government are
self-interested, just like people in business. The question becomes: Which
kind of institution will serve the public interest better? And I contend and
libertarians contend that, in fact, competitive market processes will cause
all of us to serve the public interest better than coercive government
structures.


LAMB: You talk--you give us some examples in there, and one of the
people you talk about is Dwayne Andreas, Archers Daniel Midland. What
would a libertarian do with that whole--I don't know whether you call it
a subject, but what would you do to make things different? The ethanol,
Senator Bob Dole's involvement...


Mr. BOAZ: Oh, the best thing to do would be to take away the government's
power to hand out favors to companies like Archer Daniels Midland. ADM
subsidizes all the politicians in Washington. It subsidizes all the public
affairs shows except yours, because--you know, on all the commercial networks,
you see ads from ADM. This is all part of a process, because ADM earns its
profits in Washington. Most companies earn their profits out in the
marketplace; ADM earns most of its profits in Washington. The ethanol subsidy
makes it profitable for them to produce ethanol. I believe they also profit
from the sugar quotas which prevent cheap sugar from overseas from coming into
our country. They really do their farming in Washington. And so what
libertarians would like to do is take away from the federal government the
power to hand out those benefits. A great thing might be if we had a
constitutional amendment that said, `Congress shall have no power to regulate
the economy.' If you did something like that, ADM would have to go out and
look for profits in the marketplace, like other companies.


LAMB: Why do you think they spend so much money on the news shows?


Mr. BOAZ: Because I think it enhances their image in Washington, makes them
seem like nice guys and so, when they go in and ask for a $100 million
subsidy, not only have they given money to the politicians, but they've
created this image of themselves as a public-spirited company, so it doesn't
seem so outrageous.


LAMB: Do you think they would get this subsidy if they didn't send money to
the politicians or, you know, help finance their campaigns?


Mr. BOAZ: I certainly hope the politicians wouldn't do things that crazy for
free, but I don't think it's as straightforward as that might imply. There
are lots of subsidies, lots of regulations that benefit some companies that I
think probably nobody has ever given a contribution for or anything like that.
We have a government; both parties, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and
conservatives, who believe that the role of the federal government is to divvy
up the national product, to decide, `Well, we have $6 trillion in our economy
this year. How much will we let the people who earned it keep and how much
will we give to ADM and how much will we give to Chrysler and how much will we
give to Social Security? How much will we give to farm subsidies?' They
don't seem to have an understanding that that money is earned by individuals
and that the people who earn it really have a prior claim to it.


LAMB: What'd you think of the Chrysler bailout a number of years ago?


Mr. BOAZ: I think it was just an absolute, quintessential example of what's
wrong with government subsidies. The Chrysler Corporation couldn't produce
cars that Americans wanted to buy. I saw a great cartoon once--in fact, I
think Ed Crane has it framed on his wall, my--my boss at the Cato Institute.
It shows Lee Iacocca in a car with a bumper sticker that says, `Buy what
America builds'--good old buy America notion--and a guy in a Japanese car
parked next to him with a bumper sticker that says, `Build what America buys.'
That's what Chrysler wasn't doing. They weren't building what America buys,
so they were going to go out of business. So they went to the
government instead of figuring out a way to produce a car that Americans
wanted to buy, they went to the government and they got a $1 1/2 billion
subsidy. And a lot of people think that was a great success; we saved the
Chrysler Corporation. We did, although, of course, they downsized by
two-thirds of their workers, so we didn't save very many of the jobs. And
besides which, what we don't see--and this is one of the key readings in "The
Libertarian Reader"--is what is not seen. That $1 1/2 billion that was lent
to Chrysler was not lent to you to build a house, was not lent to some other
businessman to expand a business that was actually selling things people
wanted to buy, was not borrowed by a student to go to college and become a
more productive worker. We can't see what didn't happen, but what we do know
is that people who were more credit-worthy didn't get credit because that
money went to the Chrysler Corporation.


LAMB: Now if you had to put together a little evening's discussion group
of libertarians that you've--that are in "The Libertarian Reader," people that
you'd like to have around the table to hear their wisdom on libertarianism and
the history that you've known, who would you put--let's put five or six of
them at the table.


Mr. BOAZ: Are you talking about history forever or contemporary or...


LAMB: Just five or six people you'd like to have at your dinner table to talk
about politics and libertarianism.


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I'd like to have Thomas Jefferson there. George Will called
him `the man of the millennium,' because he enunciated, really, the--the
concept of the millennium, which is individual rights. So I'd love to have
him there. I'd say Friedrich Hayek, who I did have the pleasure of meeting,
was a great Nobel laureate, economist and social thinker, but I certainly
would like to have spent more time talking to him. Probably Milton Friedman,
who, fortunately, is still alive and I do have a chance to talk to
sometimes. And I think probably Ayn Rand, who, for all of her foibles, was a
brilliant, fascinating, penetrating woman, and I would love to have been able
to spend some time with her and see what it was that people found so
mesmerizing personally. And I think maybe that's four--maybe I'd take
Thomas Paine.


LAMB: Cato is set up how? Who runs it?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, we have a board of directors of about a dozen people, and we
have contributors, about 12,000 people who become Cato sponsors and--and
support us financially. And then we have 50 staff members. The president and
CEO is Ed Crane, who founded it. I'm the executive vice president. Our
chairman is William Niskanen, who was a top economic adviser to President
Reagan. And then we have about 10 policy directors who direct our work in the
area of constitutional studies, fiscal policy, environmental issues and so on.
And then...


LAMB: Who of those do we see on a regular basis on television shows
and...


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I think you see Bill Niskanen, the chairman, who talks about
economics a lot. Steve Moore, our director of fiscal policy studies, talks a
lot about taxes and spending. Roger Pilon, our director of constitutional
studies; Jerry Taylor, our director of natural resource studies--those are all
pretty visible. And I think Ted Carpenter, our vice president for foreign and
defense policy studies, does a lot of the defense-oriented shows.


LAMB: Is Doug Bandow...


Mr. BOAZ: Doug Bandow, yes. He is not a policy director; he's a senior
fellow. But he does a lot of writing for us, so you see a lot of op eds by
him and he does a lot of TV appearances.


LAMB: I asked our folks to put the names of your board members on the screen
so that the audience can see who supports this. How much--let's--let's take a
look at who they are. There's Peter Ackerman of Rockport Financial Limited;
K. Tucker Anderson of Cumberland Associates; James Blanchard III, Jefferson
Financial; John--is it Blokker or Blokker (pronounced differently)?


Mr. BOAZ: Blokker.


LAMB: Of Woodside, California; Frank Bond of Holiday Health Spas; Gordon Cain
of The Sterling Group; Edward Crane, who is your president; Richard Dennis of
the Dennis Trading Group; Theodore Forstmann of Forstmann Little & Company; is
that Ethelmae...


Mr. BOAZ: Ethelmae Humphreys.


LAMB: ...Humphreys of the Tamko...


Mr. BOAZ: Tamko Asphalt.


LAMB: ...David Cook...


Mr. BOAZ: Koch.


LAMB: ...I knew I'd get that wrong; John Malone of Tele-Communications, Inc.;
and William Niskanen; David Padden of the Padden & Company; Howard Rich, US
Term Limits; and Frederick Smith of the Federal Express Corporation.


Mr. BOAZ: I think one common thread of the people I mean, in
general, the people who are on the board, other than the two staff members,
are significant financial contributors, people who help us raise money as well
as giving some themselves. I think one common theme running through there is,
they're entrepreneurs. You don't see very many presidents of Fortune 500
corporations; these are people who have built their own companies. They have
a sense of the dynamics of the free market. John Malone really helped to
build TCI, the big cable company. Fred Smith is probably the best
known, the founder of Federal Express. Ted Forstmann is a venture capitalist,
which sort of means that he funds entrepreneurs to get businesses off the
ground. And some people here may have heard of Howard Rich, who runs US Term
Limits. He is also a businessman, an investor, but US Term Limits has been
his big political interest recently.


LAMB: What was the thing that Richard Dennis funded a couple years ago?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, Rich Dennis has funded a lot of things. He is a generous
contributor to Cato. He is also a funder of the Drug Policy Foundation; he's
very much in favor of reform of our current policies of drug prohibition.
He's a commodities trader in Chicago. He's also an active Democrat, so he's
funded a lot of Democrats.


LAMB: There was something else he funded, either a media organization or--I
can't remember.


Mr. BOAZ: Well if your memory goes way back, he funded
something called the Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies, I think was
the name--funded that quite generously. And that organization is no longer
around.


LAMB: How many of those board members are members of political parties and
active?


Mr. BOAZ: I don't know. I suppose half of them, probably. Rich Dennis, as I
say, is an active Democrat. I think Ted Forstmann is an active supply side
Republican, a fan of Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes and people like that. I think
probably several of them are Republicans, and a couple of them have been or
are in the Libertarian Party. Actually, David Koch was the Libertarian
Party's candidate for vice president in 1980, which was, you know, the only
way you can give a large amount of money to a minor party. It turns out
there's all sorts of ways to give a large amount of money to a major party
that we didn't know about.


LAMB: Have you ever sat around the table and listened to those people on that
board talk about politics?


Mr. BOAZ: Somewhat, yes, sure, at our board meetings.


LAMB: What's their number-one interest?


Mr. BOAZ: I think their number-one interest I mean, I think it's
broad. I think their number-one interest is individual liberty, and so that
goes into a lot of areas. That's why they're on Cato's board instead of some
organization that only does one issue. But I suppose if you
insist on narrowing it down from the concept that they really do believe in
liberty, I'd probably say economic growth. They're very concerned about
overtaxation, overregulation, overspending and what that's doing to the
prospects for growth. You know, we used to grow at 3 percent or 4 percent a
year in this country. It doesn't sound like much. We used to grow at 3
percent or 4 percent; now we grow at 1 percent or 2 percent. But it's the
difference between doubling your standard of living in 15 years or 30 years or
70 years, and that makes a big difference. And I think that we shouldn't be
growing as fast as we did in the 1950s; we should be growing faster. We have
more rapid technological improvement. We have global markets now. I think
the fact that we're only growing at half the rate we were then is atrocious.


LAMB: In your book, you talk about the post office and that--as a matter of
fact, you've got Fred Smith there with FedEx. You don't think much of
the post office?


Mr. BOAZ: I don't think much of large, gargantuan, bureaucratic monopolies,
that's right. You know, we have an antitrust division. We talk all the time
about competition and monopoly and if two companies merge, will that be a
threat to competition? And then you've got this huge part of the economy,
communication of ideas, and it's run by an 800,000-person government monopoly.
Now what's happening, of course, is that, increasingly, all important
communications are going through Federal Express or UPS or through electronic
mail. So even though the Postal Service has a legal monopoly, it's losing a
large part of its market share.


LAMB: You have a ch--I don't know that we can do this or not, but you have a
chart here--maybe you can explain it--`What Uncle Sam Has Really Promised You,
Latest official projections available as of January 1996.' And, Andy,
get real close, if you can, on this. What was the point of this?


Mr. BOAZ: The point of it is to say we have a serious problem looming with
Social Security. A lot of people think that Social Security is the greatest
success of big government. And I think that's a pretty good indication if
that's their greatest success, they don't have much to claim, because what's
happening with Social Security is that it was a great system for older people;
it's a great system for people who are retired now. But for baby boomers and
for generation Xers, it's going to be a disaster. We are heading toward
bankruptcy around 2010. A lot of people like to say we're heading toward
bankruptcy in 2029. That's when the theoretical trust fund is depleted. But
around 2010, the cash flow turns negative; there's more money going out than
there is coming in. And since the only thing that's in this Social Security
Trust Fund is government bonds, this is just a matter of--they're going to
start cashing in government bonds, which means the US government is going to
have to start subsidizing Social Security. If they didn't have the government
bonds, what would happen when the cash flow turned negative? The US
government would have to start funding Social Security more than what our
Social Security taxes are. We have a looming crisis that politicians don't
want to admit they've created, and that chart has a lot of details on it.


LAMB: What would libertarians do about Medicare?


Mr. BOAZ: I think that we have to move toward having more of a free market
in health care. You know, it's easy to say in theory, `I don't think the
government should be involved in retirement. I don't think it should be
involved in health care.' We get better health care, we can save more money
for retirement if we have minimal taxes, minimal regulation, and we let the
free market work. The best retirement plan we could have would have
been to continue our growth rate of 4 percent rather than knock it down to 1
1/2 percent. But it's more difficult--once the government sets up these
programs and you have to get out of them, then it's more difficult. We need
to move toward free markets in health care. In the case of Medicare, that
might mean voucherizing it. It might mean letting younger people out to
invest in private plans like medical savings accounts. It--certainly with
Social Security, it means letting younger people out to invest in private
retirement accounts where they can do better. Medicare is going to be even
more difficult because it's more bankrupt, going to be out of money sooner.
But I would say voucherizing, marketizing and putting more reliance on
individuals saving for their own health care is the solution.


LAMB: Here's "The Libertarian Reader." Inside there, you also have an
article by H.L. Mencken. Was he a libertarian? Who was he?


Mr. BOAZ: He generally was. He was probably the greatest journalist of the
first half of this century. He was, interestingly enough, known as a liberal
back during the era of Coolidge and Harding. He was, you know, this great
liberal journalist who was always railing against the pomposity of the
complacent bourgeoisie of the Republican administrations. Then when Roosevelt
came in, Mencken started to be considered a conservative, because he also
railed against the excessive government and the pomposities of the New Deal.
I think what he really was was a libertarian all those times. He believed in
the individual and he didn't much believe in government.


LAMB: Clear up this--the--you have the federalists and the anti-federalists.
And in--and in your book, especially the one--"The Libertarian Reader," in the
introduction, was talking about that James Madison was a conservative
libertarian federalist, and then an anti-federalist is a radical libertarian.
What--what was the difference?


Mr. BOAZ: This is a libertarian country. All the founders were basically
libertarians, and in an earlier generation, we would have called them liberals
or classical liberals. They would have called themselves Whigs, perhaps. But
we can look back at their ideas and say they were basically libertarians.
They believed in individual rights. They believed in government only by
consent. They believed in free markets. And the difference between the
federalists and anti-federalists was over issues of how much power can you
give to the federal government? And the federalists wanted to give a tiny
amount of power to the federal government, and the anti-federalists thought
that even a tiny amount of power was too much. And as I say in the reader,
we're still judging that argument, because if you look at what the federalists
gave the government in the Constitution, it's a pretty libertarian grant of
power. The government was not granted the power to go out and do everything
from Social Security to midnight basketball; it was granted the power to
regulate commerce between the states and to handle foreign affairs, and that
was about it. The anti-federalists said, `You do that and it will get too
powerful. It will exceed its bounds. You will not bind down the government
by this Constitution.' And clearly, on that score, you have to say the
anti-federalists were right.


Now whether that means we should have stuck with the Articles of Confederation
and not tried the Constitution is a more difficult question. But I think if
you look at George Mason and James Madison, you're talking about two Virginia
libertarians who disagreed over whether the Constitution was too risky.


LAMB: Are there any libertarians on the Supreme Court?


Mr. BOAZ: No, I don't think there's anybody on the Supreme Court that I would
call a libertarian. You look at different--you can--you can certainly find--I
think Justice Thomas' opinion in the Lopez case, which said, `There are things
the federal government can't do,' was certainly a libertarian analysis. But
on some civil liberties cases, we've had people who might be considered more
liberal give ringing libertarian dissents or opinions.


LAMB: Is Bill Clinton at all a libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, Bill Clinton is so eclectic and has such wide-ranging
interests that it's hard to say. Bill Clinton has been reported recently to
have said he might be interested in replacing the income tax with a national
sales tax. I'm not that keen on a national sales tax, but it would be better
than the federal income tax. And he's also talked about how successful the
privatization of Social Security in Chile has been. So if you look at those
things. Also, I think you can say, in some ways, Bill Clinton has a tolerant
libertarian attitude toward social issues, although after Dick Morris got hold
of him and said, `Move to the right and talk about curfews and school uniforms
and things,' he might have come across as less so.


LAMB: In your book, you also--in one of the two books here--by the way, the
one, "The Libertarian Reader," sells for $27.50, and your "Primer" sells for
$23. How many copies of each did the Free Press print? Do you know?


Mr. BOAZ: I think there's about 12,000 copies of each in print, which is a
fairly small run for a popular book, but we'll see how popular it is.


LAMB: Did you--is this your first book?


Mr. BOAZ: I've edited several books for the Cato Institute. The "Primer" is
the first book I've written.


LAMB: How did you put all this together? How much help did you have?


Mr. BOAZ: I had a lot of help from some libertarian scholars and colleagues.
I would say that when I was first asked, `What about putting together a
reader?' and I sat down and made a list of 30 articles I would put in, 25 of
those are in there and another 20 have been added. So I was--you know, I was
60 percent right on my first cut. But I asked a lot of people for advice and
I balanced it and I said, `I'd like to have that, but I really have to cover
this subject, so I'm going to have to do something else.' And--and then, at
the last minute, we decided that the book was about 10 percent too long for
the--the price we wanted to put on it and everything, so some amount of help.
I--I think--I think you could say this represents close to a consensus of what
libertarian scholars these days, if they could all vote on what should be in
there, should be.


LAMB: Other names you have in here are Frederick Douglass...


Mr. BOAZ: Frederick Douglass.


LAMB: ...and William Ellery Channing on slavery and William Lloyd Garrison.
What's your--what's your position on slavery, and...


Mr. BOAZ: Well, slavery is about the greatest violation of individual rights
there can be, and so abolitionism was clearly the libertarian cause of its
day. William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, I think, were libertarians.
If you read their writings, they talk about individual rights. They talk
about `No man is empowered to govern another.' And they call slavery
`man stealing.' And they reason they call it man stealing is, they are
saying, `You are trying to steal the very essence of a man from himself.' And
they rested their argument on self-ownership, which is an old libertarian
theory. The first reading in here about it is from Richard Overton,
who was one of the Levellers in England. Self-ownership, the idea that I own
myself, that is the base of my individual rights. Nobody owns me; I don't
belong to the collective; I don't belong to other people. I own myself. And
if I do, slavery is an attempt to steal me from myself.
LAMB: You have Woman as a Moral Being by Sarah Grimke? Is that the way you
pronounce it?


Mr. BOAZ: I think so.


LAMB: And the other one is Angelina Grimke, Rights and Responsibilities of
Women. What's the point there?


Mr. BOAZ: They were sisters. They were abolitionists. In the struggle for
abolitionism, they began thinking about their own rights as women and realized
that they didn't have full equal rights, either. And so women did not do a
lot of public writing at that time. They did do public speaking. But both of
those excerpts, I believe, are from letters. Now they were letters that were
sort of like open letters to the Boston Anti-Slavery Society. And one of the
reasons they're in there is partly because feminism and abolitionism
were clearly libertarian causes, but another reason is that both of those rest
the case for abolitionism and women's rights squarely on the notion that each
adult individual holds moral responsibility for his own actions. And so to
try to control his actions, either to make him a slave or to forbid him from
entering into contracts, which was a way women were treated at the time, is to
take away that moral responsibility, to tell him, `You can't be'--or to tell
her, `You can't be a full and complete adult because you don't have the
responsibility to enter into actions and be responsible for them.'


LAMB: You mentioned Lord Acton earlier and you quoted him on power. Is
it--does it mean anything that most people, when you they tend to quote
him and I'm--I'm looking for the quote here--people say, `Power
corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' And then some people who
know the quote come back and say, `Power tends to corrupt.'


Mr. BOAZ: That's right, power tends to corrupt. And...


LAMB: Does it always corrupt, in your--from what you've seen?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I guess I would say it always tends to corrupt. It's always
dangerous. But this is the tension in setting up a government. We need a
government of some minimal sort to protect us from each other. Most people
want to live their lives peacefully most of the time, but some people would
harm other people if they had the chance. That's why we set up a government:
to protect our peaceful exercise of our rights. But then we immediately face
the dilemma, `How much power can you give the government without it starting
to infringe on your rights?' And that's why I think you say power tends to
corrupt.


If you look at the United States, we've had 200 years of a pretty free
society. Power has not entirely corrupted the people who have run the United
States, but it has tended to move in that direction. And I don't mean just
the John Huang illegal fund-raising and all that kind of thing. I mean the
notion that politicians are better than the rest of us, that they deserve
better protection, that they are treated almost as if they were monarchs.


We have this inauguration, you know, that's going to be the most expensive
inauguration ever--the most expensive public funds, anyway--for a guy who's
already president. In England, that's what you do when you crown a king, not
when you have a new prime minister. So I think there's a sense that we have
too much of the trappings of power associated even with our republican form of
government.


LAMB: You point out to us that Lord Acton's real name is John Emerich Edward
Dalberg Acton. Who was he?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, he was a very distinguished 19th century British scholar,
reader. He's kind of a sad case, because he was always going to write the
history of liberty in the world, and it would have been a brilliant book.
It's--it's said that he read a book a day for his entire life, and he wrote a
book review a day for much of it, and he wrote essays and he lectured at, I
believe it was Oxford University. But he never wrote that book. And
libertarians call it the greatest book never written.


LAMB: You say that a person named Roy Childs Jr. `is one of the brightest
and most dazzling personalities I've ever known and remains an inspiration to
me and many other libertarians.'


Mr. BOAZ: Well, to be technical, that line is actually written by Tom Palmer,
who wrote the bibliographical essay for that book.


LAMB: Right.


Mr. BOAZ: But I'll endorse it.


LAMB: Do you know--did you know him?


Mr. BOAZ: Yes. I knew Roy Childs very well. He was another person who kind
of sadly never wrote a book. He would have been a few years older
than I am. He would be in his 40s now, and he died young. But he
was a brilliant thinker and writer, fascinating person, bubbling over with
ideas. I always say he once made me fascinated by opera for about 10 minutes.
I don't know anything about opera, but I just asked him a question once and he
started rattling on about it, and it was fascinating. And he had that
capacity. He wrote a lot of libertarian essays which, unfortunately, never
became a book.


LAMB: John Perry Barlow is a rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead
and a co-founder of the Atlantic Electronic Frontier Foundation. Why is his
essay in here?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, he has an essay called The Future of Government, and it helps
us to get into the--you know, this--this goes all the way back to the Bible
and through the American Revolution, but I wanted to get into the information
age. And John Perry Barlow, I think, has the last essay in the book. It's
called The Future of Government, and it talks about how the information age is
really going to undermine the powers of government, makes it possible for
people to get more information than they ever had available to them, makes it
possible for them to live outside the bounds of any particular government.
We're going to see people in the next few decades moving to wherever the taxes
are lowest and the living is best. It's going to be very difficult for
governments to control people because we're going to have so much freedom to
move around.


LAMB: Because we're spending so time--much time with this gentleman this
year, I see a number of essays in here by Alexis de Tocqueville. Why? Was he
a libertarian?


Mr. BOAZ: Tocqueville was a libertarian, one that you might call a
conservative libertarian, very concerned about tradition and order in society,
something of an aristocratic approach.


LAMB: Why do the liberals claim him, too?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, I don't think there's--you mean--you mean today's modern
liberals?


LAMB: Yeah.


Mr. BOAZ: I can't imagine. I really don't know what they think they see
in de Tocqueville. Tocqueville was a brilliant critic of American democracy.
He was a great admirer of it, but he pointed out the kinds of things that
could happen, could be foibles of a democratic society, which was a new
experiment. People didn't know. He was really kind of predicting. There's
an essay in there, What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear. We
know what sort of despotism non-democratic nations had. Could there be
despotism in a democratic nation? And he warned about a government that would
beneficently cover the surface of society with minute and petty
rules and regulations. And I have to say that was pretty prescient. I mean,
today we've got regulations on everything from how long you have to stay in
the hospital after you have a baby to midnight basketball to what drugs you
can take if you're sick and your doctor recommends something the FDA doesn't,
all for our own good. The government is always beneficent to us, and yet,
they're covering our society with this network of rules.


LAMB: If you had to pick a book or two that--besides your book right
here--that you would want to read that would be, you know, the best thought
for you on libertarianism, what would that be?


Mr. BOAZ: I would probably say two books by Friedrich Hayek, "The Road to
Serfdom," which is a--a relatively popular introduction to libertarian,
liberal ideas, and "The Constitution of Liberty," which is more his magnum
opus. And I just kept reading and underlining "The Constitution of
Liberty," in particular, as I was writing these books, and I wanted to
include every chapter from it in "The Libertarian Reader."


LAMB: When did he die?


Mr. BOAZ: He died in 1992. He was about 90 years old.


LAMB: What do you remember about him?


Mr. BOAZ: Well, personally, of course, when I met him, he was a very old man,
and so I remember a very old man of old-fashioned, European demeanor, a
gracious gentleman, a scholar who was always so careful and precise to state
his objections to other people's ideas without ever criticizing other people
personally. He dedicated his book, "The Road to Serfdom," to the socialists
of all parties. And I think he was very sincere in wanting to say, `I share
your aspirations. I understand your dreams. But please read this warning of
what will happen if you let government have too much power.' And he kept
that respect for every--for all of his adversaries to the end of his life.


LAMB: When he died, where was he? What--was he still at the University of
Chicago?


Mr. BOAZ: I believe he was--no, he had gone back to--I believe he was a
native of Austria and he had gone back to Germany where, obviously, they speak
German. And--and so I think he felt more comfortable after spending about 30
years in England and the United States.


LAMB: Here are the two books--first time we've done this. The first one is
"Libertarianism: A Primer" by David Boaz, and the one right under that is
"The Libertarian Reader," also edited by David Boaz, which includes a lot of
contemporary and classic writings about libertarianism.


Thank you very much for your time.


Mr. BOAZ: Thank you.
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