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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