David Boaz

Here we go again. Another “obituary” for libertarianism. While Salon Magazine declares that we all live in a “libertarian dystopia,” and a new brand of big‐government conservatives promise to free the Republican party and American government from their libertarian captivity, Barton Swaim declares in the Wall Street Journal that a new book “works as an obituary” for libertarianism. That’s not a characterization that I think the authors—Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi—would accept of their book, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism.

Swaim notes that the book surveys many different kinds of self‐styled libertarians over the past two centuries, and that the authors lay out six “markers” that libertarians share: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Not a bad list, significantly overlapping with the list of seven key libertarian ideas that I laid out in the first chapter of my own book, The Libertarian Mind.

He goes on to argue, following the authors, “In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho‐capitalists, paleo‐libertarians (right‐wing), ‘liberaltarians’ (left‐wing) and many others.” Somehow he leaves out actual libertarians, such as those who populate the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, the Objectivist world, and much of the Libertarian Party. Indeed, a few lines later he cites the “diversity” of “the priestess of capitalism Ayn Rand, the politician Rand Paul and the billionaire philanthropist Charles Koch”—none of whom would fall into any of the esoteric categories that he suggests make up modern libertarianism and in fact belong to actual libertarianism or its penumbras.

The whole review is ahistorical. Swaim never mentions classical liberalism, the revolutionary movement that challenged monarchs, autocrats, mercantilism, caste society, and established churches beginning in the 18th century. Liberalism soon swept the United States and Western Europe and ushered in what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls the “Great Enrichment,” the unprecedented rise in living standards that has made us moderns some 3,000 percent richer than our ancestors of 1800. The ideas of the classical liberals, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders, are those that animate modern libertarianism: equal rights, constitutional government, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law. Zwolinski and Tomasi say that “what sets libertarians apart is the absolutism and systematicity” with which we advocate those ideas. Well, yes, after 200 years of historical observation and philosophical and economic debate, many of us do believe that a firmer adherence to liberal/libertarian ideas would serve society well. We observe that the closer a society comes to consistent tolerance, free markets, and the rule of law, the more it will achieve widespread peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Swaim insists that libertarians do not engage “with ultimate questions—questions about the good life, morality, religious meaning, human purpose and so on.” He’s wrong about that. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. F. A. Hayek stressed the importance of morals and tradition. Ayn Rand set out a fairly strict code of personal ethics. Thomas Szasz’s work challenged the reductionists and behaviorists with a commitment to the old ideas of good and bad, right and wrong, and responsibility for one’s choices. Charles Murray emphasizes the value and indeed the necessity of community and responsibility. Libertarian philosophers of virtue ethics find the case for limited government to be based on the search for the good life. Swaim would be on more solid ground to say that libertarianism does not presume to tell individuals what to believe and how to live. Separation of church and state and all that. As I wrote in a letter to the Journal (not yet published), Swaim refers to the “studiously amoral philosophy of libertarianism.” A popular summary of libertarianism, “don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff, and keep your promises,” is just the basic morality that allows human beings to live together in peace.

As for his claim that libertarianism is dead, that this book is an obituary, I refer Swaim again to all the people who complain that we’re living in some sort of libertarian world. Libertarians often feel depressed; they believe the world is on “the road to serfdom.” But in fact the world is far freer in this century than ever before in history. Free markets and free trade, an end to slavery and caste societies, representative government, and the rule of law now govern the Western world and much of the rest. Most of the Cato Institute’s website comprises complaints about the malfeasance of the U.S. government. But in the bigger picture, libertarians have had much success. In the roughly 50 years since I started thinking about politics, one could point to such successes as:

the end of conscription in the United States
social, economic, and political equality for women
dramatically lower marginal tax rates
freer trade
deregulation of major industries such as airlines, trucking, communication, and finance
the almost total demise of communism
and the consequent discrediting of socialism and central planning
the reorientation of antitrust policy to a consumer welfare standard
expanded First Amendment protections
expanded Second Amendment protections
the progress of gay rights and gay marriage
growing opportunities for school choice
a slow erosion of the war on drugs

I could go on. None of these are total victories. No ideology achieves all of its sweeping vision, at least not without a military conquest of the government and the ability to rule by decree—and those experiments are nothing to emulate. In various parts of the world bad ideas are back—socialism, protectionism, ethnic nationalism, anti‐Semitism, even industrial policy. The libertarian challenge is to join with other liberals—Reaganite conservatives, free‐speech liberals, people who are “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”—to push back against these bad resurgent ideas. But this record of accomplishment is no obituary.

David Boaz

In 2009, as the federal government was rolling out the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program and preparing to spend another $787 billion in President Obama’s “stimulus” package — both with little serious examination by Congress — I wrote a blog post titled “How to Spend a Trillion Dollars without Waste and Fraud.”

The first line of my post was “You can’t.” And I noted that the federal government knew that, because both Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, and Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general, had told a House subcommittee — after the passage of both bills — that the government’s experiences in the reconstruction of Iraq, hurricane‐relief programs, and the 1990s savings‐and‐loan bailout, along with the lack of written policies in the new programs, did not bode well.

As Dodaro noted, it wasn’t the first such example. Nor would it be the last. Reports are now rolling in about massive waste and fraud in the government’s Covid‐relief spending, begun in 2020 under President Trump and increased under President Biden.

“An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.” Now the Small Business Administration’s inspector general reports that more than $200 billion may have been stolen from the Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs.

Linda Bilmes, coauthor with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, analyzed the massive problems in three somewhat smaller government projects — the Iraqi reconstruction effort, Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, and the Big Dig artery construction in Boston — and found that “in any organization that starts to increase spending very rapidly there are risks of waste, fraud and inefficiency.”

President Obama assured us in 2009 that Vice President Biden would be in charge of monitoring the spending in the stimulus bill and that “nobody messes with Joe.” But that is not in fact a solution to the inevitability of waste and fraud when an unaccountable bureaucracy is spending trillions of other people’s dollars. As the pickpocket says in the opening scene of Casablanca, “This place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere.” Vultures ye have with ye everywhere. And when you’re trying to shovel out trillions of dollars — money created by writing a number on a piece of paper and then writing checks on that sheet of paper — you can’t ask too many questions. The goal was to get money into people’s hands to ward off depression. And all the money did get into people’s hands. Just not necessarily into the intended hands. Some of it, for instance, went to SBA employee LaKeith Faulkner, who was sentenced to 62 months and ordered to pay $10,600,000 in restitution for his role in a scheme to obtain fraudulent PPP loans. And some of it to six Essex County, New Jersey, residents who were arrested for scheming to fraudulently obtain — you guessed it — Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans.

David Fahrenthold of the New York Times wrote,

In the midst of the pandemic, the government gave unemployment benefits to the incarcerated, the imaginary and the dead. It sent money to “farms” that turned out to be front yards. It paid people who were on the government’s “Do Not Pay List.” It gave loans to 342 people who said their name was “N/A.”

He calls it “one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people, including at least one amateur who boasted of his criminal activity on YouTube.”

There are no doubt many more stories for other reporters to pursue. And continuing questions about the net costs and benefits of massive government spending programs, funded by debt and rife with, yes, waste, fraud, and abuse.

David Boaz

Suddenly, and rather quietly, both public and elite opinion are turning against the “new” methods of teaching reading that have dominated our schools for a generation.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this issue for a long time. In 1995 I noticed that after state test results showed that the vast majority of California public school students could not read, write, or compute at levels considered proficient, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin appointed two task forces to investigate reading and math instruction. The reports were clear — and depressing. There had been a wholesale abandonment of the basics — such as phonics and arithmetic drills — in California classrooms. Eastin said there was no one place to lay the blame for the decade‐long disaster. “What we made was an honest mistake,” she said. Or as the Sacramento Bee headline put it, “We Goofed.”

You’d think such a devastating report in the nation’s largest state would have had an impact. But it didn’t seem to get much attention outside California. Instead, schools kept adopting reading instruction plans based on “whole language” and “balanced literacy” theories. Despite the fact that in 1997 Congress instructed the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development to work with the Department of Education to establish a National Reading Panel that would evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 reading studies. In 2000 it reported its conclusion: That the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates:

Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness
Systematic phonics instruction
Methods to improve fluency
Ways to enhance comprehension

But suddenly, in May of last year the New York Times took note of the problems with school reading instruction with a page 1 article on how a leading advocate of “balanced literacy” was backtracking. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team trained thousands of teachers, and she estimated that her “Units of Study” was used in a quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools.

The Times noted that a 2019 investigation by American Public Media revealed “American education’s own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.”

Then in January of this year I noted that the Fairfax County and Arlington County NAACP chapters in Virginia were making demands on the local school system: they want the schools to teach black and Hispanic kids to read. And they want the school to start using the best research‐tested methods. After years of promising to make minority achievement a priority, finally in the past school year, the district gave all kindergarten through second‐grade teachers scripted lesson plans featuring phonics.

In March the Washington Post editorialized: “Cut the politics. Phonics is the best way to teach reading.”

In April the New York Times reported, “A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.” They quoted Ohio Governor Mike Dewine: “The evidence is clear,” Mr. DeWine said. “The verdict is in.” And noted: “The movement has drawn support across economic, racial and political lines. Its champions include parents of children with dyslexia; civil rights activists with the N.A.A.C.P.; lawmakers from both sides of the aisle; and everyday teachers and principals.”

American Public Media has continued to follow the issue, and reported recently that at least 18 state legislatures are considering “ways to better align reading instruction with scientific research.”

NPR’s “All Things Considered” reported in June on the state of Georgia’s new push for phonics in the lower grades. NPR notes that “there’s perhaps no greater predictor of how a child will succeed in school than how well they can read by about the third grade. Research has shown that if students don’t learn by then, they’re far more likely to fall dangerously behind.”

This new approach is being called “the Science of Reading,” but it’s the science your grandmother knew: Learn the letters, learn how each letter sounds, learn how the letters combine into words. The amazing thing is that for a generation or more, professors and school administrators thought they had better ideas.

As I wrote before:

Phonics seems like a good idea to me, but I’m no expert. As noted, though, there’s a lot of research recommending phonics that a lot of school districts still aren’t following. As a libertarian, I don’t usually spend much time telling government agencies how to do their jobs, except as their actions impinge directly on individual rights. My focus is more on defining what activities ought to be undertaken by government and what ought to remain in the private sector, with individuals, businesses, churches, clubs, nonprofits, and civil society. And I think there’s a lesson here on that.

Government agencies tend to be sluggish monopolies, with little incentive to improve and subject to political influence. When the California superintendent promised to fix the mistake, the teachers union head warned, “It’s like turning an oil tanker around. You just don’t do that quickly,” and the governor’s spokesperson said it would be a hard slog because “there is such partisan politics going on.” Private organizations, especially profit‐seeking businesses, are under constant pressure to serve customers better than their competitors. Businesses fail to meet that test every day and go out of business. When’s the last time you heard of a failed government agency being shut down? That includes schools. Private schools must keep families happy or they can go elsewhere, and the school could be forced to shut down. Public schools, no matter how unhappy parents are, are almost never closed. As long as the tax money keeps coming in, they stay in business.

The problem is that the schools are run by a bureaucratic government monopoly, largely isolated from competitive or community pressures. We expect good service from businesses because we know–and we know that they know — that we can go somewhere else. We instinctively know we won’t get good service from the post office or the Division of Motor Vehicles because we can’t go anywhere else.

But now, after many years of complaints from parents, the elite media are joining the chorus: Teach children to read, using time‐tested methods, confirmed by the National Reading Panel in 2000. It’s about time.

David Boaz

The United States is a liberal country in a liberal world. What does that mean? Let’s consider a little history.

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For thousands of years, most of recorded history, the world was characterized by power, privilege, and oppression. Life for most people was, in the phrase of Thomas Hobbes, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

And then something changed. In the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution emerged out of a new, more empirical way of doing science. And that led into the Enlightenment beginning late that century. In his book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker identifies four themes of the Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

Liberalism arose in that environment. People began to question the role of the state and the established church. They argued for liberty for all based on the equal natural rights and dignity of every person. John Locke, often regarded as the father of liberalism, argued in his Second Treatise of Government that every person has a property in his own person and in “the work of his hands”; that government is formed to protect life, liberty, and property and is based on the consent of the governed; and that if government exceeds its proper role, the people are entitled to replace it.

As the economist and intellectual historian Daniel Klein has shown, in the 1770s writers began using such terms as “liberal policy,” “liberal plan,” “liberal system,” “liberal views,” “liberal ideas,” and “liberal principles.” Adam Smith was another founding figure of liberalism. In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, he wrote about “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” The term “liberalism” came along about a generation later.

The year 1776, of course, also saw the publication of the most eloquent piece of liberal or libertarian writing ever, the American Declaration of Independence, which concisely laid out Locke’s analysis of the purpose and limits of government.

Liberalism was emerging in continental Europe, too, in the writings of Montesquieu and Constant in France, Wilhelm von Humboldt in Germany, and others. In the 1820s the representatives of the middle class in the Spanish Cortes, or parliament, came to be called the Liberales. They contended with the Serviles (the servile ones), who represented the nobles and the absolute monarchy. The term Serviles, for those who advocate state power over individuals, unfortunately didn’t stick. But the word “liberal,” for the defenders of liberty and the rule of law, spread rapidly. The Whig Party in England came to be called the Liberal Party. Today we know the philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, the American Founders, and John Stuart Mill as liberalism.

The Liberal 19th Century
In both the United States and Europe the century after the American Revolution was marked by the spread of liberalism. The ancient practices of slavery and serfdom were ended. Written constitutions and bills of rights protected liberty and guaranteed the rule of law. Guilds and monopolies were largely eliminated, with all trades thrown open to competition based on merit. Freedom of the press and of religion was greatly expanded, property rights were made more secure, and international trade was freed. After the defeat of Napoleon, Europe enjoyed a century of relative peace.

That liberation of human creativity unleashed astounding scientific and material progress. The Nation magazine, which was then a truly liberal journal, looking back in 1900, wrote, “Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us.” The technological advances of the liberal 19th century are innumerable: the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion engine. Thanks to such innovations and an explosion of entrepreneurship, in Europe and America the great masses of people began to be liberated from the backbreaking toil that had been the natural condition of humankind since time immemorial. Infant mortality fell and life expectancy began to rise to unprecedented levels. A person looking back from 1800 would see a world that for most people had changed little in thousands of years; by 1900 the world was unrecognizable.

The Turn Away from Liberalism
Toward the end of the 19th century, classical liberalism began to give way to new forms of collectivism and state power. That Nation editorial went on to lament that “material comfort has blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible” and that “before [statism] is again repudiated there must be international struggles on a terrific scale.”

From the disastrous World War I on, governments grew in size, scope, and power. Exorbitant taxation, militarism, conscription, censorship, nationalization, and central planning signaled that the era of liberalism, which had so recently supplanted the old order, was now itself supplanted by the era of the megastate.

Through the Progressive Era, World War I, the New Deal, and World War II, there was tremendous enthusiasm for bigger government among American intellectuals. Herbert Croly, the first editor of the New Republic, wrote in The Promise of American Life that that promise would be fulfilled “not by … economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self‐denial.”

Around 1900 even the term “liberal” underwent a change. People who supported big government and wanted to limit and control the free market started calling themselves liberals. The economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, “As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.” Scholars began to refer to the philosophy of individual rights, free markets, and limited government—the philosophy of Locke, Smith, and Mill—as classical liberalism. Some liberals, including F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, continued to call themselves liberals. But others came up with a new word, libertarian.

In much of the world even today the advocates of liberty are still called liberals. In South Africa the liberals, such as Helen Suzman, rejected the system of racism and economic privilege known as apartheid in favor of human rights, nonracial policies, and free markets. In China, Russia, and Iran, liberals are those who want to replace totalitarianism in all its aspects with the liberal system of free markets, free speech, and constitutional government. Even in Western Europe, the term liberal still indicates at least a fuzzy version of classical liberalism. German liberals, for instance, usually to be found in the Free Democratic Party, oppose the socialism of the Social Democrats, the corporatism of the Christian Democrats, and the paternalism of both.

For all the growth of government in the past century, liberalism remains the basic operating system of the United States, Europe, and an increasing part of the world. Those countries broadly respect such basic liberal principles as private property, markets, free trade, the rule of law, government by consent of the governed, constitutionalism, free speech, free press, religious freedom, women’s rights, gay rights, peace, and a generally free and open society—but not without plenty of arguments, of course, over the scope of government and the rights of individuals, from taxes and the welfare state to drug prohibition and war. But as Brian Doherty wrote in Radicals for Capitalism, his history of the libertarian movement, we live in a liberal world that “runs on approximately libertarian principles, with a general belief in property rights and the benefits of liberty.”

America’s Liberal Heritage
And that is certainly true in the United States. The great American historian Bernard Bailyn wrote:

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The major themes of eighteenth‐century [English] radical libertarianism [were] brought to realization here. The first is the belief that power is evil, a necessity perhaps but an evil necessity; that it is infinitely corrupting; and that it must be controlled, limited, restricted in every way compatible with a minimum of civil order. Written constitutions; the separation of powers; bills of rights; limitations on executives, on legislatures, and courts; restrictions on the right to coerce and wage war—all express the profound distrust of power that lies at the ideological heart of the American Revolution and that has remained with us as a permanent legacy ever after.

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Through all our many political fights, especially after the abolition of slavery, American debate has taken place within a broad liberal consensus.

Modern American politics can be traced to the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when “liberalism” came to mean activist government, theoretically to help the poor and the middle class—taxes, transfer programs, and regulation—plus a growing concern for civil rights and civil liberties. Race relations, which had taken a turn for the worse in the Progressive Era, with Woodrow Wilson’s resegregation of the federal workforce, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, began to improve after World War II with the desegregation of the armed forces and federal employment and subsequent moves to undo legal segregation. A new opposition arose, a conservative movement led by William F. Buckley Jr., Sen. Barry Goldwater, and President Ronald Reagan. That conservative movement preached a gospel of free markets, a strong national defense, and “traditional values,” which often meant opposition to civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights.

And those were the opposing factions in American politics from the 1960s to 2015. But Donald Trump changed that picture. He didn’t really campaign on free markets, traditional values, and a strong national defense. He emphasized his opposition to free trade and immigration, was largely indifferent to abortion and gay rights, and engaged in open racial and religious scapegoating. That was a big shift from the Republican party shaped by Ronald Reagan, but Trump remade the GOP in his image.

Now we have Democrats moving left in all the wrong ways—far more spending than even the Obama administration, openly socialist officials, and aggressive efforts to restrict free speech in the name of fighting “hate speech.” Meanwhile, Republicans are moving to the wrong kind of right—a culture war pitting Americans against Americans and a new willingness to use state power to hurt their opponents, including private businesses.

The Liberal or Libertarian Center
Where does that leave libertarians? Well, right where we’ve always been: advocating the philosophy of freedom—economic freedom, personal freedom, human rights, political freedom. Or as the Cato Institute maxim puts it, individual rights, free markets, limited government, and peace.

But if liberals and Democrats become more hostile to capitalism and abandon free speech, and Republicans double down on aggressive cultural conservatism and protectionism, maybe there’s room for a new political grouping, which we might call the liberal or libertarian center.

Pundits talk a lot about “fiscally conservative and socially liberal” swing voters, and a Zogby poll commissioned by Cato once found that 59 percent of Americans agreed that they would describe themselves that way. Most Americans are content with both the cultural liberations of the 1960s and the economic liberations begun in the 1980s.

That broadly libertarian center is politically homeless today. If we approach politics and policy reasonably, libertarians can provide a nucleus for that broad center of peaceful and productive people in a society of liberty under law.

The Libertarian Challenge
As bleak as things sometimes seem in the United States, there are definitely worse problems in the world. In too much of the world, ideas we thought were dead are back: socialism and protectionism and ethnic nationalism, even “national socialism,” authoritarianism on both the left and the right. We see this in Russia and China, of course, but not only there; also in Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines, maybe India. A far‐right candidate—anti-immigration, anti‐globalization, anti–free trade, anti‐privatization, anti–pension reform—came too close for comfort to the presidency of France.

As Tom G. Palmer wrote in the November/December 2016 issue of Cato Policy Report, we can identify three competing threats to liberty: identity politics and the intolerant left; populism and the yearning for strongman rule that invariably accompanies it; and radical political Islamism, which has less political appeal in the West.

People who oppose these ideas need to develop a defense of liberty, equality, and democracy. Libertarians are well suited to do that.

In 1997, Fareed Zakaria wrote:

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Consider what classical liberalism stood for in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was against the power of the church and for the power of the market; against the privileges of kings and aristocracies and for dignity of the middle class; against a society dominated by status and land and in favor of one based on markets and merit; opposed to religion and custom and in favor of science and secularism; for national self‐determination and against empires; for freedom of speech and against censorship; for free trade and against mercantilism. Above all, it was for the rights of the individual and against the power of the church and the state.

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And, he said, it won a sweeping victory against “an order that had dominated human society for two millennia—that of authority, religion, custom, land, and kings.”

Libertarians are tempted to be too depressed. We read the morning papers, or watch the cable shows, and we think the world is indeed on “the road to serfdom.” But we should reject a counsel of despair. We’ve been fighting ignorance, superstition, privilege, and power for many centuries. We and our classical liberal forebears have won great victories. The fight is not over, but liberalism remains the only workable operating system for a world of peace, growth, and progress.