Ask the Expert: David Boaz

Susanna Morrison from Wesleyan University asks:

"I just finished reading your book, The Politics of Freedom. I know I am not the only one who is troubled by the current disdain for free markets and the general irreverence that lawmakers have shown for individual liberties recently, but how can we make libertarian positions more widely accepted in the political world and thereby become a more serious challenge to increased government intervention?"

David Boaz, Executive Vice-President of the Cato Institute, answers:

This is a rough time for defenders of liberty. Both the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the current financial crisis caused many Americans to say "don't just stand there—do something!" As Robert Higgs demonstrated in Crisis and Leviathan, government doesn't grow by a steady one percent a year. It grows in spurts, mostly during crises like wars and depressions. Every crisis is an opportunity for government to grow in size and scope and power. And it can be hard at those times to try to remind people that government actually caused the crisis in the first place, and more government won't solve a problem caused by government, and we'll be sorry later when we've given up more freedom and let government exceed its constitutional authority.

Let's take a breath and remember that things are not as bad as they may seem at the moment. The United States and Western civilization still run on broadly libertarian principles: the rule of law, separation of church and state, private property, market exchange, freedom of speech, equality under the law. And you may go, so what? Everybody knows that. But the world didn't run by any of those rules until earlier generations of libertarians (whatever name they went by at the time) fought for them. Even more recently, in my own lifetime, Americans lived with Jim Crow, military conscription, 90 percent income tax rates, sodomy laws, indecency laws, strict regulation of finance and telecommunications, wage and price controls, and more. So we've made more progress toward freedom than we sometimes remember, and our basic ideas—which were ours before they were everyone's—are more widely held than we may realize.

And now we're in a fight again—not just against a growing welfare state and the war on drugs and the school monopoly but against new restrictions on civil liberties and brand-new intrusions into our financial system. And all we can do is what fighters for freedom have always done—educate ourselves, educate others, stand on principle, communicate our ideas, make alliances where we can. We want to make freedom an exciting vision—dynamic, progressive, liberal in the best sense. Freedom is morally right; people should be free to make the important choices about their lives. And freedom works; it creates new ideas and new products, lifts people out of poverty, and gives us longer, healthier, more comfortable lives. That's the message we want to get across. And we should be doing it with books, magazines, blogs, speeches, protest marches, films, online video, music, art, and political organization.