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The Libertarian Party has always stood for personal liberty, economic liberty, and constitutional rights, but the most prominent speaker at its convention this weekend opposes all those things. Why are they doing it?

Libertarians are not far right; true liberalism is the opposite of illiberalism on both left and right.

Political scientists rate highly those presidents who govern in wartime (except George W. Bush) or expand the size, scope, and expense of the federal government.

Maryland's problems don't require more taxpayer resources. Most of them would be better solved by deregulation of housing and investment, ending drug laws, and school choice.

Hayek lived long enough to see the rise and fall of fascism, national socialism, and Soviet communism.

Under the Constitution, the president is not authorized to issue massive, sweeping orders to regulate whole industries.

A new book pays tribute to the "underground historians" who are trying to tell the truth about Chinese history, especially the history of the Chinese Communist Party.

As bad as our policy discussion is today, it's not as bad as the collectivist, centralist, and even dictatorial ideas that dominated the intellectual climate of the Depression years.

Beginning in 2020 Congress created trillions of dollars of emergency pandemic spending programs. The emergency is over, and it's time to close down the spending.

David Boaz


I've written before about whether athletes take state taxes into account when they weigh competing offers. Here's another example: Grant Williams left the Boston Celtics for the Dallas Mavericks, at least partly because of Massachusetts' Millionaire's Tax:
Testing the market worked out for Williams, who will now make more money while living in Texas, which does not have state income tax. Williams reportedly turned down a four‐​year, $48 million over offer from the Celtics last season.
Williams mentioned Massachusetts' Millionaire's Tax as one of the factors he was mindful of when considering the Celtics' offers. The Millionaire's Tax is a four percent tax on top of Massachusetts' five percent income tax, which raises the tax rate to nine percent for millionaires.

"I was thankful just because I feel like the way my agent and everybody talked about it was that this was our floor," Williams said. "In Boston, it's really like $48 million with the millionaire's tax, so $54 million in Dallas is really like $58 million in Boston and $63 million in L.A."

Here's what I wrote in 2019 when Bryce Harper chose Philadelphia over San Francisco:
Has California lost another centi‐​millionaire because of its high tax rates? Washington Nationals superstar Bryce Harper just signed a 13‐​year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies, the largest contract in the history of major North American sports. (Though not the largest when adjusted for inflation.) Some reports say that the San Francisco Giants came very close in the competition but lost out because of California's taxes. Alex Pavlovic of NBC tweeted:
"I'm told Giants made a 12‐​year, $310 million offer to Bryce Harper. They were willing to go higher but would have had to go well over $330 million to get it done because of California taxes."
If taxes did keep Harper on the East Coast, he wouldn't be the first sports star to make such a decision. Trevor Ariza, a member of the Los Angeles Lakers' 2009 NBA championship team and by 2014 "a key part of the Wizards' playoff run," decided to leave Washington and join the Houston Rockets. Why?
"Washington was disappointed but hardly shaken when Ariza chose to accept the same four‐​year, $32 million contract offer in Houston, where the 29‐​year‐​old could pocket more money because the state doesn't tax income."
As I wrote then, yes, a $32 million salary – or indeed a $32,000 salary – goes further in Texas than in the District of Columbia. What economists call the "tax wedge" is the gap between what an employer pays for an employee's services and what the employee receives after taxes. It causes some jobs to disappear entirely, as employees and employers may not be able to agree on a wage once taxes are taken out of the paycheck. It causes some employees to flee to lower‐​tax countries, states, or cities. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bono, and Gerard Depardieu are some of the better‐​known "tax exiles." It isn't just entertainers and athletes, of course. A 2018 study found that 138 millionaires left California after a 2012 tax increase. Millionaires have also been seen leaving Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Last fall Chris Edwards wrote about the impact of taxes on interstate moves. As taxes rise in many states, no‐​income‐​tax states like Texas, Florida, Washington, Tennessee, and Nevada may become increasingly attractive to athletes, entertainers, and other high‐​income producers.

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


Here we go again. David Leonhardt of the New York Times dredges up a poorly designed chart from 2017 that purported to show that there are very few "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" American voters. At the time Karl Smith pointed out some basic design flaws in the analysis. Emily Ekins noted that determining the number of liberal, conservative, libertarian, and populist/​communitarian/​statist voters depends very much on the definitions you start with and the issues you choose. She concludes: "The overwhelming body of literature, however, using a variety of different methods and different definitions, suggests that libertarians comprise about 10–20% of the population, but may range from 7–22%."
The Gallup Poll has regularly used a two‐​question screen to divide voters into four ideological categories, and they typically found libertarians around the 20 percent mark.







Beginning in 2006 David Kirby and I used a three‐​question screen to identify libertarians, and we found that with that stricter definition "libertarians" constituted about 13 percent of the population and 15 percent of reported voters. And note that if we insisted on agreement with the liberal or conservative position on all three questions, the number of liberals and conservatives would likely be quite a bit lower than 25 percent.
It's quite possible, of course, that the Trump Effect on Republican voters, not to mention the anti‐​Trump backlash among independent and Democratic voters would have significantly changed some of these pre‐​Trump, "normal" findings.
We also commissioned Zogby International to ask our three American National Election Studies questions to 1,012 actual (reported) voters in the 2006 election. We asked half the sample, "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal?" — the very categorization Leonhardt used in his column. We asked the other half of the respondents, "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian?"
The results surprised us. Fully 59 percent of the respondents said "yes" to the first question. That is, by 59 to 27 percent, poll respondents said they would describe themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal."
The addition of the word "libertarian" clearly made the question more challenging. What surprised us was how small the drop‐​off was. A healthy 44 percent of respondents answered "yes" to that question, accepting a self‐​description as "libertarian." We summed all that up in this handy graph:







Leonhardt and others may well be right that there are more "socially conservative, fiscally liberal" voters than "fiscally conservative, socially liberal." Though the latter are better educated, more affluent, and more likely to vote. And in any case the numbers are a lot closer than Leonhardt and his befuddled chart would have you believe. Also, much depends on the questions you ask. Kirby and I used broad philosophical questions, as did Gallup, Pew, and ANES. But you can also use specific issues, as did a Washington Post poll. The combination "abolish Medicare" and "repeal all drug laws" would find a huge percentage of SCFL voters and very few FCSL or libertarianish voters. "Gay people should be able to get married" plus "the government spends too much money" will get you a lot of FCSL voters. Which one is closer to actual American policy conflicts?
There's plenty of room for debate about how to analyze the ideological positions of American voters. But looking at the available data is a good place to start.