Pun Salad

What can I say? I bought this book by the late David Boaz when it came out back in 1998. And only now did it work its way to the top of my non-fiction to-be-read pile. Kept cyber-piling more recent, more interesting, books ahead of it.

And it's good! At least it was 27 years ago. If you are shopping for a good intro to libertarian philosophy and practice, written by a not-particularly-critical activist, I recommend you buy Boaz's updated version The Libertarian Mind, which came out in 2015.

I must confess: in my case, Boaz was pushing on an open door. And I didn't learn much I hadn't already managed to pick up as a decades-long Reason magazine, and occasional reader of Sowell, Hayek, Rothbard, Rand, Nozick, Caplan, Friedmans (Milton and David), …

Lest anyone doubt that libertarianism has an ancient pedigree, Boaz quotes 1 Samuel 11-18, where Sam relays the word of the Lord to the Israelites demanding a king to rule over them (I'll quote the New Revised Standard Version Updated, verse numbers elided):

… These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.

Yeah. You can't say you weren't warned about this, by God Himself.

Boaz was optimistic about libertarianism's long-term prospects, and he may have been right, given a term long enough. But our post-1997 road has been rocky, at best. For example, he quotes the recommendations of Jacob Weisberg in a 1996 book, In Defense of Government:

(1) accept that life is risky and stop trying to legislate risk out of existence; (2) stop promising more than government can deliver; (3) be willing to abolish failed, outdated, or low-priority programs; (4) stop delegating Congress's lawmaking authority to the bureaucracy; (5) promise that government won't get any bigger than it is now, in therms of government share of GNP.

Reader, Weisberg was, at one time, editor-in-chief of Slate. Not exactly a hotbed of rabid anarchists, now or even then.

As far as the "promise" in item 5 above: the USA's FY1996 Federal Net Outlays were 19.3% of its GDP. Compared with 23.1% in FY2024. Getting back to 19.3% would require (by my math) a 16.5% cut across-the-board in overall spending.

(But that "across-the-board" figure includes debt service. Adjust my math appropriately.)

All in all, it's a very good primer, and an interesting look at the state of liberty back in 1997 compared to now.