The Liberty Fund symposium on “The Legacy of David Boaz” – prominent libertarian thinker and longtime Cato Institute leader—is continuing. We now have initial essays by all five participants—Andy Craig, Tarnell S. Brown, Aaron Powell, Jonathan Blanks, and myself. Each person will also have two response essays commenting on others’ contributions, and some have already been posted, including my own.
Here are the contributions posted so far:
Andy Craig, “David Boaz Understood Liberty and the Rule of Law are Inseparable“
Ilya Somin, “ David Boaz on Immigration“
Tarnell Brown, “Perspective Essay Invasive Illiberalism: David Boaz and the Russo-Ukrainian War”
Aaron Ross Powell, “David Boaz and Trans Rights“
Jonathan Blanks, “The Expansion of Liberty makes America Great“
Jonathan Blanks, “Embracing a Liberalism beyond Policy” (Response Essay)
Ilya Somin, “Liberal Universalism and the Menace of Nationalism” (Response Essay)
Here is an excerpt from my response essay:
I have few disagreements with the other contributors to the symposium in honor of David Boaz. But I want to take this opportunity to highlight some common themes that run through all our essays. Most notable is the imperative of extending liberty to as wide a range of people as possible, breaking through morally arbitrary distinctions such as those of race, gender, sexual orientation, and immigrant status. The struggle for liberty also cannot stop at national boundaries, but rather must include liberal states working to oppose oppressive regimes internationally, in some cases by force.
Like most libertarians, David Boaz advocated protecting a wide range of liberties, both “economic” and personal. But he went further than many in emphasizing the importance of extending those rights to all people, without distinction. Central to David’s thought was the idea that libertarianism requires both a broad conception of the range of liberties that must be protected, and a broad view of the range of people entitled to that full protection. As Andy Craig puts it, “[n]othing offended David more than picking and choosing some people as more deserving of freedom than others, treating some people’s rights as important and other people’s rights as disposable.”
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