Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce her running mate next week. She is reportedly considering several governors who theoretically appeal to moderate voters in the swing states: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are also in the mix. Which of these individuals would be best from a libertarian perspective is not
Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce her running mate next week. She is reportedly considering several governors who theoretically appeal to moderate voters in the swing states: Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are also in the mix.
Which of these individuals would be best from a libertarian perspective is not as clear cut as it was on the Republican side, where North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum was obviously better than the alternatives. (Unfortunately, former President Donald Trump selected Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, whose distinguishing feature is his contempt for libertarian economic policies.) Nevertheless, it's possible to parse them.
First, the national figures. Unlike the other names on the list, Buttigieg is actually a member of the current administration and has been responsible for implementing federal policies. Unfortunately, his tenure as Transportation secretary will not be remembered as particularly libertarian. While he has signaled openness to tearing down bureaucratic "barriers" in the wake of transportation-related disasters, he has not made any serious attempts to grapple with said bureaucracy. On the contrary, when things have gone wrong, he has reserved most of his ire for private companies like Southwest Airlines and Norfolk Southern, rather than the outdated and meddlesome regulators who make their jobs more difficult.
Buttigieg comes across as a technocrat rather than a progressive: He appears to believe that smart, capable people like himself should run the government and make things more efficient. When he pursued the presidency in 2020, liberal news site Vox described him as a "product of the meritocracy" and did not intend it as a compliment. He enrages the left, but this does not make him a friend to liberty, amusing though it is. His foreign policy views also seem somewhat more hawkish than other standard-issue Democrats, which is not an improvement.
Then there's Kelly. As an astronaut and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D–Ariz.)—who was grievously wounded after being shot in the head by a deranged gunman—he is certainly an inspiring figure. However, his political positions are mostly in line with his party. He has voted in support of President Joe Biden's approved policies 95.5 percent of the time. On energy and environmental issues, he has deviated from the progressive wing of the party: He opposes the Green New Deal and has voted in favor of increased oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. On the other hand, he is one of the more outspoken Democrats on gun control.
Arizona's U.S. senators have tended to be more individual-minded, bipartisan, and independent: see Kyrsten Sinema. For those reasons, Kelly might be slightly preferable to some of the other options.
Now for the governors. Walz and Beshear were both elected in 2018 and thus have longer records than Shapiro, who became governor of his state just last year. Alas, their tenures are not particularly inspiring, as both of them overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic—providing an opportunity to implement policies that were anathema to liberty.
Walz implemented many of the same heavy-handed, liberty-infringing mitigation policies as other blue state governors; he also maintained a government hotline for people to call and report their neighbors for violating social distancing rules. When Republicans complained about it, he replied: "We're not going to take down a phone number that people can call to keep their families safe." This alone should be disqualifying.
For his part, Beshear attempted to keep lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closures in place—well into the pandemic. In fact, he reimposed masks on public school students in August 2021, saying, "We are to the point where we cannot allow our kids to go into these buildings unprotected, unvaccinated and face this delta variant." This is also disqualifying.
That leaves Shapiro, who has had mercifully less time in office to do things that would offend libertarians. To his credit, he has supported several encouraging initiatives. One of his first actions after taking office was to eliminate the college degree requirement for government jobs. He also made some small progress on reforming the state's occupational licensing system. He is a supporter, to a degree, of school choice; he ultimately vetoed a voucher bill after facing significant pressure from teachers unions, however.
Given how popular he is in Pennsylvania—a must-win state for Harris—Shapiro has emerged as the likeliest veep pick in recent days. Like Buttigieg, Shapiro seems to make the far-left very upset: The New Republic called him "The One Vice Presidential Pick Who Could Ruin Democratic Unity." While that sounds entertaining enough, the main knock on him from the left is that he harshly condemned the recent pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and is vocally supportive of Israel. For libertarians who would like to see the U.S. become less involved in Middle Eastern affairs and stop spending American tax dollars on costly foreign wars, these are reasonable concerns.
At the same time, it's hard to imagine Vice President Shapiro steering a markedly different course on foreign policy than any of the other options; on most other issues, he is slightly better. All this contributes to a weak—very weak—libertarian preference for Shapiro.
Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both? Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the
Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both?
Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was trying to convince MAGA supporters to be more libertarian. Reason's Stephanie Slade saw him make his case for "national libertarianism" at the National Conservatism Conference. That event was also attended by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who has a different vision for the conservative movement. Those dueling visions are the subject of today's episode.
Note:This episode is plagued by technical issues due to a software malfunction. With the exception of an approximately nine-minute section (which is marked in the episode), the full conversation is intact.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Pictures of Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump, Liz Wolfe, and Zach Weissmueller with the Reason logo, the Just Asking Questions logo, and the words "Libertarian or nationalist?" all in white
Today's guest is libertarian legal giant Randy Barnett, who has just published his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Currently a law professor at Georgetown, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Barnett about his days as a prosecutor in Chicago, how he helped create the legal philosophy of originalism, what it was like arguing medical marijuana and Obamacare cases at the Supreme Court, and what he learned from anarc
Today's guest is libertarian legal giant Randy Barnett, who has just published his memoir, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. Currently a law professor at Georgetown, Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Barnett about his days as a prosecutor in Chicago, how he helped create the legal philosophy of originalism, what it was like arguing medical marijuana and Obamacare cases at the Supreme Court, and what he learned from anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard. They also discuss why he thinks the libertarian movement needs an intellectual reboot and how his working-class, Jewish upbringing in Calumet City, Illinois, remains central to his identity.
0:00— Introduction
1:05— Gonzales vs. Raich (marijuana legalization)
6:15— United States vs. Lopez (gun-free school zones)
20:11— What is Originalism?
25:40— How Barnett became an originalist
27:20— How the 9th Amendment kickstarted Barnett's Constitutional law career
32:30— Lysander Spooner, slavery & the Constitution
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David Boaz. (Cato Institute) Longtime Cato Institute vice president David Boaz passed away on June 7. He was one of the most effective and principled advocates for libertarianism in our time. In his last major public speech, delivered at a Students for Liberty conference in February, David cautioned us against excessive pessimism, but also warned about the dangerous rise of illiberal nationalism as a major threat to freedom around the world. Th
Longtime Cato Institute vice president David Boaz passed away on June 7. He was one of the most effective and principled advocates for libertarianism in our time. In his last major public speech, delivered at a Students for Liberty conference in February, David cautioned us against excessive pessimism, but also warned about the dangerous rise of illiberal nationalism as a major threat to freedom around the world. The speech was transcribed by Andy Craig, and is reprinted here with permission:
Too often, libertarians (and also conservatives) believe that we are actually on the road to serfdom. I want to give you a more optimistic view along with a warning and a challenge. I'm going to start with some history.
For millennia, with few exceptions, the world was marked by despotism, slavery, hierarchy, rigid class privilege, and literally no increase in the standard of living over hundreds of years. And then, the Western world experienced the Enlightenment, a new perspective on the world based on reason, science, a belief in progress, and freedom.
And the ideas about freedom eventually came to be known as liberalism. Human rights, markets, property rights, religious toleration, the value of commerce, the dignity of the individual. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Peace, human flourishing.
That brought about what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact of human history, the enormous and unprecedented growth in living standards, starting around 1800 in the Western world. And these ideas spread to more aspects of society and more parts of the world. They gave Europe a century of peace and progress, from roughly 1815 to 1914. The Great Fact spread from Northwestern Europe and America to the rest of Europe, to Latin America, to parts of Asia.
Liberal ideas were never perfectly realized. When they faded in the late 19th century, we got World War I, trade war, the Great Depression, and World War II, and some countries endured the horrors of communism and national socialism. Mercantilism, cronyism, bigotry and discrimination, political murders, authoritarianism, plagued and still plague parts of the world.
Even in our own country, in my own lifetime—and the interesting thing is most of these things are no longer true in your lifetime—but in my country, in my lifetime, we lived with military conscription, 90% marginal income tax rates, wage and price controls, restricted entry to transportation and communications, indecency laws, and Jim Crow.
It's a lot of change. Progress has been happening. After World War II, a renewed commitment to free trade, international rule of law, and constitutional liberal democracy brought about another long period of great power peace and prosperity. And the spread of property rights and market institutions to China, India, Latin, America, and even Africa has brought more than a billion people out of extreme poverty in just 25 years.
More and more of the world is respecting equal rights for people regardless of color, gender, religion, sexuality or language. Equal rights based on our common humanity. It was our liberal ideas that brought that about, and we should take pride in that. Of course, now we're more likely to call those liberal ideas libertarian, but our job is not done. We face the rise of illiberalism on both left and right in the United States and around the world with threats to liberty, democracy, trade, growth, and peace.
And so it remains to us to defend the constitutional order of our republic, to remind people over and over of the wonders that America has produced, how rare freedom and abundance have been in the world and the rules that are essential to their continuance.
There was a book some years ago called All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Well, everything you need to know about politics, in a way, you learn in kindergarten, the fundamentals of freedom, the fundamentals of civilization: Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff, and keep your promises. If you apply those rules, you'll have a prosperous and peaceful society.
One more idea you wouldn't think needed to be said, is we libertarians, like most of us Americans, are liberals. Liberalism is a universal creed. We believe that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not just some people. That idea is incompatible with political ideas based on 'blood and soil' or treating people differently because of race or religion.
So when you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates talking about blood and soil or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy, or saying we shouldn't care about government racism against Black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars and supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up, fight back, tell people that's not America and it's certainly not libertarianism.
And while it's not actually un-libertarian to be anti-vaccine, it's stupid, and I'd rather recruit smart people. Can you believe that there are people who think an environmental extremist, tax-hiking, gun-grabbing, big spender who's also an anti-vaccine crank, would make a good Libertarian Party candidate? Meanwhile, before I move on, I just want to remind you, taxation is theft.
We libertarians spend a lot of time talking about what we're against, high taxes, unnecessary wars, crony capitalism, over-criminalization, treating people unequally because of who they are. And we should talk more about what we're for. As our Cato Institute mission statement says, individual rights, limited government, free markets and peace. But more than that, we're for those things because they help us achieve abundance and social harmony and human dignity and human flourishing. We want everyone to flourish, to be free, to pursue happiness in his or her or their own way.
I'm always happy to quote George Washington's letter to the Newport Synagogue. It's a little bit of archaic language. "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States gives to bigotry, no sanction to persecution, no assistance."
Libertarian ideas are radical, yet deeply rooted in Western tradition, and we have a record to be proud of. We've been fighting ignorance, superstition, privilege and power for several centuries, and it is to those ideas and that struggle that we owe the best parts of our civilization. More often than libertarians often recognize, we live in a world of freedom and progress, imperfect freedom and imperfect progress to be sure, but real. We have extended the promises of the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — I say that a lot, I like that phrase — to people to whom they had long been denied.
Around the world, more people in more countries than ever before in history enjoy religious freedom, personal freedom, democratic governance, the freedom to own and trade property, the chance to start a business, equal rights, civility, respect, a higher standard of living, and a longer life expectancy, and it is libertarian ideas and libertarian-minded people who have made that happen. We need to fight for those gains, especially here in America where the right and the left are battling over who gets to do the most to destroy liberty.
I was asked once by some skeptics what the most important libertarian accomplishment ever was. I thought for a moment and said the abolition of slavery. "Okay," they conceded. "Name another." Now, I thought if you had the abolition of slavery on your resume, you're ready to meet your maker. That's pretty good.
But I thought more carefully, and I said, bringing power under the rule of law. That was a revolutionary achievement. Constitutions, divided powers, consent of the governed, all of those things helped to constrain the natural human instinct to gain power over others. And constraining that instinct for power is our revolutionary achievement, but it's still incomplete.
It's what the Levellers and John Locke and the American Founders fought for, and the abolitionists. It's what the protesters in 1989 against communism fought for. It's what our friends in Russia and China and Egypt and Ukraine and Hong Kong fight for in challenging circumstances that we never face. It's what we fight for.
But nothing is guaranteed. Ideas we thought were dead are back. Socialism, protectionism, ethnic nationalism, anti-semitism. In what was once Ronald Reagan's party, we see people advocating something called national conservatism, which is old-fashioned, big government dressed up in new clothes. Protectionism, control of private enterprise, scapegoating of minorities.
They denounce the Enlightenment and liberalism. Some of them even advocate imposing a national religion. And that's why our job is not done. We now confront the rise of illiberalism on both left and right with threats to peace, liberty, democracy, trade and growth.
Our ancestors have faced similar challenges. Imagine the American Revolutionaries who thought they could take on the most powerful military in the world, and yet they dared and they won. Then they wrote a Declaration of Independence that is the most eloquent piece of libertarian writing in history, and they wrote a Constitution that did the things I'm talking about, putting constraints on power, dividing it between the three branches, dividing it between the two houses of Congress, dividing it between the states and the federal government. All of those kinds of things are classical liberal ideas that were first really brought forth here in America, and that's our heritage and that's our legacy.
But it keeps coming back. We also had the abolitionists who had to fight tyranny as well. There are some people who disparage talking about slavery. It's over, that's good, we should be proud of that. But we should also remember that when some people talk about the good old days, as if there was more freedom in the 19th century, when four million Americans were held in chattel slavery, held in bonds before the Civil War. So it was not exactly what you'd call a free society. And we could go through a lot of other things too, the restrictions on women's rights. God knows restrictions on gay rights wasn't even something people thought of, but people who were gay knew damn well they should keep it quiet.
Closer to our own time, in the 1940s, in the darkest days of war and a growing welfare state, three remarkable women stood up to challenge the establishment. Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand, warned Americans that we were losing our founding values and freedoms, and they launched a movement. And some writers have said, "Why was it women who stood up? Where were the men? What were they doing?" Well, there were men. All three of those women wrote a book in 1943. In 1944, Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. So it wasn't just women, but we did have three founding mothers of the modern libertarian movement, and I think we don't make enough of that. We should have their pictures on everything.
I just read Tim Sandefur's book, Freedom's Furies, about these three women, and one of the things I kept noticing was everything he quotes from Isabel Paterson, it's like things we say today about big government. She anticipated it all, or maybe we got it all from her even though we don't know it. So that happened in the 1940s and they started a movement. In the 1970s, in the face of the government's three great accomplishments, Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation, great scholars like Hayek and Friedman criticized the government's economic policies.
And along with some younger scholars, some of whom are now older scholars whose names you've heard, they changed them, and they launched another movement that restored a lot of American economic freedom. Not all of it, and some bad things kept happening, but we did make a lot of progress over the few years after that in repealing a lot of bad economic restrictions.
And now it's your turn to pick up the banner of liberty. Don't let it go. Fight illiberalism and authoritarianism wherever you find it. Extend liberty to more parts of the world and more parts of life. And make the 21st century the most liberal century yet. Thank you very much and good luck.
I don't fully agree with every point here. It's probably impossible to cover so much ground in so short a time without some oversimplification. But the core message is sound, and well-worth heeding.
Although we lack David's eloquence, Cato Institute scholar Alex Nowrasteh and I explained why the rise of nationalism is a major menace to liberty in somewhat greater detail in our recent National Affairs article, "The Case Against Nationalism."
No one person can replace David Boaz. But we can, as he said, "pick up the banner of liberty" and work to raise it to new heights.
David Boaz. (Cato Institute) David Boaz passed away today. Liberty has lost one of its greatest and most principled advocates. As the Cato Institute's longtime longtime vice president for public policy and executive vice president for over forty years, he—more than any other single person—built Cato into the world's leading libertarian think tank. His 2015 book The Libertarian Mind is one of the best and most accessible introductions to liberta
David Boaz passed away today. Liberty has lost one of its greatest and most principled advocates. As the Cato Institute's longtime longtime vice president for public policy and executive vice president for over forty years, he—more than any other single person—built Cato into the world's leading libertarian think tank. His 2015 book The Libertarian Mind is one of the best and most accessible introductions to libertarian ideas. In an edited volume, The Libertarian Reader, David compiled a wide range of classic libertarian writings by leading thinkers.
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. Thus, he advocated radically cutting back on government policies that violated economic liberty, such as taxation and welfare state spending. But he was equally concerned about those that threatened liberty of other kinds, such as immigration restrictions and the War on Drugs. And he repeatedly emphasized that the full range of liberties must be available to everyone—whether they be black or white, gay or straight, men or women, immigrants or natives.
Thus, in a 2010 article, he cautioned libertarians against nostalgia for an imagined past, where liberty was supposedly greater. While some types of government intervention were less prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was—he noted—also an era of slavery, segregation, and other forms of oppression that have since been at least in large part overcome.
David also repeatedly reminded libertarians that we must be concerned about dangers to liberty from both right and left. Unlike some, he did not minimize or ignore the threat of right-wing authoritarian ethno-nationalism exemplified by the rise of Trump in the US, an similar movements in Europe. In his contribution to National Review's 2016 "Against Trump" symposium, David wrote that "From a libertarian point of view…. Trump's greatest offenses against American tradition and our founding principles are his nativism and his promise of one-man rule." He was right then, and remains right today.
I knew David for over thirty years, since I was an intern at Cato in 1992, during the summer after my freshman year in college. A small incident from that time illustrates David's simultaneous commitment to high standards and intellectual outreach.
In those days, Cato was housed in a small building, which included a storage room filled with books published by the Institute. I liked to go there and browse—it was more fun than the work I was assigned to do! Early one morning, David happened by the storage room, and saw me reading a book there.
"Mr. Somin," he asked, "did your paycheck come on time this week?"
"Yes, sir," I answered.
"Then, why," David inquired, "are you late to work?"
Whether they were a vice president or an intern, everyone at Cato had a job they should be focused on. David had little tolerance for slackers.
Duly chastened, I moved to get back to work. But David also made sure to point out that Cato interns were entitled to free copies of Institute publications. If I wanted to read that book (or any other Cato book), he said, I should simply take it home with me—and read it on my own time. He never forgot that developing and spreading ideas was the main focus of a think tank's mission. And that is how I got copies of David's excellent edited volumes, Liberating Schools, and The Crisis in Drug Prohibition.
That same commitment to ideas and outreach made David a great promoter of libertarian thought to a wide range of audiences. He had the rare skill of always maintaining civility, while also never pulling his punches.
In later years, I became a Cato adjunct scholar, and—eventually—the Institute's Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies (in addition to my primary employment as a law professor at George Mason University). Over that time—thanks to David's support—Cato co-published two of my books, and I did various other projects with the Institute, as well. Thus, I often had the opportunity to work with David and learn from him. I could not help but admire both his unfailingly high standards, and his commitment to principle. Cato and other libertarian institutions should strive to continue his legacy.
In closing, I would like to extend my condolences to David's family, friends, and colleagues.
The Cato Institute has posted a summary of David's career, and tributes by many Cato scholars, here.
David Boaz, longtime executive vice president at the Cato Institute, died this week at age 70 in hospice after a battle with cancer. Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 to a political family, with members holding the offices of prosecutor, congressman, and judge. He was thus the type "staying up to watch the New Hampshire primary when I was 10 years old," as he said in a 1998 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of
David Boaz, longtime executive vice president at the Cato Institute, died this week at age 70 in hospice after a battle with cancer.
Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 to a political family, with members holding the offices of prosecutor, congressman, and judge. He was thus the type "staying up to watch the New Hampshire primary when I was 10 years old," as he said in a 1998 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.
In the early to mid-1970s, Boaz was a young conservative activist, working on conservative papers at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student from 1971 to 1975. After graduation, he worked with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), in whose national office he served in various capacities from 1975 to 1978, including editing its magazine, New Guard.
In the 1970s, he recalls, YAF saw themselves as not merely College Republicans but were instead "organized around a set of ideas." When he started with YAF he already thought of himself as a libertarian but saw libertarianism "as a brand of conservatism. But during my tenure at YAF, as I got to know people in the libertarian movement, I came to believe that conservatives and libertarians were not the same thing and it became uncomfortable for me to work in the YAF office."
Now fully understanding libertarianism as something distinct from right-wing conservatism, "I badgered Ed Crane to find me a job and take me away from all this." Boaz had met him when Crane was representing the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the mid-'70s and kept in touch with him when Crane was running Cato from San Francisco from 1977 to 1981. Via his relationship with Crane, Boaz became one of two staffers on Ed Clark's campaign for governor of California in 1978, which earned over 5 percent of the popular vote. (Clark was officially an independent because of ballot access requirements but was a member of the L.P. and ran with L.P. branding.)
Boaz then worked with the now-defunct Council for a Competitive Economy (CCE) from 1978 to 1980, which he described as "a free market group of businessmen opposed not only to regulations and taxes but to subsidies and tariffs…in effect it was to be a business front group for the libertarian movement." He left CCE to work on Ed Clark's 1980 L.P. presidential campaign, where Boaz wrote, commissioned, and edited campaign issue papers as well as the chapters written by the various ghosts for Clark's official campaign book. Boaz also did speech writing and road work with Clark.
The campaign Boaz worked on earned slightly over 1 percent, 920,000 total votes—records for the L.P. that were not beaten until Gary Johnson's 2012 run (in raw votes) and 2016 run (in percentages). "The Clark campaign was organized around getting ideas across in a way that is not outside the bounds of what was politically plausible," Boaz reminisced in a 2022 interview. "When John Anderson got in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized he was going to provide a more prominent third-party choice, maybe taking away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6 percent. We just barely got 1 percent. And although we said, 'This is unprecedented, blah blah,' in fact we were very disappointed."
Boaz began working at the Cato Institute when it moved to D.C. in 1981, where he became executive vice president and stayed until his retirement in 2023. He was Cato's leading editorial voice for decades, setting the tone for what was among the most well-financed and widely distributed institutional voices for libertarian advocacy. Cato, with Boaz's guidance, provided a stream of measured, bourgeois outreach policy radicalism intended to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of normal Americans, not just those marinated in specifically libertarian movement heroes, styles, and concerns.
Boaz was, for example, an early voice getting drug legalization taken seriously in citadels of American cultural power with a forward-thinking 1988 New York Times op-ed that concluded presciently: "We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom—is too high."
Boaz wrote what remains the best one-volume discussion of libertarian philosophy and practice for an outward-facing audience, one that while not losing track of practical policy issues also provided a tight, welcoming sense of the philosophical reasons behind libertarian beliefs in avoiding violence as much as possible to settle social or political disputes, published as Libertarianism: A Primer in 1997.
Boaz's book rooted its explanatory style in the American founding, cooperation, personal responsibility, charity, and uncoerced civil society in all its glories. He explained the necessity and purpose of property, profits, entrepreneurship, and how liberty is conducive to an economically healthy and wealthy society, and how government interferes with the growth-producing properties of the system of natural liberty. He discusses the nature and excesses of government in practice and applies libertarian perspectives to many specific policy issues: health care, poverty, the budget, crime, education, even "family values." Boaz's book is thorough, even-toned, erudite, and thoughtful and intended for mass persuasion, not the sour delights of freaking out the normies with your radicalism.
Meeting Boaz in 1991 when I was an intern at Cato (and later an employee until 1994) was bracing to this wet-behind-the-ears young libertarian who arose from a more raffish, perhaps less civilized branch of activism. As a supervisor and colleague, Boaz was a civilized adult, stylish, nearly suave, but was patient nonetheless with wilder young libertarians, of whom he'd dealt with many.
His very institutional continuity—though it was barely two decades long at that point—was influential in a quiet way to the younger crew. It imbued a sense that one needn't frantically demand instant victory, no matter how morally imperative the cause of freedom was. Boaz's calm sense of historical sweep both as a living person and in his capacious knowledge of the history of classical liberal ideas was an antidote to both despair and opportunism for the young libertarians he worked with.
His edited anthologyThe Libertarian Reader: Classic & Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman—which came out accompanying his primer in 1997—was a compact proof of libertarianism's rich, long tradition, showing how it was in many ways the core animating principle of the American Founding and to a large extent the entire Enlightenment and everything good, just, and rich about the whole Western tradition. The anthology featured the best of libertarian heroes both old and modern, such as Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Constant from previous centuries and Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises from the 20th, as well as providing even wider context with more ancient sources ranging from the Bible to Lao Tzu. He also placed the libertarian tradition rightly as core to the fights for liberation for women and blacks, with entries from Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.
Asked in 1998 why he chose a career pushing often unpopular and derided ideas up a huge cultural and political hill, Boaz told me: "I think it's satisfying and fun. I believe strongly in these values and at some level I believe it's right to devote your life to fighting for these values, though particularly if you're a libertarian you can't say it's morally obligatory to be fighting for these values—but it does feel right, and at some other level more than just being right, it is fun, it's what I want to do.
"I like intellectual combat, polishing arguments, and I also hate people who want to use force against other people, so a part of it is I am motivated to try to fight these people. I wake up listening to NPR every morning and my partner says, 'Why do you want to wake up angry every morning?' In the first place, I need to know what's going on in the world, and in the second place, dammit, I want to know what these people are up to! It's an outrage what they're up to and I don't want them to get away with it. I want to fight." For decades, at the forefront of the mainstream spread of libertarian attitudes, ideas, and notions, David Boaz did.
Who, exactly, is Chase Oliver? And what does he really stand for? Oliver is the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential nominee, selected after six rounds of voting at a contentious party convention in Washington, D.C., this weekend, which featured speeches from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and former President Donald Trump, who suggested himself as the nominee to a chorus of boos. Oliver was not the preferred candidate of the Mises Cauc
Who, exactly, is Chase Oliver? And what does he really stand for?
Oliver is the Libertarian Party's 2024 presidential nominee, selected after six rounds of voting at a contentious party convention in Washington, D.C., this weekend, which featured speeches from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and former President Donald Trump, who suggested himself as the nominee to a chorus of boos. Oliver was not the preferred candidate of the Mises Caucus, who remains in control of the Libertarian Party, and several of their higher profile members, such as Dave Smith, have said they will not vote for him, with several accusing him of being too woke, too pro-immigration, and too soft on COVID restrictions. We'll ask him to address all of that today.
Oliver, a 38-year-old sales executive, rose to prominence in the party as the 2022 Libertarian Senate candidate in a highly competitive race in Georgia, where he pulled 2 percent of the vote and forced it into a runoff, which ultimately resulted in the Democratic candidate winning, tipping the balance of the Senate in their favor.
Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
(NA) In the course of an interview mostly devoted to other issues, a Japanese reporter recently asked me whether there is a difference between justice and the rule of law. Some of his (understandable) confusion was purely linguistic. Both "justice" and "rule of law"are fuzzy terms that different people use in different ways. It's easy to see how non-native English speakers could get confused. Nonetheless, there are differences between the two con
In the course of an interview mostly devoted to other issues, a Japanese reporter recently asked me whether there is a difference between justice and the rule of law. Some of his (understandable) confusion was purely linguistic. Both "justice" and "rule of law"are fuzzy terms that different people use in different ways. It's easy to see how non-native English speakers could get confused.
Nonetheless, there are differences between the two concepts that go beyond semantics. Sometimes, of course, "rule of law" might be used in ways that preemptively rule out the possibility that legislation that meets rule-of-law requirements could ever be unjust. In the famous Hart-Fuller debate of the 1950s, Lon Fuller argued that gravely unjust rules and regulations (like those of Nazi Germany) could never be real laws. If so, enforcing such mandates can never be squared with the rule of law.
More commonly, however, "rule of law" is used to denote crucial procedural elements of a legal system, particularly that that ordinary people should be able to readily determine what laws they are required to obey, and that whether or not you get charged by the authorities depends mostly on objective legal rules rather than the exercise of official discretion (thus, the contrast between the rule of law and the "rule of men"). We might add that the rule of law bars—or at least presumptively forbids—discrimination on the basis of certain morally irrelevant characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, and gender.
By contrast, "justice" is a broader notion that focuses on the substantive rightness of the legal rule in question. Laws protecting freedom are (at least usually) just. Laws promoting slavery are not. And so on.
Understood in this way, it is easy to see how legislation that meets the requirements of the rule of law can nonetheless be profoundly unjust. Consider a law mandating the death penalty for jaywalking. It's certainly clear and unequivocal. Assume, further, that there is no enforcement discretion; no discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or any other morally arbitrary trait. Nor is there any favoritism. It is enforced against the rich and powerful no less than the poor and weak. If the governor of the state jaywalks, he or she will be executed just as readily as a homeless person who commits the same offense.
This rule meets the requirements of the rule of law. But it is still blatantly unjust. The death penalty is a hugely disproportionate punishment for the offense of jaywalking, no matter how evenly it is applied.
The same can be true of laws where "crime" itself is something that should not be illegal, even aside from the severity of the punishment. Imagine a law imposing forced labor on a large swathe of the population, such as one requiring all able-bodied adult citizens to do a month of forced labor each year. In Butler v. Perry (1916), the Supreme Court actually upheld a Florida law that required all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of 21 and 45 to either do road repair work for six days each year, provide a substitute, or pay a $3 tax (a much larger amount in inflation-adjusted terms in 1916 than it would be today).
In 1916 Florida, this law was likely enforced much more aggressively against blacks and poor people than against affluent whites. Such unequal enforcement arguably violated rule-of-law principles. Perhaps the rule of law was also undermined by the fact that the law only mandated forced labor for men, exempting women. But we could easily imagine a version of the law that is enforced equally, and also covers women. That version would satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. And, unlike the death penalty for jaywalking law, the punishment seems at least reasonably proportional to the offense.
The forced labor law would nonetheless be terribly unjust, because forced labor (including forced labor for the state) is itself unjust—no matter how equally enforced. Indeed, fully equal enforcement might in some ways make things worse, because it would increase the number of people who are victimized.
If laws that meet the requirements of the rule of law can still be unjust, we might also consider whether justice might sometimes require dispensing with rule-of-law constraints. At the very least, it seems like such a possibility cannot be categorically ruled out.
Because of the vast scope of current law, in modern America the authorities can pin a crime on the overwhelming majority of people, if they really want to. Whether you get hauled into court or not depends more on the discretionary decisions of law enforcement officials than on any legal rule. And it is difficult or impossible for ordinary people to keep track of all the laws they are subject to and to live a normal life without running afoul of at least some of them….
For most people, it is difficult to avoid violating at least some laws, or even to keep track of all the laws that apply to them….
Ignorance of the law may not be a legally valid excuse. But such ignorance is virtually inevitable when the law regulates almost every aspect of our lives and is so extensive and complicated that few can hope to keep track of it….
Most Americans, of course, never face punishment for their lawbreaking. But that is true only because the authorities lack the resources to pursue most violators and routinely exercise discretion in determining which ones are worth the effort….
In this way, the rule of law has largely been supplanted by the rule of chance and the rule of executive discretion.
I think the way to fix this problem is to drastically reduce the number of laws, and the range of behavior regulated by the state. But it's easy for me to say that. As a libertarian, I would like to abolish a vast range of current laws for reasons unrelated to rule-of-law considerations. I think a high proportion of current laws are substantively unjust; if I didn't think that, I would not be a libertarian in the first place.
But if you believe that extensive government regulation of many aspects of society is necessary - and especially if you think it's necessary to promote justice - then you are likely to face serious tradeoffs between justice and the rule of law. In some situations, you might choose to promote the former, at the expense of the latter. Note the implication that a libertarian society could stick to the rule of law much more consistently than one based on most other ideologies.
But even libertarians might sacrifice the rule of law to substantive justice in at least a few situations. What if, for example, giving government broad discretion to suppress potentially dangerous movements is the only way to prevent Nazis or communists from coming to power? Perhaps that was, in fact, the situation faced by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, or by the Weimar Republic in the years right before 1933. If so, deviating from the rule of law might be the only way to avoid horrific injustice. I think such dilemmas are rare. But the possibility they might arise can't be categorically ruled out.
If you believe civil disobedience is sometimes justified (as Martin Luther King and others argued), the distinction between justice and the rule of law implies there may be situations where there is no obligation to obey a law, even if it meets rule-of-law requirements. As described above, such a law could still be horrifically unjust. For example, people would be justified in evading a rule-of-law compliant forced labor regime, and in helping others to do so.
Both justice and the rule of law are important values. But they are not the same thing. And there can be situations where the two come into conflict.
Season five of showrunner Noah Hawley's TV version of Fargo tells a violence-filled story exploring domestic abuse, PTSD, the concept of debt (on multiple levels), and the purpose and efficacy of the institutions of marriage and police. Its villain is designed to cause discomfort for libertarians: Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who self-identifies as a libertarian and a constitutionalist, and does seem to adhere to a certain peculiar right-wing
Season five of showrunner Noah Hawley's TV version of Fargo tells a violence-filled story exploring domestic abuse, PTSD, the concept of debt (on multiple levels), and the purpose and efficacy of the institutions of marriage and police.
Its villain is designed to cause discomfort for libertarians: Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who self-identifies as a libertarian and a constitutionalist, and does seem to adhere to a certain peculiar right-wing belief in the county sheriff as the main source of authority. The only libertarianish qualities he evinces are a contempt for the FBI and the ability to recite a few silly, pointless laws. But the writers seem to want his stated ideology to add spice to the audience's dislike of him for being an abusing, murdering, and corrupt bully laundering his own rage and sin through a twisted vision of God.
In one scene, Tillman says he'd rather see orphans fight each other for sport than help them, and another character accuses him of being like a baby—crying for freedom with no responsibility. The whole thing is reminiscent of when on old college pal thinks he is totally crushing libertarianism with a masterful Facebook post.
If Tillman becomes smart quality TV fans' go-to image of libertarians, replacing the weirdly obsessed but well-meaning Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation, it will be a shame. But hopefully a smart viewer will know, when Tillman calls on the spirit of western resisters of federal power such as Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finicum, that it's no part of any proven public record that either man ever did anything a hundredth as evil as Tillman does in pretty much every episode.
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run. Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size,
Just 15 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing. But why is it broken and how do we fix it? Those are just two of the questions that Reason's Nick Gillespie asked Justin Amash, the former five-term congressman from Michigan who is currently exploring a Senate run.
Elected as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010, Amash helped create the House Freedom Caucus but became an increasingly lonely, principled voice for limiting the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. After voting to impeach Donald Trump, he resigned from the GOP, became an independent, and then joined the Libertarian Party in 2020, making him the only Libertarian to serve in Congress.
They talked about the 2024 presidential election and the country's political and cultural polarization that seems to be growing with every passing day. And about how his parents' experiences as a Christian refugee from Palestine and an immigrant from Syria inform his views on foreign policy, entrepreneurship, and American exceptionalism.
This Q&A took place on the final day of LibertyCon, the annual event for Students for Liberty that took place recently in Washington, D.C.
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Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.
Nick Gillespie: Why is Congress broken and how do we fix that?
Justin Amash: We can take up the whole 30 minutes talking about that if we wanted to. We don't know exactly how Congress got to where it is, but today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything. And that has a lot of negative consequences for our country. Among them is that the president has an unbelievable amount of power because the president now only has to negotiate with really a few people. You have to negotiate with the speaker of the House. You have to negotiate with the Senate majority leader and maybe some of the minority leaders. But it's really a small subset of people that you have to negotiate with. And when that happens, it gives the president so much leverage.
So when we talk about things like going to war without authorization, as long as the speaker of the House isn't going to hold the president accountable and the Senate majority leader is not going to, the president is just going to do what he wants to do. And when it comes to spending, as long as the president only has to negotiate with a couple of people, the president's going to do whatever the president wants to do. So it's super easy in the system for the president to essentially bully Congress and dictate the outcomes.
But there's a deeper problem with all of this, which is that representative government is supposed to be a discovery process. You elect people to represent you. You send them to Washington, and then the outcomes are supposed to be discovered by these representatives through discussions and debates, and the introduction of legislation, and amendments. You're supposed to have lots of votes, where the votes freely reflect your will representing the people back home. But instead, in Congress today, a few leaders are deciding what the final product is and then they're not bringing it to the floor until they know they have the votes. So there's no actual discovery process. Nancy Pelosi used to brag about this; she wouldn't bring a bill to the floor unless she knew it was going to pass. Which is the opposite of how Congress should work.
Gillespie: What are some of the ways to decentralize power within Congress? When you were in Congress, you founded the Freedom Caucus, which was supposed to be kind of a redoubt of people who believed in limited government and libertarian and conservative principles and actually even some liberal principles, but decentralizing authority. You got kicked out of the Freedom Caucus, right?
Amash: Well, I resigned from it.
Gillespie: Well, you were asked to leave. The police sirens were coming, and it's like, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go," right? But even places like that, that were explicitly designed to act as a countervailing force to this unified Congress, how can that happen? What can you do or what can somebody do to make that happen?
Amash: Well, it does take people with strong will. I think that when we go to vote for our elected officials, when you go to vote for a representative, when you go to vote for a senator, you have to know that that person is willing to stand up to the leadership team. And if that person's not willing to break from the leadership team on a consistent basis—and this doesn't mean they have to be mean or anything like that; it just means that they have to be independent enough where you know they're willing to break from their leadership team. If they're not willing to do that, it doesn't matter how much they agree with you on the issues, don't vote for them because that person is going to sell out. There's no chance they're going to stand up for you when it counts. I think you need to have people who have a strong will, who are going to go there and actually represent you and are willing to stand up to the leaders.
Gillespie: If you are interested in Congressman Amash's commentary on contemporary issues, go to his substack Justin Amash. The tagline is: "A former congressman spills on Congress and makes the practical case for the principles of liberty." It's a great read, particularly on issues you mentioned.
Can you tell us how you discovered libertarian ideas? You got elected in 2010, which was a wave election. It was part of the Tea Party reaction to eight years of Bush, and more problems during the financial crisis and the reaction of the government to that. Where did you first encounter the ideas of liberty, and how did that motivate you to get into Congress?
Amash:The ideas of liberty are something that have been with me since I was a child. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where they came from. I think they came from my parents' immigrant experience, coming to the United States. My dad came here as a refugee from Palestine. He was born in Palestine in 1940. And when the state of Israel was created in '48, he became a refugee. My mom is a Syrian immigrant.
When my parents came here, they weren't wealthy. My dad was a very poor refugee. He was so poor that the Palestinians made fun of him. So that's really poor. When he came here, he didn't have much, but he felt he had an opportunity. He felt he had a chance to start a new life, a chance to make it, even though he came from a different background from a lot of people, even though his English wasn't great compared to a lot of people. So he came here and he worked hard, and he built a business. When we were young, he used to tell us that America is the greatest place on earth, where someone can come here as a refugee like he did and start a new life and have the chance to be successful. It doesn't matter what your background is. It doesn't matter what obstacles you face. You have a chance here and you don't have that chance in so many places around the world.
I think that's where that spirit of liberty came from. It was from my dad's experience especially, my mom as well, coming here as a young immigrant. So I was always a little bit anti-authoritarian as a child. I rebelled against teachers at times. I didn't like arbitrary authority, let's put it that way. When someone would just make up a rule, like this is the rule, "I just say so/" Well, tell me why.
Gillespie: Have you rethought that as a parent?
Amash: No, I mean, I let my kids think very freely.
Gillespie: As long as they follow the rules.
Amash:I don't mind when they are a little bit rebellious. I think it doesn't hurt for kids to have some independence. I encourage them to challenge their teachers, even when they think the teacher is wrong about something. I think that it's a good thing for people to go out there and not just accept everything as it is.
Gillespie: You famously, as a congressman, explained all of your votes on Facebook, which is a rare concession by authority to say, okay, this is why I did what I did.
Amash:Yeah. Actually, a lot of the people in leadership and in Congress didn't like that I was doing that because I was giving people at home the power to challenge them. Instead of just being told this is the way it is, now I was revealing what was going on.
Gillespie: You grew up in Michigan. You went to the University of Michigan as an undergrad and for law school. Was it there that you started coming across names like Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard?
Amash: Not really, no. My background is in economics, my degree is in economics. I did well in economics at Michigan, but we sure didn't study Austrian economics. We didn't study Hayek. I think he might have been mentioned in one class. Very briefly he was mentioned, like there was one day where he was mentioned. But I'd say that what happened is, as I went through my economics degree, and then I got a law degree at Michigan as well, I started to realize that I had a lot of differences from other people who were otherwise aligned with me. I was a Republican. I aligned with them on a lot of things, but there were a number of issues where we didn't align— some of the foreign policy issues, but certainly a lot of civil liberties issues.
I started to wonder, what am I? What's going on here? I just thought of myself as a Republican, and I would read the platform and hear what they're saying. They believe in limited government, economic freedom, and individual liberty.
But when push came to shove on a lot of issues, they didn't believe those things. They'd say they believe those things, but they didn't. I've told this story before, I just typed some of my views into a Google search, and up popped Hayek's Wikipedia page. Literally, it was like the top thing on Google. So I clicked on that, started reading about them, and I was already in my mid-20s at this time. And I was like, yes, this is what I believe.
Gillespie: It is interesting because you would have been coming of age during a time when the Republicans were ascendant. But they were the war party. And we were told after 9/11 that you should not speak freely. That was kind of a problem, right?
Amash: Yeah, sure. Throughout my life, I believed in freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression. These are critical values. Maybe they're the essence of everything that makes this country work. The idea that we come from a lot of places—there's an incredible amount of diversity in the United States. I think diversity is always treated or often treated like a bad word these days. But it's a blessing to our country that we have people who come from so many backgrounds. Actually, the principle of liberty is about utilizing that diversity.
It's in centrally planned systems where diversity is not utilized, where someone at the top dictates to everyone else and doesn't take advantage of any of the diversity. They say no, a few of us at the top, we know everything. It doesn't matter. All of your backgrounds, all of your skills, all of your talents, that doesn't matter. What matters is we've got a few people in a room somewhere, and they're going to decide everything. And they know best because they're experts.
Gillespie: You came into office in 2011, and it seemed like there was a real libertarian insurgency within the Republican Party. But more nationally in discourse, people were tired of continued centralization, and government secrecy—famously, a lot of Bush's activities and particularly war spending early on was done in supplemental and emergency preparations, not really open to full discussions.
All of the stuff coming out of the Patriot Act, somebody like Dick Cheney kind of saying we're in control. But then Obama also promised the most transparent administration ever and plainly did not deliver on that.
That energy pushing back on centralization and government power and government secrecy that helped bring you and other people like you to Congress seems to have dissipated. Do you agree with that? And if so, what took that away?
Amash: Yeah, I agree with that. When I was running for office, both for State House in 2009 and when I got to Congress in 2011, there was a lot of energy behind a limited government, libertarian-ish republicanism. I felt like libertarianism was really rising. There was a chance for libertarian ideals to get a lot of traction. A lot of people who used to be more like Bush conservatives were coming around to the libertarian way.
I felt really good about where things were heading. And for the first, I'd say three or four years that I was in Congress, I felt like we continued to move in the right direction. The creation of the Freedom Caucus was kind of a dream of bringing people together to challenge the leadership. They weren't all libertarians or anything like that. There are a few who are libertarian-leaning, but the idea that a group of Republican members—it wasn't determined that it was going to be only Republicans, but it ended up being Republicans—got together and said, "Hey, we're going to challenge the status quo. We're going to challenge the establishment." That was kind of a dream that had come together.
Then when Donald Trump came on the scene, I think a lot of that just fell apart because he's such a strong personality and character, and had so much hold over a lot of the public, especially on the Republican side, that it was very hard for my colleagues to be able to challenge him.
Gillespie: What's the essential appeal of Trump? Is it his personality? Is that that he said he could win and he ended up doing that at least once? Is it a cult of personality? What's the core of his appeal to you?
Amash: I think he is definitely a unique character. He has a certain charisma that is probably unmatched in politics. I don't think I've ever seen someone who campaigns as effectively as he does. It doesn't mean you have to agree with all of the ethics of what he does or any of that, or the substance.
Gillespie: To keep it in Michigan, he's a rock star. He's Iggy Pop. You may not like what he's doing on the stage, but you can't take your eyes off it.
Amash:That's right. He holds court. When he's out there, people pay attention. He really understands the essence of campaigning, and how to win a campaign. He understands how to effectively go after opponents. Now, again, I'm not saying that all of these things are necessarily ethical or that other people should do the same things, but he really understands how to lead a populist movement.
Gillespie: How important do you think in his appeal is a politics of resentment, that somehow he is going to get back what was taken from you?
Amash: The whole Make America Great Again, there's a whole idea there of "someone is destroying your life, and I'm going to get it back for you." That's a very powerful thing to a lot of people. For a lot of people out there, it is more important to get back at others than necessarily to have some kind of vision of how this is all going to work going forward. It's not appealing to me because I understand, we live in one country. We have people of all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're going to persuade people, you have to be able to live with them and work with them, regardless of your differences. It doesn't mean that you can't be upset, be angry about what some other people are doing or saying. But there has to be an effort to live together here as one country. We have too much in common in this country.
Gillespie: Michigan was a massive swing state when he won the election. You voted to impeach Donald Trump. What went into that calculation? What was the reaction like to that? That's a profile in courage.
Amash:Well, I don't think that's my most courageous vote, not even by a long shot.
Gillespie: What was? Naming the post office after your father?
Amash:I didn't name any post offices after my father, to be clear. I think that the courageous votes are the ones where everyone is against you. And I don't mean just one party. It's one thing to vote for impeachment and half the country loves what you did and half the country doesn't like what you did. That's, in my mind, not that challenging or difficult. It's when you take a vote and you know that 99 percent of the public is going to misconstrue this, misunderstand it, be against it. The vote is going to be something like 433 to 1 in the House or something like that. Those are the tough votes. And there are plenty of those votes out there, where you're taking a principled stand and you're doing it to protect people's rights. But it's not the typical narrative.
Gillespie: Is there an example that, in your legislative record, you would put forth for that?
Amash:One of the ones I've talked about before is, they tried to pass some anti-lynching legislation at the federal level and everyone's against lynching, obviously, but the legislation itself was bad and would actually harm a lot of people, including harming a lot of black Americans. There was this idea that this legislation was good and parroted by a lot of people in the media. They didn't read the legislation. In fact, I complained about it and it mysteriously did not pass both houses of Congress after I pointed out all the problems with it. It did pass the House of Representatives. Did not pass both Houses and get signed by the president. Mysteriously, the next Congress, they reintroduced it and rewrote it in a way that took into consideration all of my complaints, and they tried to pass it off like they were just reintroducing the same legislation. I pointed out: They actually saw that there was a problem here and then tried to pretend like, "Oh, we're just passing it again." Those kinds of votes are tough because when you take the vote, everyone thinks you're wrong. Everyone. And you have to go home and you have to explain it. Those are the ones that are tricky.
Back to the impeachment point. Look, I'd impeach every president. Let's be clear. I'm not the kind of person who's going to introduce impeachment legislation over every little thing that a president does wrong. When you introduce legislation to impeach a president, you have to have some backing for it. It can't just be one person saying, let's impeach.
For example, I would definitely impeach President Biden over these unconstitutional wars 100 percent. But the idea of introducing impeachment legislation suggests there's other people who will join you. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in futility. You introduce it. It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits there. If we're going to impeach people, there has to be some public backing, which is why I try to make the case all the time for these impeachable offenses, why some legislation should be brought forth. But you've got to get the public behind you on that kind of stuff. I think that every president should be impeached, every recent president at least.
Gillespie: If Trump's populism, national conservatism, and politics of resentment are sucking up a lot of energy on the right, how do we deal with the rise of identity politics and a kind of woke progressivism on the left? Where is that coming from? And what is the best way to combat that?
Amash:I think a lot of it is just repackaged socialist ideas, collectivist ideas. The idea of equity, for example, is really like a perversion of the idea of equality. In most respects, when people say equity, they mean the opposite of equality. It means you're going to have the government or some central authority decide what the outcomes should be, how much each person should have, rather than some system of equality before the law, where the government is not some kind of arbiter of who deserves what. When you think about it, there is no way for the government to do this. There's no way for the government to properly assess all of our lives. This is in many ways the point of diversity: we're all so different. There's no way that a central authority can decide how to manage all that.
For many of the people on the woke left who say they care about diversity, they don't care about diversity if they're talking about equity. These things are in conflict with each other. The idea that you're going to decide that someone is more deserving than another based on some superficial characteristics. As an example—I've talked about this and I've talked about this earlier in this conversation—my dad came here with nothing as a poor refugee. Yet, in a lot of cases, he might be classified as just a white American. Even though he came here as an extremely poor Palestinian refugee. The New York Times, for example, classifies me as white. They might classify someone else who's Middle Eastern as a person of color.
I think a lot of this is just, someone is making decisions at the top saying, "Well, we think this person is more like this or that, and we're going to decide they're more deserving." But they don't know our backgrounds. They don't know anything about us. They don't know who deserves this or who deserves that. No central authority could figure that out. The best thing we can do is have a system of equality before the law, where the law treats everyone the same. It doesn't give an advantage to any person over another person. It may not be fair in some sense to some people. Some people might say, "well, that's not fair."
Some people, instead of having a dad who's a Palestinian refugee, their dad was some Silicon Valley billionaire. Some person might have a dad who was a professor. Another person might have a dad who worked at a fast-food restaurant. You don't know what the differences are. The government can't figure all of this out and say who is more deserving than someone else. So I really think that the woke left, when they pushed this idea of equity, they're really pushing against diversity. They're saying, a few people at the top are gonna decide who's valuable and who's not valuable, and they're not going to actually take into consideration any of our differences, because no central authority could take it into consideration.
Gillespie: You are a libertarian, not an anarchist. You believe there is a role for government, but it should be obviously much more limited. You are also an Orthodox Christian. Could you talk a little bit about how in a world of limited government, a libertarian world, the government wouldn't be doing everything for everybody, but placing organizations and institutions like the church or other types of intervening, countervailing, mediating institutions would help to fill the gaps that are left by the government?
Amash:The place for these organizations is to help society, not to have government deciding it. When you have some central authority deciding it, you are really limiting the opportunities for the public. You're limiting the opportunities for assisting people. You're deciding that a few people are going to make all the decisions, rather than having a lot of organizations and a lot of individuals making decisions.
When you centralize it all, there are a lot of people who are going to be missed, a lot of people who are going to be ignored. When you let the marketplace work this out, when you let private organizations work this out, there is a lot more opportunity for people who need help to get help. I think that's really important.
Gillespie: There was a libertarian wave—I like to call it a libertarian moment—which I think we're still living in, but we don't understand, rhetoric aside. What are the best ways to get libertarian ideas and sensibilities in front of young people, to really energize Gen Z? The world is getting young again. How do we make sure that these people are hearing and understanding and maybe being persuaded by libertarian ideas?
Amash:For one thing, we have to meet them where they are. I spend a lot of time, for example, asking my kids, which social media kids use these days? They're in a lot of places that the adults aren't. We might be on Facebook—I mean, my generation, your generation. Other people are on X or Twitter. And there are other people on TikTok.
You have to meet them where they are and if they're not on X and—it's still weird to call it X—if they're not on X and you are, well, they're not hearing your message. That's an issue. That's something we all have to work on. I'm probably reaching primarily Gen X and millennial people on X, and I'm probably not reaching Gen Z people as well. I think we need to work on getting them in those places.
Also, I think people who have libertarian instincts, people who want to present libertarianism and have an opportunity, go speak to students at schools. I used to do this as a member of Congress. I used that opportunity as much as I could. When schools would invite me, I'd say, "Yes, I'd be happy to come to the school to speak to the students" and take all their questions and be open about being a libertarian. Tell them frankly that your philosophy is libertarianism and talk to them about it. I think it's great. A lot of teachers end up surprised. I've had many teachers walk up to me and whisper to me, "I think I'm a libertarian, too," after having the conversation because they have stereotypes about what it might mean to be a libertarian and you have the opportunity to change their mind.
Gillespie: I have seen a lot of chatter. I have actually helped publish a lot of chatter that you may be running for the U.S. Senate from the mediocre state of Michigan. Do you have an announcement that you would like to make?
Amash: As a part of the national championship-winning state of Michigan this year, I am exploring a run for Senate. The [Federal Election Commission] FEC requires me to state that I am not a candidate for Senate, but I am exploring a run for Senate.
If you're interested in checking it out, go to https://exploratory.justinamash.com/. I'm giving it serious thought. I think that there is an opportunity for libertarians this year, and there's an opportunity to win a Republican Senate seat this year. So I'm looking at the Republican primary. I think this is probably the best shot libertarians have had in a long time in the state of Michigan.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
Photo Credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom
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