David Boaz
Overview
 
David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute
Cato Institute
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the largest privately held...

, an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...

 think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...

. He played a key role in the Institute's development and the American libertarian movement.

He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997 by the Free Press and described by the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

 as "a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas," the editor of The Libertarian Reader, and co-editor of the Cato Handbook for Congress (2003) and the Cato Handbook on Policy (2005).
Quotations

Among advocates of limited government there is despair. This is the biggest-spending president since Lyndon Johnson. And if he spends the kind of money that's being talked about here, I don't know if there will ever have been a president who increased spending as fast as this one did.

Businesses and nonprofits deal with 15% revenue losses all the time.

[Cato's privatization effort was aimed from the start not just at dismantling Social Security but also at making major inroads against what it considered an overweening central government.] Social Security, ... is the linchpin of the welfare state.

Half the stories in every newspaper should be headlined 'Stop me before I legislate again'.

I don't believe in taxing the good people of Kansas, New Hampshire, and California $30 billion on the grounds that otherwise you'll tax them more later. If we actually had saved all the money that advocates of government spending had promised their programs would save, the federal budget would be negative by now.

The fundamental class division in any society is not between rich and poor, or between farmers and city dwellers, but between tax payers and tax consumers.

The idea of creating heaven on earth is bound to fail because we each have a different idea of what heaven is.

The initial reaction was to throw heaps and heaps of money at the problem. While you've had increases in welfare spending over the last 40 years, you've also had increases in the number of unwed mothers, increases in crime.

Why are taxpayers in California and Texas and Massachusetts paying for a museum in Indianapolis?

 
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