David Boaz is Vice-President of the Cato Institute. He has just written a book: Libertarianism, A Primer; in it, he makes a scholarly and persuasive case for a market-driven, consensual society in which government plays a very limited, albeit…
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Show Me The Money
Money talks–and politicians listen. (Even the President of the United States, who is evidently running a very expensive hotel.) Campaign costs have gone from astronomical to utterly ridiculous; in 1996, some Senate candidates spent over ten million…
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When Some Are More Equal Than Others
Governor O’Bannon has now signed the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," relieving those who see recognition of gay unions as a threat to western civilization. Whatever the pros and cons of "gay marriage"–and there is no uniformity on that…
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Censorship and the Arts
I have this recurring fantasy: a caveman discovers that he can produce drawings of the animals he hunts on the walls of his cave. Excited by the possibilities of his art, energized by the creative act, he produces a drawing–only to have it rubbed angrily off the cave wall by someone in his tribe who declares that the depiction of animal…
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Liberty
A frequent lament of civil libertarians is the lack of familiarity with the idea of liberty in the western intellectual tradition. Ask people about that history, and you begin to get an almost surreal feeling that "history" is what has happened over the past ten…
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