 Few individuals have had a bigger impact on the libertarian movement than David Bowes, the longtime executive vice president of the Cato Institute. Bowes recently turned 70 and gave a keynote address in Washington, D.C. at LibertyCon, the annual gathering of students for liberty. I caught up with him to discuss disarray in the libertarian movement, why he thinks the non-aggression principle and cosmopolitanism form the core of the movement, why libertarians can never seem to take wins when we get them, and whether there's anything to look forward to in a rematch of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Here is the Reason Interview with David Bowes. David Bowes, thanks for talking to me. Thanks for having me. You turned 70 recently. You've been in the libertarian movement for pretty much, or conservative in the libertarian movement for pretty much half a century. Can I ask like right now, January, February, or February 2024, what's your assessment of how libertarian ideas and the libertarian movement is doing? Well, I think there are a lot more libertarian ideas. You know, when I was in college and thought of myself as a libertarian, but also thought of libertarians as part of the conservative movement, who'd we have as intellectuals, Hayek and Friedman, and Mises, I guess, briefly while I was in college. What about Ein Rand in the mix there? Well, yes, we read Ein Rand. And you were at Vanderbilt. I was at Vanderbilt. And what years was this? 71 to 75. So it was kind of a good set of years there, because Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 74, which was stunning to us, because even as naive college students, we knew nobody like that had won a Nobel Prize before. I think it was pretty surprising to him, too, right? And Gunnar Murdoch, who he had to choke it down with, right? And then in 1975, Nozick won the National Book Award, which really helped to put libertarianism on the map of political philosophers and so on. And then in 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize. I was out of college then. But that period really boosted libertarian sort of academic credentials. And so these days, we kind of, just like everybody says, we have nobody like Reagan and Thatcher. But in the time of Reagan and Thatcher, they said, where are the people like Churchill and Roosevelt? I look back and say, wow, weren't those great? And who is that today? But at least one answer is there's a lot more libertarian intellectuals today. And so maybe nobody is a Hayek these days. But there's definitely a lot more libertarianism in the academy, more libertarian intellectuals, more people reading those people. Some of them even get published by major publishers. So there's more of that. And I think that means there's more people who think of themselves as libertarians. Well, you guys, Cato, I haven't updated this in a while, but I mean, looking at kind of polls or surveys of people, plausibly, we can say what, five to 15% of the population is libertarian-ish or libertarian-ish or fiscally conservative, socially tolerant. We looked at polls and then we did one poll up to 2012 or 2014. And then when Trump came along, it upset all these lines. And so we never did another one. I think I was partly afraid we would find out the fiscally conservative, socially tolerant people voted for Trump. And I would not have wanted to publish that. Really? How do you define which the essence of libertarianism for you? Well, to me, the essence of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle. You have no right to initiate force against people who have not initiated force against you. And from that comes freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of property and markets. And ideally is set within a ethos of cosmopolitanism and pluralism and tolerance. At that point, we're kind of talking about liberalism. And these days, I'm worried not just about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We're keeping it within the broad libertarian movement. Does that put you at odds with groups like the Mises Institute? Yes. Okay. And Ken, is it fundamentally, because they'll say, hey, you know what, we're talking about the non-aggression principle. That's all, that's the only thing that matters. And is that part of the problem? Is that for you, it's the non-aggression principle, but this larger cosmopolitanism? Yes. And the fact that the Mises Institute has spent 40 years associating libertarianism and Austrian economics with the Confederacy. And not so much on the Mises site, on the site founded by the Mises Institute's founder, you find genuine racist stuff. Well, you're talking about Lou Rockwell.com. What is an example of the genuine racist stuff? Oh, there was a piece just a couple of days ago, like why aren't white people fighting for white people. So all that kind of stuff. Do you consider yourself white? Well, I'm a first generation white person, I think, because my mother was Italian. You are. She was kind of. One of my colleagues at Cato for a while was really into ancestry and D-A-R and things. And she brought me a printout of my entire ancestry going back eight generations. I always knew my eighth generation Bose ancestor came from Scotland. Okay, so, you know, we're Scottish. But I also realized that's actually only one 64th of my genetic inheritance. So she presents me with these papers and every single one of my ancestors at the eighth generation came from the British Isles to America before the American Revolution. So I am old stock, baby. You grew up in Kentucky. Yes. And that puts you when you talk about the Confederacy, that's interesting because Kentucky was a slave state, but it stayed in the Union. Yeah, that's right. So are you just fighting the battles of your ancestors then? Well, I don't think so. I was in maybe junior high school during the Centennial of the Civil War. And so there was a lot of talk about that. And I certainly heard things like no farmer would beat a slave to death any more than he would beat a prized bill to death. So that was a sort of underlying main then. Yeah. So that was pretty underlying attitude there. And I had to grow out of that. And it took a while. And Kentucky has more statues of Jefferson Davis, right, than like any other state. I didn't know that. But it's possible. That's where he was born. Right. Although he then was a senator from Mississippi. He was the president of the Confederacy. Do you think it's, and I remember a piece that you and and Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation in the pages of Reason debated and, you know, this is a larger debate that's taken place in many venues and many times. You are very critical of libertarians who cast back to the 19th century as a that was the goal. That was the Golden Age. And we we kind of screwed it up. Well, yes. Certainly before the Civil War, no Golden Age, four million people held in chains after the Civil War, less obvious things. But there was Jim Crow. There were restrictions on women's rights. Not even anybody even thought about restricting gay rights. They just were. So a lot of libertarians think libertarianism is about cutting government spending, less regulation, less spending. And I'm absolutely for those things. But as I've gotten older, I think I've gotten a greater appreciation for people who maybe were left out of the consensus about markets and so on to begin with and more interested in the values of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. Can we talk a little bit more about cosmopolitanism? So it's cosmopolitanism, tolerance, pluralism. Where do those come from? And why should those be adjacent to, you know, to if the nuclear core is the non-aggression principle? Why should it be? I don't know nuclear engineering, so I'm going to blow the metaphor here. But like, you know, if if we're in we're in libertarian Chernobyl, non-aggression principle, is it the reactor? Why is the housing cosmopolitanism? Well, I think libertarianism is set within liberalism, classical liberalism. And I sort of think of libertarianism as the the intellectual core of liberalism, the intellectual vanguard I'd like to think. I often say I'd like to be part of a libertarian intellectual vanguard leading a broader liberal movement. And that, for my whole career, we haven't had that. We've had liberals divided into people who emphasize free markets and people who emphasize civil liberties and tolerance and equality under the law for all. Libertarians have not had a great record on equality under the law for all, although I think it's clearly inherent in what we believe. But you didn't see many libertarians involved in the civil rights movement critical of Jim Crow, and they should have been, and they should have been out there. How much do you, and I'm thinking our mutual friend, Penn Gillette, I read an interview with him recently, and you know I talked to him a few years ago. He no longer calls himself libertarian. And in this interview with Cracked Magazine or the website, which is very good website, but the interviewer said, you know, like is libertarianism just a bunch of rich white guys? And he was like, yeah, that's part of its limitation. Do you, is this part of what you're talking about? Yeah, it's probably part of it. It has been mostly white guys. I think most intellectual vanguards over the years have been mostly white guys. Libertarianism maybe hasn't changed as much. I don't think it's just self interest. I know of rich white guy libertarians who have argued against their own direct self interest on tariffs and things like that. Back when I was in the council for a competitive economy, which was an attempt to create a libertarian business group, there was a car dealer in California who flew to Washington to testify against tariffs on foreign cars. And I've known other successful libertarian manufacturers who have resisted Bill Nascannon, maybe not exactly a rich white guy. You know, he was an economist. He was very white. Very white. He was finished. He left Ford Motor Company because he would not defend tariffs when automobile companies kind of switched on that. What do you, do you think, I mean, the libertarian movement, the one that you helped build, the one that, you know, they're going to have to kick me out of the one that the guys filming and they are guys right now filming, white guys filming this. You know, is it, is it just a sociological artifact that, you know, this started in the 60s for the most part? I mean, there's longer historical roots. And it's just it appealed to people who were not motivated towards the civil rights movement were not motivated towards the women's right movement. Maybe in the 70s started more in the gay liberation movement and things like that. But you know, where does the lack of engagement with things like the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow come from? Well, I think I think it's true that libertarians in the United States have focused much more on economic issues, property rights and free markets, deregulation, government spending. Anytime I give a speech to libertarians, they want to know how do we stop this tide of government spending? And there are a lot of other things they could ask about, but they tend to ask about that. One difference I'll tell you, like in the 70s, was libertarians were ahead of everybody else on gay rights. 1972 platform, I think, endorsed gay rights in some language, language that I think implied marriage equality, although they may not have realized they were implying that. And this is at a time when the American Psychological Association was still classifying being homosexual as a mental illness. I mean, it was decades before people like Bill Clinton, I guess, never really did when he was in office. But Barack Obama, it took decades for leading democratic, liberal democratic candidate or president. Absolutely, and not just not just politicians, but the liberal media were not there. The New York Times ran some horrifying headlines, probably not in the 70s, but back in the 60s, 50s, definitely. One difference there was there weren't many Black libertarians who might have dragged some other libertarians into the civil rights movement. There were gay libertarians, and it was at a time when gay people were starting to feel they could come out. And maybe libertarian gay people more than others because, you know, they're libertarians and they're a little outside the mainstream anyway, and they get it. And so therefore, from very early on, there were gay people involved very much in the libertarian movement, and they at least pushed some libertarians to be aware of those issues in a way there hadn't been anybody to push libertarians to look at Jim Crow. So what about women's issues? Women's lib because, you know, one of the ironies of the libertarian movement, and this has changed in the 30 years I've been involved in the movement as a movement. There are many more women, not just, you know, there are many more women in the rank and file as well as kind of in leadership positions, but, you know, there's that irony that you have people like Rose Wildler Lane and Isabel Patterson and, of course, Ein Rand in the 40s kind of creating, in many ways, the beginning of the modern libertarian movement. And then it's like, yeah, and it's a bunch of, you know, engineers in sweaty basements for the next 60, 70 years. Well, they were the ones who read Ein Rand. You know, there's a sense in which if you talk to some feminists, at least, about the difference in feminine and masculine ways of thinking, I remember reading, I think it was a well-known author, but I don't want to try the name. Carol Gilligan, perhaps? Carol Gilligan. I was going to say Carol Tavris. Is that a name? I'm not sure. Anyway, women are more about sharing and including and things like that. And men are more about defining rights and so on. And I thought, yeah, I can see that. It makes sense. She talked about what games boys and girls play. And by that standard, Ein Rand was probably the most masculine thinking writer, even though she's our woman on display. Yeah, she's much more, I always think of her in the 50s in concert with Jack Kerowack, because they're kind of similarities and a lot of differences. He's much more female in terms. He's very emotional and, you know, and oversharing where she's much more rationalist. Well, I do think Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ein Rand, all publishing books in one year. John Chamberlain wrote about why was it women who did this? Why weren't there men speaking up against the Roosevelt administration and everything? And I think that's a good question. Of course, it was basically only three women. There were a few others. Vivian Callums was a tax rebel. So it may just be that there were three one-off one-time heroes. Yeah, it might be that we search for patterns, and it's really mostly coincidences, right, or accidents. To stay on civil rights issues for a while, one of the, you know, one of the kind of Maginot lines by, I'm really screwing the, I guess I could call it the color line or the Mason-Dixon line or something, but in libertarian thinking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and this is, you know, I know a lot of people who of a certain age who were kind of activated into politics by Barry Goldwater and Barry Goldwater who had voted for all sorts of civil rights laws when he was running for president in 64. He said, no, that's too far because it takes the government into private business associations. And that helps also explain, I mean, it wasn't simply libertarians. The Republican Party lost black voters en masse after that. I mean, I think Nixon in 1960 got something like 30 or 35 percent of the vote. People like Jackie Robinson campaigned for him and then was done with the Republican Party. Is Goldwater right, or is the way that libertarians conceived of the Civil Rights Act in error? Well, as a non-aggression principle libertarian, I do think people have a right to make in their private lives, including their commercial business lives, decisions that are mutually acceptable. So I want to rent from you. You want to rent to me. You want to hire me at this price. I would prefer to be hired at this price. Hopefully, we find a number that works for both of us. But if we don't, then no contract is made. There was a flurry of discussion of this a few years ago, and I was partially persuaded by libertarian arguments that you were overcoming 250 years of slavery, and then what, 75 years of Jim Crow, and you can't just say, OK, now everybody's equal. Everybody's free. You need some kind of reparation in a way, like saying you cannot discriminate in hiring. You cannot discriminate in housing. And I get that. Theoretically, I'm not for it as a practical matter. I can see it. I think a lot of the things that were predicted did not come true. Some of the things that were predicted did, that they kept going beyond that, like to affirmative action, and then eventually to quotas, and eventually to identity groups. I have a friend who's kids in I guess junior high. They call it middle school now. Yeah. Yeah. They were assigned to groups within the school on the basis of their color. And so there's a black student union, and there's a Hispanic student union or whatever. And his kids, despite actually having a Latino last name, but being about three quarters Anglo, were assigned to the White Alliance. Can you imagine a worst name? It's like a Nazi name. Yeah. It's like a prison gang or something like that. That's amazing. What was it like going to Vanderbilt in the early 70s? Vanderbilt was the Harvard of the South. And during the number of the literary and cultural critics called the fugitives were there and around. And they were trying to, I mean, they were anti-modernity. They were trying to maintain a Southern heritage. Most of them were trying to kind of figure away how to airbrush out slavery and things like that. But what was Vanderbilt like in the early 70s? Well, the fugitive poets are in the 20s, so I didn't know them. There was, I think, one English professor on campus said to be sort of the air representative of the fugitive poets or there was another term that they used. But I never took a class for it. The Agrarians, I think. Yes, Southern Agrarians. Yeah, because in 1930 they put together a collection called I'll Take My Stand, which was essays on Southern culture. Right. So as a Southerner, I'm like romantically attracted to that. I'm also romantically attracted to the notion of Bonnie Prince Charlie. But you know, he did kind of want to impose Catholic tyranny on England, so I wouldn't technically have thought it was a good idea for him to get back in power. And that's sort of the way I would see the Southern Agrarians. Their ideas are wrong. Some of them are rooted in a nostalgia for the Old South that I can appreciate. The problem is the whole nostalgia for the Old South, you know what the Old South was. And probably wasn't that great for a lot of poor white people. If you had a mansion and a plantation, then maybe a pretty good life. So I don't think they had a lot of influence Vanderbilt at the time. Vanderbilt was going through some of the things that other campuses were going through in the 70s, but in a milder form. The Grateful Dead played on the lawn. There were anti-war marches. There were streakers. And there was some intellectual format. There was a basically a conservative magazine, but pretty libertarian because me and my friends were running it. And there was also an object. They didn't have a terrible name. No, I had a great name. It was called the Freedom Rider. And if you're in the South, that kind of elides into Freedom Rider. And then for a while there was an Objectivist tabloid printed on campus. And our group of libertarian conservatives discovered that in the dormitory, which was on each floor, there were four suites of six, we discovered that right across the hall from us was the suite of the people who were putting together this Objective newsletter. And we went over and said, hey, you know, we're the Freedom Rider people. And they're like, close the door in our face. Because they were doctrinaire Objectivists. And I think eventually they would hang out in the hall and discuss girls, but not ideas. What was, you know, you had mentioned that you kind of started out in conservative politics or that libertarianism was seen as a kind of subset of conservative politics. How did it become its own thing for you and for the movement? Well, I think it was partly just that as it grew, there were more people who wanted to be separate. There have been several separations, you know, there was the 1969 Yaf Convention and then the founding of SIL and that was supposed to be separate. And then there was the 1972 founding of the Libertarian Party. We're declaring our independence from the Republicans. But we always, it's that property rights free market deregulation that keeps drawing us back. So that's, I think that's been a problem. But there were, the Rothbardians wanted not to be conservatives partly because they were very anti-war. Even they weren't. Were you anti-Vietnam War? My first published article when I was 14 years old was a call for victory in Vietnam. Somebody asked... By the Viet Cong or by the Americans? No, American victory. Somebody asked me the other day, you know, can you name anything you've changed your mind on? I said, well, I guess I changed my mind on that. But it was a while before I really got into the non-interventionist anti-war. That was sort of the last thing for me. And in fact, it might have helped my transition. I was working at Yaf. Young Americans for Freedom. Young Americans for Freedom. And I was told to write a press release endorsing American aid to the African dictator Mobutu. And so I did because I'm a good employee. And then I, as I recall, I mailed it to Ed Crane and said, this is what I'm spending my talent on. And I think that might have... Did you use the government mail for that? Yes. You're just so deep in it. Yeah. That might have prodded him into offering me a job. So the Cato Institute, where you've spent most of your career, was founded in 78. 77. 77. And it was located in San Francisco. Right. Yeah. So how did that come into being? And what was its kind of casus belly? Well, Ed Crane was in Washington running the McBride for President campaign in 1976. And he observed that AEI and Brookings, he thought, had a significant influence on limited budgets. And he said there ought to be a libertarian think tank, one representing the values of the American Revolution. And so he talked to Charles Koch, who had money to help. And Charles said, okay, I'll put some money up if you will run it. And he said, well, you don't want me to run it because it needs to be in Washington. And I'm going back to San Francisco. And as he used to tell it, I think, Charles was smarter than I was. And he knew if I started this, I would in a few years realize it should be in Washington. So the idea was to set up a think tank that was neither liberal nor conservative, and that would put libertarian ideas on the policy map as well as just the pure theory map. What were the big issues in the late 70s that you guys were obsessed with? Well, the big influences in sort of the early 70s were Vietnam Watergate and stagflation. And I use that trio often to explain why was there an efflorescence of libertarians in the 1970s. Well, the government had just accomplished Vietnam Watergate and stagflation, which gave people a very different view of a government that they perceived as having solved the depression in World War II. So different generation, that was coming up. What were the main issues? The answer is they're kind of the same issues over and over. History is not a bunch of new things. It's one damn thing over and over. For Cato, the original sort of agenda was what we're going to take on social security, the linchpin of the welfare state. We're going to take on school choice, which underlies so many problems. Or lack of school choice. Pardon me? Lack of school choice. Yes, right. And we're going to take on the foreign interventionist state. And so early on, we were writing about all of those things. Our first real book was about an alternative to social security, how to get out of it. At least one of our first papers was on also social security. But we had a very early paper on immigration, pro-immigration. We had a very early paper on conscription, which was a live issue at that time. I mean, I remember lining up in the hallway of my college dormitory listening to the numbers being drawn out of a hat to see who would get sent to Vietnam. What is social security unstoppable at this point? This was something that seems to be the observation all over the world that we've made a lot of progress on free trade. We've made a lot of progress on human rights, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. We've made some progress on some micro-regulation issues. We're making some now on housing. We repealed a lot of the New Deal regulations in the 1978 to 81 era. So when people say we're on the road to serfdom, I tell them about all these things. We ended conscription. We ended the CAB. We ended the ICC. We created a structure that continuously brought tariffs down. So all those things were progress. There was significant progress, and people still say, yes, but what about all this government spending and everything? And I think the answer there is once you create a program that people think they're getting benefits from, very hard to take those benefits away. And we can argue that social security is not on net benefiting people, but there's a huge constituents of people who paid money in and they don't want to take it away from them. And that's true for every program. It's true for the farm program. And that's one of the reasons that we always say it is so important to stop a new entitlement in the beginning, because Medicare was expected to cost a billion dollars a year, 10 years after it was founded. That was crazy. It was much more than that. So you got to stop it. And it was called the last act of the New Deal. I mean, it was very well politically motivated. The language around it and the rhetoric to sell it really sold it to people who remembered the depression. Carolyn Weaver, who wrote our first economic policy newsletter about social security, I don't think it was in that newsletter, it was in a journal article, referred to the people advocating social security as the prospective bureaucrats. So, yes, there were a lot of people who benefited directly like that. But I think on any government, and in you create something new, you create midnight basketball. And then if you say we're going to shut down midnight basketball, there's all these people who come out and say, what are kids going to do then? Well, they're going to play video games. Well, we didn't know that at the time. Well, and that's interesting, because midnight basketball was a huge thing in the 90s. This was part of Bill Clinton's war on crime and whatnot. And that one doesn't, not a lot of midnight basketball programs. I think that's probably right. And now there are problems maybe with all the kids being in video games and other screen things. But, yeah. What was, in the 80s, what was your attitude towards Ronald Reagan? Because he's somebody within the libertarian movement. And I think this is fading, but Reagan was really good. He was the best president that we've had. A lot of libertarians or people leaning libertarian would say that. Is that right or is that wrong? I would say my own trajectory with Reagan was in the 70s. I was a yaffer. And I went to the 1976 convention on behalf of Reagan, not as a delegate, but just there to cheer him on and everything. And the Young Americans for Freedom was a group that was kind of created by William F. Buckley and M. Stanton Evans and a couple of other people. And it was supposedly numerically throughout the 60s. It was bigger than SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. Well, I'll let you in on a secret. Yaff wasn't nearly as big as it advertised. But that might have been true of SDS, too. So I liked Reagan. And I was actually a delegate to the state convention, I guess, or maybe the county convention for Reagan. And then in 1978, I got hired to work on the Clark for Governor campaign. And that kind of shifted my allegiance. This is Ed Clark. Ed Clark for Governor. California 1978, first big libertarian party campaign that actually had some money and a professional staff of me and one other guy. And so as 1980 was coming around, well, now I'm a libertarian, small LN, capital L. And I went to work for the Clark for President campaign. And I was critical of Reagan. But I remember Roy Childs calling me the great, the great auto didact Roy Childs calling me the night that Reagan picked Ford for Vice President and picked Bush. And he said, I was hoping for Reagan Ford because I thought that would be a landslide win and people would know that. And therefore, they'd be more willing to vote for a third party candidate. And I was worried about Reagan and camp because I thought that would be a campaign that would really emphasize capitalism and free markets. And that wouldn't be good for Ed Clark. And so Reagan Bush, while Reagan was president, I was a libertarian. And we were pretty much critical of everything he did. Well, not everything, but many things he did. As time went on and we saw other presidents, I think we got nostalgic for the Reagan Thatcher era. Two people who if they didn't always live up to it did enunciate a lot of libertarian rhetoric. And I think Thatcher probably in England revived British entrepreneurship and appreciation for enterprise. And Reagan did some of that, too. I think to a great extent, Reagan's speeches about freedom revived the American spirit maybe as much as his tax cuts did. Right. And, you know, in 75, Reagan was leaving the governorship of California and he talked to reason. This was one of our first big interviews. And he said, I've always believed that libertarianism is the heart and soul of the conservative movement. And then the rest of the interview is him explaining why. Yeah. But, you know, when it comes to things like gays, drugs, you know, certain types of immigrants, like now, now you can't do any of that. But it's an interesting split. How did the end of the Cold War, did that really sever in a fundamental way and in a productive way, the libertarian conservative alliance politically? I'm not sure. I thought at the time that we're going to see a lot of shifting alliances here because the Cold War has been such a big part of our understanding. And you remember Pat Buchanan said at the end of the Cold War, okay, we can come home. Yeah. And I thought more people would do that. But it did that didn't really happen. There was a peace dividend, right? And that we brought defense spending. Yeah. But we didn't we didn't bring the boys home. Right. And we we didn't return the peace dividend to the taxpayers. We spent it on other things. Yeah, like basketball. Yes. Which of course is what some people at Cato and so on had complained about Europe all the time. America is subsidizing Europe's welfare state because we're in effect pay for their defense. That means they can afford a larger welfare state. So I don't think it had as much impact as I had hoped. But coming after Reagan and Thatcher and the continuing growth of free trade, it did seem like a very triumphal moment. Yeah. That communism has fallen at least European communism. It's been completely repudiated. And that end of the spectrum ideologically is gone. So things have got to shift to the right. In some ways, they did. Right. I mean, the nineties, we saw, you know, things like NAFTA and free trade by, you know, the Al Gore defending free trade and Bill Clinton saying the era of big government is over. So yes, well, in the 94 election, the Wall Street Journal on the front page after the 94 election, I think maybe not until fiscal to say, but things that the Republicans won on reflect the less government ideas of the Cato Institute more than the conservative heritage foundation. So that was a nice clipping. What, as long as we're stuck in the nineties and particularly 1994, how disastrous ultimately was Newt Gingrich for American politics? Well, yeah. I mean, he's the architect of the Republican revolution. Right. So first you have to say he was the architect of the first Republican House in decades. Yeah. But I think he probably got delusions of grandeur. And he, you know, he complained about having to walk out the back end of Air Force One and that sort of thing. And that turned people against him. And in some ways, one of the things he did was tell Republicans to demonize Democrats. Frank Luntz, I think, you know, helped him come up with the words to demonize Democrats. And maybe that puts us on the road to Trump. Yeah. And I mean, it certainly seems like Gingrich is kind of the mad woman in the attic right now. You know, like we've forgotten about him to a certain degree, but in tone and tenor. He's and also, I think, from a Republican point of view or a conservative point of view, he would talk a big game, but he wasn't cutting spending. He wasn't. Yes. You know, he was. Well, there was a little there was a little bit. But yes, not much. You know, Republicans keep throwing out their speakers. Democrats don't. Pelosi stayed in there forever. And people like Sam Rayburn and Carl Albert, they were long term, much more institutional, I think the longest serving Republican speaker, I guess in my lifetime turned out to be a pedophile. Yeah. So the coach coach Astrid, right? Yeah. So they have done a good job with speakers. How disastrous for I guess for America and then conceivably for libertarian kind of advances. Was the Bush, the George W. Bush administration? Well, that was pretty bad. And we were sort of optimistic when he came in. I mean, you know, we were, we didn't like Republicans. They did a lot of bad things. But Bush had told Ed Crane that Kato's social security plan was on the right track and he wanted to do something like that. And early in his administration, he appointed a commission, which we were sort of opposed to because a commission is usually the way to put an idea to bed. But it turned out he appointed a commission of Republicans and Democrats that was stacked in favor of some kind of privatization. So that was good. But then 9-11 happened and everything, you know, Bush got distracted from everything else. And then and then he gets reelected and he says, I'm going to use my political capital on reforming social security. And it turns out somehow he got reelected, but everybody hated him. We did it. We did a poll at the time. And we said, you know, would you support an idea that would allow you to put your own money into retirement and then not take social security at the end? And we got 60% said, yeah, that sounds good. When we said President Bush has a plan, got 40% approval. And so that kind of killed it. And he also said the other thing he was going to spend, because he won big against John Kerry in 2004, and he was going to tackle immigration reform, which had been idling since Reagan did it in the late eighties. And that lasted about a half a week, right? How bad was it for, you know, and it wasn't just Bush, you know, creating the concept of a global war on terror, the Patriot Act, you know, with one or two exceptions, everybody voted for it. It was, you know, a very bipartisan consensus plan. How bad was that for libertarian ideas? Well, it was definitely bad that, you know, we got the Patriot Act, but also just the general, we have to respond with war. We even have to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11, and the Patriot Act and the surveillance state that was created there. Very bad for the country. Bad for libertarians, too, although it gave us a lot of targets to complain about, but we didn't get very far in aiming at those targets. Did Obama, you know, Obama took office during, you know, the biggest economic downturn since the Depression, although virtually every recession after the Great Depression was called the greatest recession since the Great Depression. But this one was a big deal, and that gave him a free hand. It also gave him, you know, because people disliked Bush and the Republicans, the Democrats came in very strong after the 2008 elections. How, you know, was that kind of, you know, where we were going from a kind of right-wing statism to a left-wing statism, was that as bad for libertarian ideas and kind of representing as the Bush years had been? It was easier to raise money against a bad left-wing administration than it was against a bad right-wing administration. And this is something liberal and conservative fundraisers know. When your guy gets in the White House, people relax. When the other guy gets in, they panic. In our case, we saw much less of that switch over. But still, it was easier to take aim at the Obama administration in fundraisers. Was Obama particularly, or I guess all presidents are bad, and then what are the particular ways? But, you know, one of the things when I look back on the Obama years is the rhetoric against him that he, you know, I would hear things people would say with a straight face. He's the first president elected, you know, if he's actually qualified to be president, whose goal is to destroy America as we know it. I mean, there were these overblown claims against him. But was there something to the idea that he was putting us on a particularly terrible path? Well, I think that kind of stuff is a precursor to what came later with the Trump movement. Yes, for one thing, like I said, every time you create a new entitlement, you'll never get rid of it. And he was trying to create those, and he had some success. We had stopped Hillary care. We were not able to stop Obamacare. And that's what we said at the time. You'll never get rid of it. And we kept trying, but we didn't. So yes, he did put us on that bad trajectory. A bigger government than we'd had before, although every president was giving us a bigger government than we had before. And with him, I mean, the Bush basically spending went up by 50% in real terms. And there was a massive spike when Obama took office, but then it kind of flattened. But it's, I mean, this is... Well, that's right. He came in and he had these emergency recovery plans. And in retrospect, what was that about $800 billion? And then there was a separate $800 billion, maybe that was the health care bill. It seems like Trump changed. Yeah. And now, yes, Biden just casually passes a couple of trillion dollar bills. Well, one of the things that you could say about both Bush and Obama is that libertarians could kind of attack them in not necessarily in complete ways, but you could sharpen your attacks on them and do pretty well. And by that, I don't just mean fundraise. I mean, like winning over people because they were hypocritical. Creating a key party. So then you get Trump. And how did Trump scramble the libertarian movement? And I'm sure you hear this more than me where people would be like, Trump is the most libertarian president ever. What is your best guess of what do people mean when they say something like that? He scrambled a lot of things. I mean, it looks like he pulled working class voters in and he lost some suburban educated voters. And he didn't do all that well. He got a smaller percentage of the vote than Romney had gotten. But there was... But he won. Yes. Yes. There were... I had lots of fights. I blocked more people that year on Facebook than ever before. I had a lot of fights with old friends who said he's most libertarian president. I mean, when he was running. And when he was running, I really don't know what it was. He said he would cut taxes. Any Republican that year would have been campaigning on tax cuts. He said he would cut regulation. He did campaign against immigration and against trade. So I never did understand. I guess he was... He said drill baby drill. And so libertarians who thought American energy independence or at least production, they liked it. And I think a lot of libertarians, certainly a lot of conservatives, but I think a lot of libertarians too, liked the fact that he fights. He stands up. He calls the left a bunch of dickheads. And I think in the subsequent five years, it occurred to me that the people, conservatives, and some libertarians are gravitating to, are not necessarily the ones who are most conservatives, certainly not the ones who are making the most compelling cases. They're the ones who are the most anti-left. So Sean Hannity on Fox. He's just partisan anti-left all the time. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA. Charlie Kirk had been kind of a free market socialism sucks. That was his organization. And then he just went all in for Trump. And then I saw other people going all in for Trump. The defense of Trump now as the most libertarian president I think would be tax cuts, conservative Supreme Court justices who many libertarians think are better than liberal Supreme Court justices. And they'll say deregulation. There wasn't that much deregulation, but there was less regulation than in a democratic administration. And let's let's talk about Biden, you know, because Biden now is, I mean, he has been pretty awful, right? Yes. I mean, both in terms of spending and in terms of regulation. What's the case against Biden? Well, the case against Biden is he is a bankrupt spender. Trump spent, I think Trump may have spent more in four years than Obama did. Biden then comes in and says, I'll see you and raise you. So there's certainly that. I think it is also the case and I understand why some conservatives and libertarians are going to vote for any Republican because the best case I heard for Trump from one of my colleagues, I'm not even sure he was making his own case, he was saying, Hillary will bring 4,000 dedicated regulators to Washington. I don't know who Trump's going to appoint. Republican hacks, Ed Fullner's list, his cronies, but they won't be dedicated regulators. And I think that's definitely happened with Biden, that he campaigned as a moderate and compared to either Elizabeth Warren or Trump. Yeah, he seemed sane, moderate, centrist. But he has empowered an administration that wants to regulate everything. Some of it is like woke regulation, sexual harassment on campus, hate speech, all that kind of stuff. And some of it is just pure economic regulation and you see it every day. The Biden administration is going to require the Biden administration is going to ban. And one of the problems there, of course, is abuse of presidential power. Every time I see one of those, I'm like, where in the Constitution does it say the president can do that? And of course, it doesn't anywhere. So I think that's the case against Biden. Foreign policy is more of a mixed bag and I'm less expert on that. But domestically, I think also with Obama, you could say there was going back to what I said in the beginning about cosmopolitanism and tolerance. Obama comes in campaigns. He's black. He's the first president to sort of welcome gay people into his administration, even though he's not for gay marriage until right before the 2012 election. But he looks like somebody who believes that everybody is part of America. Trump is obviously the exact opposite of that. And with Biden, it's gone way beyond that to we're letting the DEI woke crowd regulate everybody's life and business life, academic life. People can be canceled. Some guy in California was discovered to have given a little bit of money to the anti gay marriage forces out there. And he was forced to resign as president of Mozilla. There was also like, you know, a woman who ran a taco restaurant. And she was discovered because these are public documents to have given $100 against gay marriage. And she was hounded and boycotted until she lost her job. Now, I was for the marriage. Well, I was against the anti marriage law. But I feel very uncomfortable that people take different points, political points of view and can lose their jobs like that. Those, of course, were not the government. Right. But the government is pushing things like that, including strict rules about hate speech and microaggression and so on. So all of that is the case against Biden. Do you feel though, I mean, one of the libertarian canards I used to hear when I started at reason was, well, you should discipline people through the market. So if somebody is anti gay and you're pro gay, you know, don't do business with them and call attention to their ideological commitments. Yeah, there's something to that. We do say we want to discipline people through the market and then we feel uncomfortable when we do it. I think it's sort of the Twitter mob mentality. We used to have boycotts, but they couldn't be as effective because communication wasn't so good and everything. Now you can do that. And woman runs a taco restaurant. Yeah. If, I mean, you know, I really kind of didn't think, you know, I'm trying to remember the first time where it's like, okay, well, I really can't get worse than this. But let's just say, you know, Trump versus Hillary Clinton is like, okay, these were the two least liked presidential candidates since modern polling. One of them had to win. Now we are looking at something that's worse, you know, Trump and Biden. Biden has numbers that are as bad as Trump's were at the same point in his presidency, even before COVID. Kind of really, you know, poor gasoline on everything. What, what are libertarians to do? Like how do libertarians, you know, because neither of these people, neither of these parties are in any way, shape or form committed to libertarian principles. You know, how do we maneuver a political landscape? Well, that's a good question these days. We tried one thing. Some people tried in 2016, which was to run a presidential ticket composed of two governors, Gary Johnson and Bill Welg, both well respected against the two worst candidates in history. And they got 3.5% of the vote. So that didn't seem to work out very well. Now the libertarian party has fallen apart. So then I'm going to do that. I guess you have to pick the party you believe in. I would love to see a fiscally conservative socially liberal centrist party. And I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way. But the two parties are controlled by more or less their extremes. And how do you break into that? And my colleague, Andy Craig, who moved on to another place, has thought a lot about election reforms. I never thought much about them. I always figured, you know, if there's enough libertarians, they'll make themselves felt with whatever political system. But maybe something like rank choice voting, not so much that it would help libertarians, but that it might hurt extremists and get more of a consensus candidate. And hey, when I was a young guy, I didn't ever think I'd be looking for a consensus centrist country. Can you talk, what about a kind of libertarian culture or a culture of libertarian freedom and cosmopolitanism? Are we further along, you know, in many ways, and I know you've written about this, you know, as have I, people like Kato, people like reason, you know, in profound ways, we are more free as individuals, certainly to express ourselves and to live the way we want to, whatever that is. And many kind of institutions, whether they're public or private of repression, have faded and you can you have more choices in your life. But does it doesn't really feel that way? It doesn't feel like we are on the, you know, on the frontier of well, I think that's partly because people always have this nostalgia. You know, on Twitter, there's all these things about remember when a man with one income could afford this house. It could afford two wives and six kids and then economists come along and say, adjust for inflation and adjust for house size and things. This is not true. Plus, you have all the knowledge in the history of the world in your pocket right now. Nobody had that. David Rockefeller didn't have it in 1990. Michael Rockefeller could have really used GPS, right? Yes. Well, that's right. So part of it is just we always look back and think, oh, things were better and now they're worse. But I do think, I mean, a lot of people know they're freer because, you know, they're black people who are allowed to aspire to things. I'll tell you, when Kareen Jean-Pierre was appointed press secretary, I wrote a blog post and said, this is a sign of progress. A black lesbian could not have been the president's press secretary even maybe five or 10 years ago. And this is a sign that we're a more open and accepting society. And I got a lot of blowback from alleged libertarians saying, she's an affirmative action appointee. You're endorsing diversity, affirmative action. I said, look, I don't know if she'll be any good. But I'll tell you this, there are positions in your administration you would put diversity hires in. I don't believe you make the most visible face in your administration an affirmative action hire. It's important how she speaks on behalf of your administration. So whether she's good or not, I don't know. But I think they think she is. And we see more black people, more women being able to rise in corporations and politics and of course as a gay person in high school in the 60s and living in a world where I can live with a long time partner and my friends can get married and all of this is pretty much taken for granted even among conservatives. MAGA is pushing a long haired gay guy to be RN's Republican National Committee Chairman. His only little problem is he filmed himself having sex in a Senate office room. But other than that, apparently they were okay with the gay thing. It's not like the Senate was using that for any constructive purpose. That's true. So all of that makes us freer and then you have written a lot about new forms of communication, new forms of technology, giving us more freedom. Sometimes I think reason goes too far. That's just crap. Why is that an improvement in the world? Well, you know, one person's crap is another person's treasure, I suppose. And a lot of the stuff that we didn't save from the olden days was crap. We saved Beethoven. But you are, you know, you are kind of a short-term pessimist and not without, you can point to things. There is a, there does seem to be a vibrant form of a liberalism, a kind of Elan Vitao. This doesn't make any sense. But like there's a huge surge in a liberalism on the left, you know, which is going deep on identity politics and telling people, well, you can't speak if you don't belong to certain groups or represent certain points of view. On the right, there's a liberalism, you know, Donald Trump trying to keep Muslims out of the country, irrespective of who they are and whatever. And on the right, there seems to be a real push to kind of recreate an America when Donald Trump was, I don't know, 25 or 30 or something like that. Where is that coming from and where does that leave libertarians? Well, that's a good question. And I've been writing about this, not so much about libertarianism, but about liberalism. We live in a liberal world. Brian Doherty wrote in his History of the Libertarian Movement, a world that now runs on approximately libertarian principles. And you kind of look at that first and say, what? And then you think, well, yes, the United States, Europe and more parts of the world are generally based on free markets and private property and on free speech and freedom of religion and expanding human rights to people whom they were denied. And all of that is basic libertarian principles. And okay, we're arguing about gay marriage and okay, we spend too much money. And there's all those things, but we do live in a liberal world. And yet we have these big sets of illiberals on both left and right in the United States and in other countries, where in countries like Hungary and Turkey and India, we're moving away. It's not just Russia and China, Mexico. So my question is, liberalism works so well. Have you looked around? Do you realize what your grandparents, your great-grandparents had, even your parents? My parents had a black and white TV a long time. I have four televisions in my house of two people. You are a liberal elite living on the coasts, our libertarian elite. When I was a little boy in Kentucky, I aspired to be a coastal liberal elite. Well, look at you. You're filling that seat. Your former colleague at the Cato Institute, Tucker Carlson, who went through a libertarian phase. And he was a pretty libertarian. But he more recently has said, well, this world has given us more cheap plastic phones, et cetera, but it's not giving us meaning. And that the crisis in front of us is not one of material resources. It's one of deeper meaning. And this often gets lobbed at liberalism, that it does not reward true believers with one faith and one goal and one God and one mission. Is that a legitimate critique of liberalism? And then is it like, well, you know what? We need to work with that because that's actually, that's not a bad thing. That's a selling point. Well, to some extent, yes. It's a legitimate critique. Liberalism is a philosophy of individual autonomy. No established church, no established ideas. Well, Mao said less than 1,000 ideas bloom. But liberalism actually did that. And so, yeah, it's a significant critique, but it's a good thing. And we should defend the liberalism that allows people to find meaning in their own lives. And preachers and teachers and authors may want to help guide people to find meaning in their own lives. But we're not all going to find the same meaning. These Catholic integralists, they think somehow they're going to be able to take power and impose medieval Catholicism on the country. They're not, they're about 20% of the, all Catholics, including those that don't go to church, are 20, 25% of the country. And they think they're going to become the philosopher kings. So what we want is people being able to choose their own churches or no church, choose their own ideas and so on. But we don't want the church, the king, the Vatican, the government imposing a meaning on everybody. And that's what the liberal revolution was about. You know, it was in great part a revolution against the established churches. But the question I was getting at is, there's all these illiberals on the left, there's all these illiberals on the right, and yet liberalism endures. We do mostly live in a libertarian country, in a liberal country, in a liberal world. So something is attractive enough about liberal to resist most of these assaults. And I think it is that most people, at least in the United States, do want a world of private property and free markets, and free speech, and human rights, and freedom of abortion, and women's rights to choose and to choose jobs. And so they resist the real impositions. I recall some... But we didn't necessarily know that. I mean, it was when we think about abortion, which had been a long-standing kind of rhetorical goal of conservative Republicans, and they got their wish. I mean, the dog caught the car, and then it didn't work out for them so well. And of course, Republican operatives like Carl Rove had known all along, do not overturn Roe v. Wade, because then abortion will be a political issue in every state, and in most states, we would lose that. I remember a Democratic friend of mine saying reporters had been calling him when Justice Souter was appointed, and saying, you know, does he have any position on abortion? And it seemed pretty clear that they had picked somebody who didn't. Now that was mostly to get through the confirmation process, but it turned out he also wasn't going to overturn Roe. So the politicos knew what was there, the buboise were not informed that that was the real plan. What is, you know, as a final kind of question, what is the libertarian approach? There's always a dream that the young people, the rising generation, are finally going to recognize that they should be libertarian. And libertarianism is going to be the next youth movement. It's going to be the next thing of Lewis Rosetto, the co-founder of Wired Magazine in 1971, I think, in the New York Times Magazine co-authored a piece of libertarianism, the next youth movement. We go through this, you know, every couple of years, and at this time it's real. It's never fully happened. Can it happen or how important is it to, you know, catch people before they're 30? Well, I think it is important. I think most people do settle into a set of ideas that way. I think one problem for young people today is we libertarians, or at least we liberals, won so many freedoms for them. They're not fighting the draft. They're not fighting against the Vietnam War. They're not fighting for, well, they're back to fighting for abortion rights, I guess. We're winning on the drug war. They don't have to work after school, right? Lifestyle choices, you know, whether that's being gay or doing drag shows or going back to the land, if that's your thing. So they've gotten a lot of the freedoms that their parents didn't, and they don't realize that, this generation of young people, but also the left has really caught a lot of them with this identity politics stuff, and it started as a very noble movement, the civil rights movement, liberate gay people, and then the women's liberation movement, and then the gay rights movement, and all of that was about allowing more people to emerge into social and political and economic liberty and equality. And then many of us think things went too far, and the wrong people got control of the levers of power, and they can tell you what you can say, and they can bring you up on charges because an anonymous accusation was made, that sort of thing. So how did the left get control of that? Well, of course, people on the left do control the universities. They run most of the major media. People always talk about conservative media, liberal media, talk about the dominance of conservative media. Are you kidding? All conservative media does is criticize liberal media. They don't have any reporters. Maybe they're getting a little better at that. But there's no conservative newspaper you would buy to get the news. So that creates a world in which these young people have grown up with these ideas being pushed on them, and they seem to have accepted them, and we haven't done a good enough job of pushing back on that. This will air after this moment, but you are going to speak at the Students for Liberty Conference, which is a group, an international group that started, was started by a former Kato intern, and that brings together a couple of thousand young people from all over the world. You're talking to them. Can you kind of indicate what's the message? What's the... I'm going to say basically three things to them, which we've touched on here. One, liberalism is the most successful idea and system ever in the history of the world. It created a hockey stick in living standards, flat for 10,000 years, and then shooting up after John Locke and Adam Smith. Second, we have a problem of illiberalism around the world, and we have a problem of illiberalism lapping at our own movement. We have people calling themselves libertarians and telling Holocaust jokes on Twitter and racial jokes and cozying up to Trump and cozying up to RFK Jr. Crazy stuff going on, and that is fortunately not that much covered by the media yet, but if it ever gets more attention, it will be tremendously disappointing. And so one of the other questions we have to think about is not why are most young people left, but why are so many young purported libertarians alt-right? And I'm not sure exactly what happened there. There's always a market for scapegoating groups, whether it's the 1% or the Jews or the the queers, and that seems to have picked up a lot of people. And I do think Trump did a lot of it. Trump sort of lifted the lifted Pandora's Box, and all these things came sliming out. Unfortunately, they actually attracted people, and that's the disappointing part, not that it turns, you know, there were always racists around, but now they've got websites and they've got podcasts, and there seems to be a market for crazy, and reasonable radical libertarianism has trouble, I think, fighting back. A nuanced, you know, Russell Roberts' very thoughtful podcasts are not as big as the Tom Woods podcast, where he rails against the left and against other libertarians and so on. So there's a market for crazy on both left and right, and there is a market for center, and we're finding that at Cato, we're finding that a lot of our donors are saying, we like the fact that you're neither left nor right, you're not falling for the crap on either side, and that you're sticking to principles. And so there are people who like that, they're hard to organize. For one thing, if you have some passion, like stopping, you know, stopping trans people or stopping any possibility of hate speech, there's a passion there, whereas wanting to live your own life and not caring whether who other people marry, that is not exactly a passionate idea, you wouldn't march for that. Well, we're going to stop talking on that point. David Bose, thanks for talking to reason. Thank you.