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David Boaz, a writer and scholar who for nearly half a century was a leading voice of libertarianism, a political philosophy that he labored to move from the margins to the mainstream of American politics, died June 7 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 70.

His death was announced by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington where Mr. Boaz served at the time of his death as a senior fellow and executive vice president. The cause was cancer, said his partner of 30 years, Steve Miller.

Libertarianism does not fit tidily into categorizations such as liberal or conservative, but Mr. Boaz did have a tidy summary of the cause to which he devoted nearly his entire professional life. Libertarianism, he said, stands for the idea that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.

In practical policy terms, that means small government, low taxes, free enterprise and school choice, among other positions associated with the political right. It also means robust civil liberties, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the repeal of bans on drugs and prostitution, and the rejection of censorship, among stances traditionally taken by the left.

There are only a few rules: You cant hit other people and you cant take their stuff, Mr. Boaz once quipped to The Washington Post. After that, you have to make the important decisions for yourself.

Mr. Boaz said he was drawn to libertarianism during his adolescence in western Kentucky, where he acquired a twang that never fully left him. His mother had studied economics and kept on her bookshelf a copy of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a best-selling 1946 volume that articulated in laymans terms the case for an unfettered free market.

The young Mr. Boaz also consumed works such as the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a cult classic among libertarians, and The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) by U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide but invigorated the conservative movement.

(In his office at the Cato Institute, Mr. Boaz kept a Goldwater poster and two busts of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher associated with laissez-faire capitalism.)

By the end of his life, Mr. Boaz was one of the writers to whom people of his persuasion turned for their political moorings. He was the author of books including The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom (2015) and The Politics of Freedom (2008) and edited the volume The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (1997).

Mr. Boaz helped shape the course of libertarian thought from his longtime intellectual home at the Cato Institute, which he joined in 1981.

He quickly scaled the leadership ranks and was widely described as one of the key leaders who helped grow Cato from a scrappy operation into a significant presence in the Washington policy world.

Mr. Boaz contributed prolifically to newspapers including The Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He drew wide notice with a 1988 commentary published in the Times in which he argued against the criminal laws, immigration regulations and other policies enforced under the umbrella of what was often described as the war on drugs.

An antiwar song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the 60s went this way: Were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on, Mr. Boaz wrote in the op-ed. Today were waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time its a war on drugs.

In his personal life, said Tom G. Palmer, a longtime friend and colleague at Cato, Mr. Boaz was a teetotaler. He drank no alcohol, smoked no cigarettes, used no pot. His only vice, Palmer said, was Coca-Cola, which he preferred so strongly that he avoided restaurants that offered Pepsi products.

But Mr. Boaz saw anti-drug laws as a violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy. He compared them to Prohibition, which officially banned but failed to actually stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. He argued that alcohol and tobacco both legal accounted for many more deaths per year than illegal drugs did.

For libertarians, the growing contemporary movement toward the legalization of marijuana represented a significant victory; the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes in 38 states and the District and for recreational purposes in 24 states and the District.

Mr. Boaz counted another victory in the expansion of rights for same-sex couples most notably the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 finding a constitutional right for gay couples to marry, a cause that he had worked toward for decades.

But mainstream American politics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, remained, in his view, woefully distant from foundational notions of liberty.

He criticized Democrats for seeking to raise taxes and Republicans for attempting to censor books and television. Liberals who oppose school vouchers, as he interpreted their position, would deny parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, while conservatives opposed to gay rights would constrain an individuals right to marry and build a family.

He conceded that the Libertarian Party was not a very successful political party but posited that most Americans support at least some libertarian ideals.

Millions and millions of Americans, if you ask them, What do you think about drug laws; what do you think about Social Security; what do you think about taxes? theyre going to come out in a libertarian direction, he said. But theyre not going to call themselves libertarians, because libertarianism really is the basic theme of America.

David Douglas Boaz was born in Mayfield, Ky., near the Mississippi River, on Aug. 29, 1953. His mother was a homemaker. Mr. Boaz described his father, a circuit court judge, to the Washington Examiner as a Jeffersonian conservative Democrat. Reflecting on his own political evolution, Mr. Boaz said that he was a conservative before he was a libertarian.

Mr. Boaz enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1975. He landed one of his first jobs with the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization, before working as a campaign staffer for Ed Clark, a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 1978 and for U.S. president in 1980.

Besides Miller, of Arlington, Mr. Boazs survivors include a brother and a sister.

Mr. Boaz did not join the Libertarian Party, telling NPR in 2002 that he preferred to think of himself as an independent.

He found stark flaws in the Democratic Party platform and during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, remarked that among libertarians, the view was that if someone puts a gun to your head and says you have to choose between Clinton and Trump, the correct answer is, take the bullet.

But in that election, Mr. Boaz also condemned Trump for making racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign and for vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.

Mr. Boaz expressed deep distress about Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election, in which he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and opposed the appearance of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at the Libertarian Partys 2024 national convention in May.

I have friends who say Biden is the biggest spender ever and hes regulating and hes woke and how can anyone consider voting for him over Trump? Mr. Boaz told CNN in April.

And Ill say that one reason is that Biden has not tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Thats a very fundamental issue. You can add up all these [other] issues and weigh them. But the big freedom issue that Biden has over Trump, he continued, is that Trump tried to steal an election.

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David Boaz, leading voice of libertarianism, dies at 70 - The Washington Post