David Boaz

David Boaz is the executive vice president of the influential libertarian U.S think tank the Cato Institute. He has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement.

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• 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?