David Boaz

David Boaz (born August 29, 1953, Mayfield, Kentucky) is the former executive vice president of the Cato Institute, an American libertarian think tank.

Boaz, a graduate of Vanderbilt University, is the former editor of The New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981.

Boaz's 1988 op-ed in The New York Times on the high cost of the drug war fueled public debate over the decriminalization of drugs.

His articles have also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate.

He has appeared on ABC's Politically Incorrect, CNN's Crossfire, NPR's Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, Fox News Channel, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.

He is the author of Libertarianism: A Primer, published in 1997 by the Free Press and described in the Los Angeles Times as "a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas."

He is also the editor of The Libertarian Reader and co-editor of the Cato Handbook for Congress (2003) and the Cato Handbook on Policy (2005).

He frequently discusses such topics as education choice, the growth of government, the ownership society, his support of drug legalization as a consequence of the individual right to self-determination, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and the rise of libertarianism on national television and radio shows.