“Don’t Just Stand There, Undo Something”: Libertarians Dissent from the Reagan Revolution, 1980–88

In the waning years of the Reagan administration, prominent libertarian scholars and activists gathered at the Cato Institute to register their dissent with Reagan and to chart a new course forward. As befit the conference theme, “Assessing the Reagan Years,” libertarians condemned Reagan for failing to reduce taxes and regulations, increasing U.S. intervention overseas, and raising government expenditures. Clarence Thomas explained that libertarians’ problem lay in their “failure to enunciate a principled understanding of what we were about; to identify the meaning of individual rights and how we might best defend them.” At conferences like this, libertarians maintained a voice of dissent outside of the Reagan administration, calling on the administration to be more radical and to follow more free-market policies. Contrary to their own assessment, libertarians were very influential in the Reagan administration, as several prominent libertarians–including Martin Anderson, William Niskanen, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Poole–pushed their anti-statist agenda from the seat of government. This paper argues that libertarians’ success in fact lay in their ability to straddle the line between insiders and outsiders : both anti-political activists who wanted no hand in politics, and key movers in the Reagan administration. The life and work of Robert Poole in particular provides a window into the relationship of the libertarian movement to the Reagan administration, as Poole served as both a specialist in transportation policy under Reagan, while acting as Senior Editor of the libertarian movement’s central publication, Reason.