What Are the Most Important Libertarian Priorities? I Asked 4 Experts

I asked Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Jessica Flanigan, and Chris Freiman. Here's what they thought.

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Imagine going to the doctor’s office with an array of ailments. You have high blood pressure, low bone density, high cholesterol, and a suite of other conditions.

Ideally, you want all of your afflictions to be treated. But what if you’re faced with serious tradeoffs? What if the doctor can only give you two drugs at a time? What if, by increasing the dosage of one of those drugs, we have to decrease the dosage of another?

To the extent that we want to treat society’s ills, whether we’re worried about poverty, healthcare, pandemics, or anything else, we are similarly faced with tradeoffs. Money, labor, time, and political capital that is spent on one problem cannot be spent on another.

Which brings us to my ideological backyard: libertarianism.

Libertarians, as I’ve previously argued, have a huge prioritization problem. There is no formal apparatus, research program, or organization that rigorously studies what the most important problems are, using methods like the SNT Framework. To be fair, I’m quite confident that progressives, conservatives, and other ideologies don’t do this either.

We can therefore expect, by default, for such ideological movements to be wasting colossal amounts of time and resources. This is because some problems are not 2x or 5x, but 1000x more important than others. Libertarian priorities are no exception. 

So in order to make sure that our political or non-profit efforts aren’t being put to waste, we need to get a decent sense for which libertarian issues are the most important. This can help us determine which issues to invest more resources in, and perhaps, which issues we should be less willing to compromise on.

In that vein, I’ve asked 4 libertarian scholars who were familiar with the SNT Framework to rank what they believe the most important libertarian priorities are: Bryan Caplan, Chris Freiman, Jessica Flanigan, and Tyler Cowen.

The question I asked them was the same:

“What do you think are some plausible answers for ‘best libertarian issue areas to work on’ based on this framework?”

Below, I’ll show their answers, I’ll discuss why they had so much in common, and I’ll conclude with my own list of what I think are the most important libertarian priorities.

Spoiler alert: Nearly all of them had immigration and housing on their list.

Some disclaimers: (1) I slightly altered the wording in some of their answers for the sake of maintaining consistency. For example, I standardized the answers “YIMBY,” “deregulate housing” and “liberalizing housing regulation” under “liberalizing housing regulation.” (2) I added notes in [brackets] for the sake of clarity/context. (3) I’m mostly focused on libertarian priorities in the US in this piece. 

The Biggest Libertarian Priorities, According to Libertarian Scholars

Bryan Caplan

1. Liberalizing immigration.

2. Liberalizing housing regulation.

3. Austerity!  Searching for wasteful spending and eliminating it.

4. Means-testing, starting with Social Security and Medicare.

5. Ending Covid regulation at all levels of government.

Tyler Cowen

1. Liberalizing immigration

2. Liberalizing housing regulation

3. Foreign policy

Jessica Flanigan

[She gave a thorough response to my email, which I’ll include at the bottom as a footnote

¹

]

1. Aid to the global poor [includes liberalizing immigration and free trade]

2. Pharmaceutical Innovation [includes more research on IP]

3. Research into air pollution and environmental externalities

4. Rights during Childbirth/Child-friendly economic policy

5. Cultural issues [promoting openness and toleration]

Chris Freiman

[He noted: “These are listed roughly in order of priority, but I say that without much confidence”]

1. Liberalizing immigration

2. Decarceration (which of course includes ending the drug war, but goes beyond that to all causes of mass incarceration)

3. Pharmaceutical Deregulation

4. Liberalizing housing regulation

5. Free Trade

Now let’s see what their lists have in common.

A Pattern Emerges

I’m going to list out all the issues they mentioned once again. This time, I’ve also indicated how many of the four scholars put that issue into their own list (including nested categories - see footnote 1).

• Liberalizing immigration - 4

• Liberalizing housing regulation - 3

• Pharmaceutical Deregulation - 2

• Free Trade - 2

• Austerity - 1

• Means-testing - 1

• Ending Covid regulation - 1

• Decarceration/drug war - 1

• Foreign policy - 1

• Air pollution and environmental externalities - 1

• Rights during childbirth/child-friendly economic policy - 1

• Cultural issues [promoting openness and toleration] - 1

All four scholars mentioned immigration as being a high-priority issue. Three out of the four scholars mentioned housing regulation. Half of the scholars mentioned free trade and pharmaceutical policy.

It should come as no surprise that immigration and housing in particular were so prominently featured in this list. I acknowledge that there may be selection bias here (I only reached out to libertarian scholars familiar with the SNT Framework), but there are good reasons to prioritize these two issues.

The reasons why we should support liberalizing housing and immigration are quite similar to one another, as has been pointed out in this blogpost by Bryan Caplan. So for the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on immigration. How might a libertarian who is reasoning through the Scale/Neglect/Tractability Framework arrive at the conclusion that immigration liberalization should be prioritized?

Why Prioritize Immigration?

Scale

The global economic gains we could expect from thorough immigration liberalization are mind-boggling. If the world removed all immigration barriers, some estimates suggest that the total amount of global wealth would roughly double over a year. Even under more conservative assumptions, we could expect global GDP to increase by 40-60%.

For those who don’t have a sense for how big these numbers are, they’re enormous! This is pretty much the only economic policy intervention that creates such massive gains in GDP.

Keep in mind that global GDP isn’t just some fancy meaningless number. It’s a time-tested measurement of human prosperity that strongly correlates with all kinds of outcomes that we value, from education to happiness.

Immigration expands global wealth because of a fundamental factor of production in economics: labor. Right now, hundreds of millions of people are needlessly languishing in desperate poverty. Some of them are very highly skilled and others have more common skills. But in any case, whatever capabilities they do have are being wasted because they’re trapped in countries where they can’t reach their potential.

Just by moving prospective immigrants from low-productivity areas to higher-productivity areas, those people are stupendously better off. Sometimes, just by moving to a country with better institutions, a person facing desperate poverty may make 15x more income than before, even adjusting for cost of living.

How can they make 15x more? Not by stealing money from native-born citizens, but by literally creating new wealth that didn’t exist before. For an intuitive explanation of this phenomenon, check out Bryan Caplan’s Antarctican Farmers analogy.

It’s also important to note that full open borders isn’t necessary for us to accrue astonishingly high benefits. Even returning US immigration policy to what it was before the 1920s would supercharge our economy.

But of course, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. How might we compare the scale of immigration liberalization with that of other issues?

The great thing about immigration is that it gives people access to rights that they may not have previously had. Think free speech is important? Then allow people to migrate to countries with more free speech. Think religious liberty is important? How about gun rights? Then allow people to migrate to countries with better religious liberties and gun rights. So on and so forth.

For a simple (and admittedly very crude) model of how this works, let’s say we rate US free speech protections at a 7/10. 7/10 is not perfect, but you’d still be hard pressed to find countries with substantially better speech protections than the US. That means that a majority of the world - billions of people - live in a country with much worse speech protections.

By allowing more immigration, we are letting people who might otherwise languish in a country that’s rated 2/10 on free speech move to a country that’s 7/10 on free speech. For those immigrants, we’re creating a much bigger improvement than going from 7/10 to 9/10 for native-born citizens (on a per-capita basis). And furthermore, we’re creating analogous improvements in gun rights, property rights, and a whole host of other rights that libertarians care about.

Consider also how immigration restriction constitutes rights-violations on multiple libertarian grounds. Owners of property should have the right to invite anyone they want to live with them, so long as that individual is not a fugitive or carrying a contagious disease. Likewise, businesses should be able to hire whomever they want, regardless of where that person was born.

By limiting immigration, we aren’t just limiting the rights of immigrants. We are limiting the rights of Americans (or citizens of other receiving countries) to freely associate.

For these reasons and many more, we should appreciate the enormity of the “libertarian” benefits gained by liberalizing immigration, as compared with other issues. 

One could, of course, object to the benefits of liberalized immigration by claiming it will brings harms, from crime, to lowered wages, to terrorism, to institutional collapse. For a brief treatment of these concerns, check out this piece by The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh. In it, he argues that such concerns are unfounded and overblown. The benefits of well-planned immigration liberalization are clear. The harms are questionable.

That’s how one could reason through immigration liberalization via the Scale dimension of the SNT Framework. But what about Neglectedness? Does the United States already have a quite open immigration system? Are there hundreds of millions of libertarian donor dollars going to high-impact organizations that push for immigration liberalization?

The answer to both of these questions is a resounding “no.”

Neglect

The United States is one of the freest countries in the world. That essentially means that the US already dedicates significant resources to protecting valuable liberties. The court system already does a lot to protect free speech and gun rights, for instance, especially compared to the rest of the world.

But with respect to immigration rights? The US is not even close to being one of the freest countries to immigrate to. We’re towards the bottom of OECD countries when it comes to metrics like net foreign inflows per capita or foreign born population per capita.

When it comes to highly-effective organizations being leveraged toward liberalizing immigration, we similarly see that it’s quite neglected. Most US immigration organizations focus on protecting the rights of immigrants already here. Very few focus on changing our immigration system to become more open.

There aren’t nearly as many resources – especially in the libertarian non-profit ecosystem – that are being leveraged toward immigration liberalization as there are being leveraged toward issues like free speech. It also seems that far fewer think tanks, non-profits, and other types of organizations support substantial immigration liberalization than support protecting gun rights (in a country that already has some of the freest gun laws in the world).

For this and other reasons, I think it’s fair to say that both among libertarian non-profits and society at-large, immigration is far more neglected than it should be. 

Now, onto Tractability.

Tractability

Tractability is probably the weakest aspect of immigration liberalization in the SNT Framework. The kinds of ambitious immigration-expanding proposals that could bring about these benefits sit well-outside the Overton Window at the moment.

On the other hand, serious efforts to liberalize immigration that include creative compromises or key-hole solutions haven’t really been attempted. Some such efforts could be more successful than we would otherwise think.

A Tentative Verdict on Immigration as a Priority

On balance, I think it’s fair to say that due to the vast Scale and Neglectedness of immigration liberalization, despite lower Tractability, it still comes out as a very important libertarian cause area.

I’m not making the argument that immigration should be libertarians’ number one priority. For what it’s worth, I do not think it should be. See the end of this piece for my current list of libertarian priorities.

Rather, I’m highlighting the kind of reasoning we should be using when comparing the importance of different interventions. It’s not enough to just make vague guesses at what issues are most important. It’s not enough to say to ourselves “since free speech is necessary for everything in a free society, it must therefore be our highest priority.” 

We instead have to do the rigorous work of making comparisons using methods like the SNT Framework.

Concluding Thoughts and My Own List

My goal here was not to create some objective list of “the most important libertarian priorities.” Perhaps more mainstream libertarian issues like gun rights or reducing income taxes actually should be closer to the top of the list. Adjudicating that issue is outside of the scope of this piece.

The goal was to argue that we shouldn’t just treat such prioritization as a purely subjective question either. When we claim that one issue is more important than another, it should be based on the reasoning of scale, neglect, and/or tractability. 

Thinking about issues in these ways may or may not lead to some convergence on what libertarians should prioritize. But at the very least, it requires us to spell out our reasoning more carefully. To voice beliefs that we may have simply held as assumptions. To question just how sure we are that one particular issue is more important than another.

My impression is that such an in-depth exercise has not been executed as a research program within libertarian organizations. Whereas the effective altruist community dedicates many of its resources trying to improve meta-level cause prioritization, at the moment, the libertarian community dedicates essentially zero resources to this important task.

It’s time we approach the crucial question of which issues to prioritize with a lot more rigor.

I’ll conclude with my own list of “most important libertarian priorities.” Let me know what you think in the comments!

My List

1. Governing artificial intelligence to prevent stable totalitarianism

2. Liberalizing immigration

3. Free market solutions to climate change

4. Liberalizing housing regulation

5. Decarceration/drug war

Other issues that I think are extremely important but may not be considered "libertarian" include:

1. Other concerns with transformative artificial intelligence (particularly from accidental misuse)

2. Factory Farming

3. Bio-engineered pandemics

4. Nuclear risks

5. Voting reform

These lists are pretty rough and subject to change, but they reflect my current state of thinking as of August, 2022. In future pieces on Longterm Liberalism, I will explain the reasoning behind some of these rankings.

1. The following is a block quote from Dr. Jessica Flanigan - her response to my email. I found it both thorough and well-stated, so I wanted to include it in the post.

1.  Aid to the global poor- Libertarians should advocate more for supporting markets and promoting economic liberty in the developing world and they should also advocate for free trade and open borders. The neglected aspect of this cause within the libertarian movement is probably supporting markets and economic freedom in developing contexts, or as a first step, supporting research into how they could accomplish this. One promising area of advocacy and research here might relate to crypto?

2. Pharmaceutical Innovation - Same as my previous answer, though IP is tricky for libertarians and so IP is an area where more thought/research is needed IMO. 

3. Research into air pollution and environmental externalities: This is a case where I think EA orgs are on it but libertarians don’t talk as much about externalities. But they can also a huge difference through policy or technology. See e.g. the deregulation of nuclear micro reactors or the free market environmentalist types. 

4. Rights during Childbirth/Child-friendly economic policy- Just as EA’s overlook the value of getting more people in both rich and poor countries to have kids/more kids, so do libertarian. For libertarians, the obvious areas for progress involve changing labor and tax policy to make it easier for people to have kids and also advocating for more birth options and better protections for women's rights during childbirth. How to care for children is a tricky philosophical question for libertarians but there are plenty of libertarian-ish things they can do to support families more than the status quo.

5. Cultural Issues: This is lower on the list for me because I’m not sure how tractable it is, but I think organizations like FIRE are doing great work for higher ed and it would be interesting for libertarians to think more about how they could promote cultures of toleration and openness in other private contexts. Libertarians are often very focused on public policy and the state, but the authoritarianism of these institutions is often driven by authoritarian attitudes in the broader culture. This kind of work could include things like working for the destigmatization of sex work, resisting nationalism, or celebrating what some people complainingly refer to as neoliberal or consumer culture.