Top Priorities versus The Big Six
How do other libertarians' ideas compare to mine?
How do the policy priorities of various libertarians differ from what I seek in advocating for The Big Six?
Drug Prohibition (end it—allow adults to make their own choices)
Education (privatize it—give the government an ever-smaller role)
Immigration (open it up—allow people to freely move and freely interact with other people)
Taxation (simplify and redirect it—efficiently tax the use of resources not the creation of resources)
War (move away from it—make postures less bellicose and violence less of an option).
Housing Development (build, baby, build—greatly reduce the obstacles and restrictions so that the owners of capital can buy, build, and reconfigure real estate as they see fit)
Let’s examine some recent posts from others on this subject along with some comparison to my framework.
The first of these is Yusuf at Longterm Liberalism interviewing Bryan Caplan, Chris Freiman, Jessica Flanigan, and Tyler Cowen. You should know that he is examining this from what is know as the Scale-Neglect-Tractability (SNT) framework.
In summary here was the list that emerged from this survey of 4 (with the number of times it was a priority noted):
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
After analyzing the experts’ lists, Yusuf goes on to make his own list in two parts:
Governing artificial intelligence to prevent stable totalitarianism
Liberalizing immigration
Free market solutions to climate change
Liberalizing housing regulation
Decarceration/drug war
Other issues that I think are extremely important but may not be considered "libertarian" include:
Other concerns with transformative artificial intelligence (particularly from accidental misuse)
Factory Farming
Bio-engineered pandemics
Nuclear risks
Voting reform
There is obviously strong overlap between my thinking and these lists. For the differences that do exists, I think the premise each list is created under separates the results.
The Big Six seeks low-hanging yet highly-desirable fruit. Even though in the SNT framework achievability is highly critical, I don’t believe it is the same as thinking of it as low-hanging. Solvability and achievability are distinct qualities. It’s the difference between knowing how to win a close football game in the closing seconds (score a touchdown) and being able to actually get to the end zone. You both need the bill in Congress to legalize narcotics and the necessary votes to pass it.
So my list leans more toward impact we can achieve—I think I am a bit more pragmatic. I think in both cases we are being sufficiently directional as opposed to destinational (explanation here), which is a great quality.
Next, let’s look at how Scott Sumner structures his list. For background, he is a lowercase and soft-L libertarian. He also tends to approach problems from a utilitarian perspective. And he fully embraces the neoliberal label.
His list is the following with some seeming prioritization within it (edited for space):
1. Ukraine/Russia and the broader war on authoritarian nationalism. [basically he wants us to fight it more strongly]
2. Immigration: Let’s have much more immigration.
3. Zoning: Abolish it and fight NIMBYism more broadly.
4. Drugs: Legalize them.
5. Abortion: Legalize it. Let mothers and doctors decide.
Second tier, but still important:
6. Identity politics: End it.
7. Free trade: End trade barriers (and that includes barriers to international services such as air travel) with countries that are not trying to conquer foreign countries.
8. Global warming: Enact a carbon tax and legalize clean infrastructure such as nuclear power.
9. Monetary policy: NGDPLT.
10. Occupational licensing: End it.
11. The FDA: Take away their regulatory powers. Limit their power to recommendations.
12. Moral Hazard: End FDIC, the GSEs, Too Big Too Fail, etc.13. Prostitution and gambling: Legalize them.
14. Public schools: Abolish them, and replace them with private schools plus vouchers.
15. Health care: Stop subsidizing with tax breaks and deregulate to reduce costs.
16. Internal trade barriers: End them.
17. Tax code: Blow it up and replace it with a progressive consumption tax plus a land tax and a carbon tax.
18: Be less cruel to (non-human) animals: This might be the single most important issue, but I’m not an animal so I don’t have a good sense of how important it is. On animal rights, I’m not yet woke.
Third tier:
19. Privatize Amtrak and lots of other transport infrastructure (airports, airport traffic control, DMV, etc.)
20. Drinking age laws. End them.
21. Free range children: Legalize them.
Existential tier:
22. Think of a way for humanity to avoid destroying billions of people via AI run amok, manmade viruses, nuclear war, etc., etc. This actually may be the number one issue, but I don’t have any policy recommendations here, which is why I put it on the bottom. It’s a separate category from issues where I do have recommendations.
Again, despite some differences including policies I would deemphasize (and one, abortion, that I would have a different position on) there is a lot of overlap here. Scott is much more specific at times than either my list or Longterm Liberalism’s.
Seeing the agreement in all of these cases gives me a sense of validation and more importantly a sense of hope that there are thoughtful people aligned behind the same causes for which I advocate.
P.S. One of the experts surveyed above, Bryan Caplan, has this related post on the distraction that focusing on policy equity or distributive outcomes has interfering with effective public policy change.
Remembering that economic growth > > > economic equity, his punchline: “Anyone who promotes equity reforms automatically impedes growth reforms.”
