Archetype
We estimate roughly 2.5% of people fit this profile — about 1 in 40.
You believe free markets and personal liberty are the best tools for helping the vulnerable. Open borders and free trade lift people from poverty better than government programs.
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The thinkers whose ideas this type descends from. Most lived in other eras and never identified with it.
384–322 BCE
Treat human flourishing and practical wisdom as the point of political and economic life, and markets turn into means toward human ends rather than ends in themselves — the warmer side of liberty-focused thinking, and the side you take.
1632–1704
Locke put consent at the root of legitimate government — rights belong to the individual, and property is not the state's to seize at will. You treat that as the floor and lean on gentler, later traditions to build warmth on top of it.
1711–1776
Ground morality in sentiment and sympathy, as Hume did, and you get a way to think about markets and freedom in terms of flourishing rather than abstract principle. A Treatise of Human Nature is the foundation under your instincts.
1723–1790
Most people cite the other Smith. This is the one who saw markets as engines of prosperity rooted in human sympathy and moral institutions — means, never ends. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the half of him your worldview kept.
1748–1832
A policy is only as good as what it actually does to human well-being — above all the well-being of the worst off. That humanitarian core of utilitarianism, stripped of the cold arithmetic Bentham is caricatured for, is yours.
1801–1850
Bastiat framed the market not as a mere efficiency mechanism but as an engine of human flourishing — and held that free exchange benefits the poor and the working class most of all. That humanitarian reading of trade runs back through him to you.
Public figures associated with this position today. Listed for recognition, not endorsement.
Freer human movement isn't a slogan here but a case built from evidence — Nowrasteh's work at Cato marshals economic and empirical arguments for open borders, made in numbers rather than sentiment. You'd rather win the migration argument on data than on feeling.
b. 1953
Build a company on free markets and a stakeholder ethic at once and you've arrived at Mackey's Conscious Capitalism — business defended not as a necessary evil but as a moral good. Whole Foods was the proof of concept for the argument you carry.
b. 1962
Market thinking gets its most restless public voice in Cowen — blogs, books, and podcasts that make the case accessible while needling complacency, stagnation, and wherever a culture's dynamism has stalled. That probing habit is the part of him you carry.
b. 1973
When you argue that a market-friendly welfare state is no contradiction in terms, you're taking Wilkinson's 'liberaltarian' turn — the deliberate break from libertarianism's old alliance with the right. That fusion runs straight through your politics.
The intellectual tradition this type is rooted in.
Traditions reached through the thinkers above — the more of them a tradition claims, the more this type leans on it.
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