Suppose that you want to recruit people to join a prototype seastead in the middle of the ocean. How do you select for the right crew members?
After all, if you select crew members who have incompatible values and personalities, the higher the risk of conflict and fighting. Such conflict will make life miserable, and may result in crew deaths due to failure to cooperate.
So, to reduce potential conflict, you decide to select for people who are sincere libertarians. (I know, I know, this sounds like the setup to a joke, given how much libertarians fight with each other. But please humor me.)
How would you go about deciding who to admit to the crew? How do you know if someone sincerely holds libertarian beliefs?
I propose that there are five main screening techniques:
Economic literacy
Scissor questions
Costly signals
Social proof
Genetic Testing (speculative)
Which technique to be used will depend on the person being screened, budget and staffing availability.
Economic literacy
Most people don't bother to learn even basic economic facts, or anything about the libertarian economic literature. So you can eliminate most people just by giving them a test of economic literacy. For example:
What is the population of the US?
What is the GDP of the US?
How big is the national debt?
What percentage of the Federal budget is spent on each of these categories:
Department of Defense
Medicare / Medicaid
Social Security
Foreign AID
Can they accurately explain economic concepts like:
inflation
comparative advantage
revealed preference
rational ignorance
unseen vs seen
opportunity cost
the broken window fallacy
socialist calculation debate
Cantillion effect
relationship between supply and demand
Can they summarize the contributions of prominent libertarian thinkers?
What are the favored immigration policies of Bryan Caplan and Hans Herman Hoppe? How do they differ from each other?
What point was Bastiat trying to make in his essay the "Candle Maker's Petition"?
Why did Ayn Rand consider selfishness a virtue?
Who said: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
Of course, someone hostile to libertarians might be able to give good answers to these questions, if they've spent much time sparring with libertarians. So, for critical roles, additional screening techniques should be used.
In addition, many would be residents (such as young people, migrants) might not yet have had the opportunity to gain such knowledge.
Scissor questions
Scissor questions are questions where libertarian answers sharply differ from the answers that a typical conservative or progressive would make.
Statements that would likely eliminate conservatives:
It should be legal:
...for a father to have a sexual relationship with his adult daughter.
...to produce / sell photorealistic synthetic child porn.
...to buy / sell heroin from vending machines.
...to hire someone from Mexico just as easily as it is to hire someone from New Mexico.
...to drive without a license.
...to hire a doctor to euthanize yourself, even if you are young and physically healthy.
...to auction off the rights to adopt your child.
Statements that would likely eliminate progressives:
It should be legal:
...for an obstetrician to refuse to perform an abortion.
...to refuse to hire a man solely because he is black.
...to refuse to sell a house to a black family, just because they are black.
...to buy machine guns, assuming you have no criminal record.
...to refuse to serve a black man at a restaurant, solely becuse he is black.
...to be free to sell one's kidney to the highest bidder.
...to allow merchants to raise their prices on essential goods (food, fuel, water) as high as they like during a natural disaster.
...to offer medical services without a license.
Now, of course, a motivated person could fake the "correct" answers. However, there are ways to structure survey questions such that you can determine if the test taker is lying.
For example, a drug use survey might include a "red herring" question about a drug that doesn't actually exist. If the survey taker claims that they have taken this non-existent drug, then they are mistaken or lying, and the surveyor can follow up with additional questions to see which is the case. (Pew, 2024) (Cao, 2019)
Costly social signals
Someone who is not a libertarian is unlikely to have spent much time involved in the libertarian movement. Sincere libertarians will likely be able to answer yes to one or more of the following questions (and document their claims):
Have they given significant amounts of time and money to libertarian organizations?
Have they publicly defended unpopular libertarian policies even in the face of widespread denunciation?
Have they published significant numbers of pro-libertarian works (essays, books, podcasts, webcomics, videos, music)?
Social Proof
People who have been involved in the libertarian movement for a long time probably know many other libertarians. If you are also an active libertarian, your social circles probably overlap to at least some degree.
The more someone has overlapping trusted libertarians in their social network, the more likely they are to be a libertarian.
Some individuals will have not had the opportunity to demonstrate any of these "proof of libertarian" hurdles. For example, an 18 year old, male, impoverished immigrant from Venezuela may never have been exposed to libertarian ideas before.
Such an individual could be given a trial period to demonstrate their libertarian bonafides by learning the theory/history of libertarian thought and working on libertarian projects (such as doorknocking for a political campaign, translating articles into Spanish, etc.) After the trial period, they should then have a body of work and social endorsements on which they can be judged.
Genetic Testing
Twin studies suggest that 30-60% of the variance in social and political attitudes can be explained by genetic influences. (Hatemi, 2014).
While I doubt there is a "libertarian gene", there are probably a set of genes that incline someone toward libertarian beliefs.
Testing for these traits is currently speculative, but with advances in:
our understanding of the neurobiology of belief
polygenic risk screening tools
...it may soon be possible to test embryos for the likelihood that they will hold libertarian beliefs as adults.
For example, individuals born with genes that code for high IQ, high disagreeableness, autism, introversion, low disgust sensitivity, low empathy, and anti-authoritarianism may well grow up to have a propensity for libertarian beliefs.
(Hatemi, 2014) - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4038932/
(Pew, 2024 ) - https://www.pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions/