Takeaways from FREOPP's 2023 Freedom & Progress Conference

Traveling to conferences is a big part of my job at FREOPP. I travel to conferences related to my public policy research in health care, fiscal policy, and bitcoin. I travel to conferences about broader currents in American politics and policy. I travel to conferences to raise money to support the work of FREOPP’s twenty-plus scholars. But I can honestly say that my favorite conference every year is FREOPP’s own.

Am I biased? Maybe. But as I reflect on FREOPP’s 2023 Freedom & Progress conference, held in November in Washington, D.C., I was struck by how many of our attendees felt the same way.

What makes F&P special? Several things.

First, our focus. The Freedom & Progress conference centers exclusively on how individual liberty and economic freedom can improve the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the ladder. That, of course, is FREOPP’s mission, but it’s also the mission of many other thinkers, activists, journalists, and philanthropists across America. F&P is the place where all of these individuals can convene in person and build deeper relationships and collaborations with each other.

Second, our content. I’ve been struck by the number of people who came up to me at F&P and told me something along the lines of, “Avik, I go to so many conferences. And I don’t think I’ve been to one with better sessions than this one.” The quality of our content stems in part from our unique focus, as discussed above. But it’s also because we take great care to curate high-quality conversations among smart people who are committed to improving social mobility, but have different views as to how to achieve it.

Some highlights for me were “Redesigning the Safety Net” with FREOPP’s Michael Tanner and Aparna Mathur and Heritage’s Robert Rector and “The Conservative Case Against Free Markets” with Tim Carney of AEI, Julius Krein of American Affairs, and Ben Domenech of The Spectator. Oren Cass of American Compass debated Bryan Riley of the National Taxpayers Union on “Free Trade and Blue Collar Americans.” 

Other panels tackled health care, energy, housing, education, policing, affirmative action, bitcoin, the administrative state, and foreign policy. Lots of people were buzzing around our conversation on “Freedom and the Rising Generations,” with Alexandra Hudson, Casey Given, Daniel Di Martino, and Marshall Kosloff. And a crowd favorite was our session with George Will and Matthew Continetti on “The Moral Case for Freedom.” (We will be posting videos of all the sessions at fp2023.freopp.wpengine.com over the next few weeks.)

The third factor that makes Freedom & Progress unique is our optimism. Since we founded FREOPP in 2016, one thing we’ve repeatedly learned is how ennobling it is to gather people together who believe that the most important thing about freedom is what it can do for other people. All of us want to belong to a cause that is greater than ourselves. A common refrain I hear from people who attend F&P is how inspired they are by every session they attend. 

A highlight of the conference was our inaugural dinner for the Frederick Douglass Prizes honoring exceptional leadership in expanding freedom and progress. (The title of our conference comes from a speech Frederick Douglass gave in 1870 at a celebration for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in which Douglass exclaimed, “I never intend to belong to any other than the party of freedom and progress!”)

This year’s winners were former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, for their essential roles in advancing universal education savings accounts. On the national level, no one has done more than DeVos—through both activism and philanthropy—to advance education freedom in the 21st century.

And Ducey will go down in history for his role in enacting a universal ESA bill in Arizona, where every parent now has the ability to determine the way in which his or her children are educated. ESA reform is something we are particularly invested in at FREOPP, because FREOPP Senior Fellow Dan Lips is the one who first proposed universal ESAs in a 2005 paper. We are all so proud to see Dan’s life work finally come to life.

The revolution in education freedom is important not only because of the millions of low- and middle-income families who will benefit from it. It’s also important because it contravenes the media-fueled narrative that it’s pointless to advance liberty because America is a hopeless country run by terrible people.

There is, of course, good reason to be dissatisfied with many politicians. But as Doug Ducey and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu demonstrated at our conference, our country is also blessed with fine public servants who are achieving real gains for their constituents by showing how freedom can make their lives better.

There are lots of conferences where people express their dissatisfaction with the state of American politics on both the left and the right. F&P convenes the group of thinkers, activists, journalists, and philanthropists who are building a constructive alternative to the status quo.

If you didn’t join us this year, I hope you will in 2024.

Happy Thanksgiving,