One week from today, I will be in Amsterdam to take part in The Price of Pride: Economic Freedom & Digital Rights, an event organized by the European Liberal Forum in cooperation with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Europe and Rainbow Platform, on the fringes of EuroPride and WorldPride Amsterdam. The event will bring together researchers, activists, policymakers, and content creators to discuss a question that is often fragmented across different academic and political debates: how do economic freedom, digital rights, personal liberty, and human dignity interact in the lives of LGBTI people?
I am particularly looking forward to the discussion because I will present our ongoing research project, Coming Out for Open Markets: Economic Freedom and LGBTI Rights, which I am co-authoring with Yuri Guaiana and Constantinos Saravakos. The project has been developed in cooperation with the European Liberal Forum, LGBTI Liberals of Europe, Fundación para el Avance de la Libertad in Spain, and KEFIM – Centre for Liberal Studies in Greece. The policy paper is now in its final revision stage, and we expect it to be published in August.
The project began from a relatively simple observation. Political discussions about LGBTI rights usually focus on legislation, constitutional protection, anti-discrimination rules, cultural attitudes, or political representation, while discussions of economic freedom tend to concentrate on property rights, regulation, taxation, entrepreneurship, trade, and the size or quality of government. Both bodies of literature are substantial, but the relationship between them receives much less attention. That separation may prevent us from seeing an important part of the institutional environment in which individuals actually exercise their freedom.
Why Economic Freedom May Matter for Personal Freedom
Economic freedom is sometimes treated as if it were concerned only with firms, investment, or aggregate growth. That interpretation is too narrow. Property rights, freedom of contract, occupational choice, entrepreneurship, and the ability to exchange voluntarily affect individuals long before their consequences appear in national income statistics. They influence whether a person can find employment outside a hostile social environment, start a business, move to another city, rent a home, accumulate savings, or build an independent life without requiring the approval of a political authority or a socially dominant group.
For minorities, these exit options can be especially important. A competitive economy does not guarantee that prejudice disappears, and it would be a mistake to present markets as an automatic cure for discrimination. Markets are composed of human beings, and human beings carry preferences, biases, traditions, and sometimes hostility into economic life. Competition can nevertheless change the cost of acting on those preferences. An employer who refuses productive workers for reasons unrelated to their ability may bear a cost when competitors are willing to employ them, while an entrepreneur who recognizes underserved consumers may have an incentive to serve people whom others neglect.
This is one reason the relationship between economic and personal liberty deserves empirical investigation rather than ideological assumption. The question is not whether every economically free society necessarily protects LGBTI people, because historical and contemporary experience plainly shows that economic institutions alone are insufficient. The more interesting question is whether the institutions associated with economic freedom can create conditions that make individual autonomy, social mobility, and private alternatives easier to sustain.
Friedman’s Warning Against an Easy Conclusion
Milton Friedman made a distinction in Capitalism and Freedom that remains useful for this research. He wrote: “History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.” The importance of the statement lies precisely in its refusal to turn a relationship into a guarantee. Markets can disperse economic power and create spaces for independent action, but political freedom also depends on legal institutions, constitutional constraints, civil society, and a culture capable of tolerating peaceful differences.
The same caution should guide any analysis of LGBTI rights. A high level of economic freedom does not logically imply strong protection of sexual minorities, just as the adoption of formal rights does not by itself ensure social acceptance or equal economic opportunity. Institutions interact. The challenge is therefore to understand whether economic freedom has an independent relationship with LGBTI inclusion after accounting for other political, legal, cultural, and developmental factors.
For me, this distinction is important because classical liberalism loses much of its intellectual value when it is reduced to a slogan. If we believe that individual liberty matters, we should be willing to test our propositions against evidence, including evidence that complicates our expectations. A serious liberal political economy should ask not only whether markets create prosperity, but also how decentralized economic institutions affect the practical ability of different individuals to make choices about their own lives.
Freedom Is More Than a Legal Category
Legal equality is indispensable, but the ability to exercise a right also depends on economic circumstances. A person may formally possess freedom of association while remaining economically dependent on an institution that punishes private choices. Someone may have legal protection against discrimination while living in a labor market with few employers and limited opportunities to move. Conversely, greater economic independence can provide individuals with alternatives when families, employers, local communities, or other institutions become restrictive.
This does not mean that every private choice is liberal merely because it occurs outside the state. Private organizations also have rights of association, contract, and expression, and conflicts between these liberties can be difficult. The purpose of our research is not to replace one simplified theory with another, but to examine how different institutional arrangements shape the opportunities available to individuals. Economic freedom is relevant because it affects the number and quality of alternatives people can realistically choose among.
This perspective also connects economic freedom with human dignity. Dignity is difficult to reconcile with a system in which adults must constantly seek political permission to work, create, exchange, or organize their private lives. At the same time, dignity cannot be reduced to consumer choice or income. A liberal order must take seriously both economic agency and civil liberty, because separating the two too sharply risks misunderstanding how freedom is experienced in everyday life.
Competition, Decentralization, and the Possibility of Exit
One of the mechanisms I find particularly interesting is decentralization. In a competitive market, economic decisions are distributed among many employers, firms, consumers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. No single actor normally possesses the authority to determine all opportunities available to an individual. This does not eliminate discrimination, but it can make discrimination less decisive when alternative relationships are available.
The possibility of exit matters here. When individuals can change employers, establish businesses, sell their skills to different clients, or relocate without prohibitive institutional barriers, they possess greater bargaining power over their own lives. Exit is not always easy, and economic inequality can make it more difficult for some people than for others. Yet reducing barriers to entry and mobility can expand the set of choices available to people who find themselves constrained by a particular organization or social environment.
From an Austrian perspective, there is also a knowledge problem. Policymakers cannot know in advance every form of association, workplace arrangement, service, or community that individuals may value. Entrepreneurship allows people to discover unmet needs and develop alternatives that central authorities may never have anticipated. This process can matter to minority groups precisely because their preferences or circumstances may be poorly represented by standardized institutions designed around majority expectations.
Digital Markets Add a New Dimension
The European Liberal Forum’s description of the Amsterdam event adds an important digital dimension to this discussion. The program will examine online harassment, platform regulation, selective taxation, restrictions affecting queer creators, and the changing economic environment of digital platforms. These issues illustrate why the boundary between economic and civil liberty has become increasingly difficult to draw.
Digital markets can create opportunities for individuals who previously faced high barriers to reaching customers, audiences, or communities. A creator can potentially build an income without relying on a traditional employer, while a small organization can communicate with people across national borders at relatively low cost. At the same time, dependence on a small number of platforms can create new vulnerabilities when rules are opaque, access is restricted, or regulation imposes disproportionate costs on particular forms of lawful activity.
The policy challenge is therefore not simply to choose between regulation and non-regulation. It is to identify which institutional arrangements protect individuals from coercion, fraud, harassment, and genuine rights violations without unnecessarily restricting peaceful expression, voluntary exchange, innovation, or market entry. That question is especially relevant when digital regulation is designed for large platforms but its costs ultimately fall on smaller creators and users with fewer resources to adapt.
What We Hope to Learn
Our project is ultimately empirical. We are interested in whether observable relationships exist between measures of economic freedom and measures of LGBTI rights and inclusion, how robust those relationships are, and which mechanisms might explain them. Correlation by itself cannot establish causality, so the interpretation of any statistical relationship must remain cautious. Economic development, democratic institutions, education, religion, social attitudes, historical experience, and regional differences may all influence both economic institutions and the treatment of LGBTI people.
This is also why interdisciplinary work is useful. Economics can help us think about incentives, competition, mobility, entrepreneurship, and institutional constraints. Political science contributes to our understanding of democratic institutions, rights, representation, and policy change. Human-rights research provides information about legal protection and the lived consequences of discrimination. Bringing these perspectives together can produce a more complete picture than treating economic and personal liberty as unrelated subjects.
I do not expect one paper to settle a question this broad. I would consider the project successful if it clarifies the mechanisms worth studying, identifies patterns that deserve further testing, and encourages researchers on both economic freedom and LGBTI rights to take the other side of the relationship more seriously. Good research should narrow some uncertainties while revealing new questions.
Looking Ahead to Amsterdam
I am looking forward to presenting this work in Amsterdam next week because the setting is particularly appropriate for the subject. The discussion will take place alongside EuroPride and WorldPride, where questions of identity, equality, expression, and human dignity will naturally receive considerable attention. Introducing economic institutions into that conversation may help broaden the discussion beyond the familiar opposition between cultural attitudes and legal rights.
For classical liberals, the connection should be worth examining carefully. Economic freedom is not valuable merely because it can increase output, and personal freedom is not something that begins only after economic questions have been settled. Both concern the ability of individuals to make meaningful choices, form voluntary relationships, pursue opportunities, and live without unnecessary coercion. The precise relationship between them is an empirical question, but it is also an important question about the kind of society liberal institutions are intended to sustain.
I am grateful to the European Liberal Forum, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom Europe, Rainbow Platform, LGBTI Liberals of Europe, Fundación para el Avance de la Libertad, and KEFIM – Centre for Liberal Studies for creating the space in which this research and discussion can develop. I am equally grateful to my co-authors, Yuri Guaiana and Constantinos Saravakos. Our policy paper is now approaching its final form, and I look forward both to the discussion in Amsterdam and to sharing the completed research after its publication in August.
Suggested References
• European Liberal Forum. (2026). The Price of Pride: Economic Freedom & Digital Rights.
• Friedman, M. (1962). Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press.
• European Liberal Forum. Research areas: A Democratic, Just and Free Europe.
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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)
Wang, H. H. (2026, July 18). Economic Freedom, LGBTI Rights, and the Price of Pride. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/07/25/economic-freedom-lgbti-rights-and-the-price-of-pride/
