Jacek Spendel

Jacek Spendel is the President of Liberty International, described as the oldest organisation promoting libertarianism worldwide. A Polish libertarian advocate, he runs educational programmes for freedom-minded students and activists around the world and argues that the ability to relocate freely between jurisdictions, to “vote with your feet”, is a truer form of democracy.

He came into the movement in 2006 as a twenty-one-year-old student attending a Liberty International conference in Prague on a scholarship, ran his first liberty camp two years later, and has since organised more than a dozen of them in several countries. He became president of the organisation in 2019.

In 2012 he founded the Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation in Poland, where he is chief executive. Its best-known programme, Project Arizona, sends young people from central and eastern Europe to the United States for an intensive fellowship in classical liberal ideas and practical advocacy.

His own argument joins the two halves of the work. Teaching the ideas matters, but so does keeping the exits open, because a person who can leave has leverage that a voter inside a single jurisdiction does not.