By Trevor Kraus, Managing Editor

As you’ll see in the video below, Mario Spoltore is the Most Interesting Libertarian in the World. But he also might be the most caring. Caring — in the sense of caring for patients, which is what he’ll be doing when he finishes med school — AND caring in the sense of compassionate, friendly, loving, and down-to-earth.

Rarely has an SFL alumnus made such an impression on me. I met Mario in Madrid, at LibertyCon Europe, 2026, where he was presenting his newly published book, Healthcare Economics. He was one of the stars of the show there, and yet he treated me and my video team as if we were the stars. He was gracious and humble. He volunteered more of his precious time than we had a right to ask for.

Then, when one of our teammates mentioned she had a headache, sure enough, Mario reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out some ibuprofen tablets. “I always carry some of these, for exactly these situations,” he told her. “Take one of these, every six hours, with lots of water.”

So I have zero doubt Mario Spoltore will be a great doctor. He’s already proven himself to be a great entrepreneur (he founded his own, thriving medical company); a great philanthropist (he started a fundraiser to buy an ambulance for Ukrainian victims of war); he’s now a published author; he already was a licensed helicopter pilot; and he’s been all over the world, taking the ideas of liberty as far and wide as Japan.

All this and more make him The Most Interesting Libertarian in the World. And this is the kind of person Students For Liberty helps to educate, develop, and empower.

In Mario’s case, since he joined SFL in 2024, he has attended — and aced — our public speaking training in Poland, because he recognized that was a skill he needed to improve, and that SFL’s training would help with.

He organized an SFL event to bring the ideas of free trade and free markets to his native Italy, featuring President Javier Milei of Argentina. (“Yes, that’s me. I have to admit, it’s quite a ‘flex’” he said, with a laugh, when I showed him a photo from that event.)

Above all, the thorough understanding of economics, classical liberal philosophy, and morality that SFL encouraged in him pervades his book and his outlook on the world.

Read Mario, in his own words, from his speech that launched his book to the world:

There’s a big problem in medicine, and it’s informational asymmetry. Historically, doctors have known better than patients what’s good for them — and that’s really challenging from a libertarian perspective, because we want control over ourselves.

When a doctor says “I know what’s best for you,” that can be a big conflict with libertarian values. So doctors need to understand the patient’s perspective, not just come from on high and say “you have to do this,” but explain why they’re doing it and find a collaboration between patients and doctors.

Let me give you a practical example of this information asymmetry:

If your car breaks down, you go to a mechanic. You ask for a quote, you compare prices, maybe you Google what a carburetor does. You act like a rational consumer in a free market. But if you are having a heart attack, you don’t pull out your phone to check Google Reviews for the nearest emergency room. You don’t ask the surgeon, “Hey doc, can you give me a discount on this bypass?” You are terrified, vulnerable, and the doctor holds all the knowledge.

This massive imbalance is exactly why healthcare cannot be treated like a simple market for selling shoes. We cannot pretend to understand the details if we don’t have a general idea of how the system works — especially if we want to apply our libertarian ideas to it.

We must understand why the economics of healthcare is such a thorny issue.

It’s because it forces us to reconcile morality with economics. We must be careful to recognize what look like “moral promises” but are actually just political agendas, far removed from reality and efficiency.

Dr. Mario already could say it well. With a little help from SFL and a lot of intrinsic passion, he’s becoming a better and more effective speaker by the day.