The Libertarian Case for Expanding the House of Representatives: A Clarification to the Confusion

This article was written by friend of the caucus and guest Daniel McCarthy, you can find him on Linkedin here

“Wait… a libertarian wants to make Congress bigger?”

This is the typical first response whenever house expansion comes up. To clarify: we Libertarians want more representatives, not more government. Libertarians fundamentally oppose concentrated power. If you believe monopolies are dangerous in the marketplace, why would you defend one in politics?

The House of Representatives was designed to dilute political power by spreading it among representatives who actually knew their constituents. When the Constitution was ratified, each member represented roughly 30,000 people. Today it’s closer to 760,000. The U.S. population has more than tripled since 1929, and yet Congress has kept the House capped at 435 seats.

For perspective, Britain seats 650 members in the House of Commons for a population about a fifth the size of ours. We are the developed world’s outlier, and no principle explains the gap. Only the cap does.

The Cap Is Not a Founding Choice

The 435 number is not in the Constitution. It comes from the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, passed after the 1920 census set off a fight over rural-versus-urban power. Rather than settle it, Congress froze the number and dodged the fight. The cap we live under is a nearly century-old political compromise, not a design principle.

The framers wanted the opposite. The Anti-Federalists warned that the House was too small to represent the people. The Federalists answered in Federalist 55 and 58 by pointing to a chamber that would grow with the country. And the very first amendment Congress ever proposed, sent to the states in 1789 alongside the Bill of Rights, set a formula for House size. It is still technically pending. Expanding the House does not break with the founding. It returns to it.

If you want a target, the math is not mysterious, and the whole range of serious proposals points the same direction. The cautious version is the “cube root rule,” which describes how most national legislatures are actually sized and puts the House around 690. I would go further. Start with the Wyoming rule, which sizes every district to the population of the smallest state, then cut that district in half so Wyoming itself gets two seats. The House lands near 1,149, and each member represents roughly 290,000 people instead of 760,000. That is still larger than the districts the founders knew, and still larger than the vast majority of other nations, but it is a fraction of what we tolerate now, and it is close enough to bring retail politics back within reach.

A chamber that large would operate differently, and that is the point. Diffuse power is harder to capture than concentrated power. We also no longer need every member crowded into a single building for the House to function. Modern technology lets representatives collaborate, debate, and vote without sharing a room. Most of the year they could remain in their own districts, among the people they represent, instead of relocating to Washington and absorbing its incentives. A House that lives in its districts sits physically closer to voters and their needs, and further from a lobbying culture that runs on proximity, access, and the Washington social circuit. That is decentralization in the most literal sense.

Perverse Incentives

A representative who serves 30,000 people can meet with them. They can knock on doors, hold town halls, and build trust one conversation at a time.

A representative who serves 760,000 people cannot.

That representative needs television ads, digital marketing, consultants, polling firms, fundraising operations, and millions of dollars. Politics stops being a conversation and becomes an industry. This requires no shadowy cabal and no secret conspiracy. Incentives are enough.

When representation becomes scarce, political influence becomes valuable. The people with the resources to buy that influence naturally gain the loudest voice. Big Pharma protects its patents, defense contractors lobby for the next weapons program, entertainment companies extend copyrights, financial institutions shape banking regulations. Every major industry with billions on the line invests heavily in Washington because the return on investment is enormous. The voters are still involved, but they are treated as an audience to persuade rather than citizens to represent. This helps explain why government keeps growing regardless of which party wins. Both major parties promise to fight special interests, and both depend on them.

The Political Market Artifice

Libertarians argue that markets work because competition prevents monopolies from becoming entrenched. Politics is no different. Artificially limiting the number of representatives creates artificial scarcity, artificial scarcity creates rents, political rents attract lobbyists, lobbyists write legislation, and government grows.

None of these examples get fixed by a vote on House size, per se. What changes is the incentive gradient that produces them. Intellectual property law is one of the clearest illustrations.

The Constitution authorizes patents and copyrights only for limited times, and only to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. The purpose was not to create permanent monopolies. It was to encourage innovation. Instead, copyright terms have been extended repeatedly over the last century, often just as valuable works approached the public domain. Pharmaceutical companies routinely engage in patent evergreening, making minor changes that delay generic competition for years. Software patents are more often used to threaten competitors with expensive litigation than to protect any real invention. Whether you are talking about Disney, Pfizer, or a patent troll, the pattern is the same: politically connected incumbents use government-granted privileges to reduce competition. A free market cannot exist when government decides who gets decades of legal exclusivity.

Finance and Foreign Affairs

The same incentives help explain American foreign policy. Poll after poll shows Americans are weary of endless wars and open-ended military commitments, yet Washington almost always finds another intervention, another deployment, another emergency requiring another appropriation.

Peace is popular, but war is profitable.

When the benefits of intervention are concentrated among well-organized interests and the costs are spread across taxpayers, future generations, and military families, Washington predictably chooses intervention. Again, no conspiracy required. Just incentives.

What Does Expanding the House Do For Us?

Expanding the House changes the economics of politics.

The obvious objection is that more lawmakers just means more doors for lobbyists to walk through. It is a fair worry, and it is why this case does not rest on making Congress harder to buy by sheer headcount. Leadership and committee chairs remain pressure points no matter the size of the chamber. The real shift is in campaign economics.

A candidate running in a district of a few hundred thousand can win on retail politics and small-dollar money. A candidate in a district of three-quarters of a million cannot, and the price of entry is exactly what makes the median member dependent on the interests who can pay it. Shrink the district and you loosen that dependency at the root.

From there the rest follows. Smaller districts mean cheaper campaigns, and cheaper campaigns mean ordinary people have a realistic chance to run. Representatives become more accessible. Constituents become harder to ignore. And the value of buying political influence falls, because political influence is no longer artificially scarce.

That is exactly how competition is supposed to work.

This is not about making government bigger. It is about making political power harder to capture. If libertarians believe concentrated economic power should face competition, we should believe the same about political power. Expanding the House is one of the few reforms that actually decentralizes authority. It makes representation more local, it makes campaigns less dependent on massive fundraising, and it changes the incentive gradient that makes government valuable as a tool for rent-seeking. I believe that is a reform worth fighting for.