freedom festival

3718 days ago

The Freedom Festival – A Libertarian Weekend gives me mixed feelings, remembering Shoreditch

A friend of mine from my Shoreditch days says that he is heading off to a weekend of eating drinking and libertarianism on the 15th March and would I care to go. It looks great but then comes the libertarian dilemma.

If you are a pure thinking individual I would urge you to check out the Freedom Festival here

There are some entertaining speakers: Mark Littlewood, Norman Tebbit, Toby Young, Dan Hannan and I am sure that it will be great fun. However:

a) I am not convinced that this is ideologically pure enough for a true libertarian. I see there is a debate “is immigration a boon or a burden?” If you score straight A’s on the Ron Paul crystal pure test you would not need that debate, the answer is obvious. There is another debate “is the conservative family falling apart?” Heck, when did we join that family to start with?

b) Maybe I am a libertarian because I hate the idea of being organised. One of the joys of Shoreditch life right inside the triangle was that the residents were a pretty crazed bunch. On a day to day basis I had nothing in common with the Lebanese cookery writer for the FT, the fat American artist gay couple, the super geek IT guy from Morgan Stanley or the Australian architect with his French wife who’d been there since the sixties. I struggle to remember the other residents but occasionally we’d come together like a Wild West town

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