The people who could usually be counted on to provide "a pox on both your houses" commentary on the Republicans asking Strzok about his adulterous affair with Page and Democrats like MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, claiming that her fellow Vowel-Impaired American Strzok is a "Patriot," are in Las Vegas with 2,000 of the like minded at the annual FreedomFest.
FreedomFest, though not a partisan conference - stages here were shared by Republicans like Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Thomas Massie, proselytizing non-voters like reason magazine's Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Libertarian Party candidates and officers like LP national chair Nicholas Sarwark, 2012 Veep candidate Judge Jim Gray, and former Governors William Weld and Gary Johnson - actually had more major libertarian political figures in attendance than last week's Libertarian Party national convention in New Orleans.
Last year on one flight from D.C. to Las Vegas, FreedomFest passengers included FOX News contributor John Tamny, the national executive director of the Libertarian Party, and one of the directors of a non-profit dedicated to promoting the ideas of Ayn Rand. This year on one flight one could find columnist George F. Will (this year's keynote speaker) in first class, and back in coach, Veronique de Rugy, one of those economist at George Mason University with a Koch brothers funded berth that has groups on the Left upset, and a number of staffers of free market think tanks, responsible for running the 90 booths pitching the attendees.
Will and the other speakers addressed - from their transcendent "pox on both your houses" perch - issues not of the immediate moment, instead of the Strzok/Page testimonies or Trump's European junket. Will's keynote praised the current polarization in American politics, pointing out that consensus politics has allowed Americans to ignore fundamental issues, like the looming debt and entitlement crisis. (A "pre-political" Donald Trump was the keynote speaker in 2015.) In another panel Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) denounced growing budget deficits under a Republican President and Republican Congress.
Everybody in this lane politically wants to pitch the FreedomFest crowd, who skew to wealthier, older libertarian couples who like to donate and make investments. Imagine a kind of Burning Man for gold bugs who want to keep their clothes on and stay indoors. Exhibitors are roughly half investment opportunities, half political groups, including political magazines like the biggest libertarian magazine, reason. If you aren't either loaded or begging for money, you feel rather out of place.
Reason is a co-sponsor of this year's FreedomFest (convention theme: "Where is the voice of reason?") in part to celebrate reason's 50th year of publication. The Reason Foundation's president, David Nott, as well as two of its four original founders, engineer Robert Poole, and lawyer Manny Klausner, are here meeting fans - and potential donors. For this year reason also folded the awards ceremony for the Bastiat Prize for libertarian journalism into a closing night reception emceed by FOX Business's Kennedy.
There were also awards for the 8th annual Anthem Film Festival, with 22 films in competition. Organized by Jo Ann Skousen, a college literature professor and the wife of investment advisor Mark Skousen (who owns and organizes the wider FreedomFest conference), Anthem offers mainly recognition, but also small ($2500) cash prizes. Last year's winner, What Happened In Vegas, was a documentary on police abuse of black (and sometimes other) Nevada residents. The festival judges again awarded a criminal justice reform themed film this year's top prize, honoring Skid Row Marathon, a documentary about a California judge who, after being forced by mandatory sentencing laws to issue prison terms he found unjust, organizes running events to rebuild the self-esteem of those he has sentenced, when they are released.
Many of the entrants have anti-Communist themes, films about the history of totalitarianism or about far Left groups shutting down speech on campus.
Just as Will and other speakers cover issues like entitlements that are often kicked down the road, and the exhibitors pitch cryptocurrencies and other opportunities until recently viewed as fanciful or grifter-ish, several of the films cover unknown or obscure people: the aforementioned Congressman Massie, an MIT grad married to an MIT grad, who decided to sell a technology company based on patents he invented, and move back to his home state to live off the grid in Appalachia; Garry Davis, a chorus dancer and actor who was an understudy for Danny Kaye, who chucked Broadway to become an anti-war activist and promote the end of nation-states; Polish refugee from the Soviet occupation Wanda Was Lorenc; Ota Benga, a pygmy who was one of many indigenous peoples kept against their wills, in "human zoos," by American academics who wanted to study them; or Anders Chydenius, a relatively unknown Swedish pastor who was Adam Smith before Adam Smith put pen to paper.
The latter figure is discussed by Johan Norberg, a Swedish television journalist and policy analyst (imagine an intellectual Ryan Seacrest), in a documentary, Sweden: Lessons for America?, produced by an American non-profit, the Milton Friedman-inspired group Free to Choose media. (One might have expected this film, a product of the libertarian media complex, to win something, but it was entirely shut out from the many awards given.)
Paradoxically, given Sweden's mythic status as an idyllic social democracy in the minds of many Americans, Norberg says the lessons learned are that the United States - if it wants to be a country with a highly literate, long-lived, healthy, wealthy population - should embrace the free market and become more libertarian.
Sweden has in the past two decades privatized the provision of most social services in its generous welfare state, for example shifting its entire education system to vouchers, which can be used at public or private schools, with parents able to send their children to any school, even in cities other than where they live. Half of all schools are now private.
Norberg also investigates how Sweden became wealthy before it created its welfare state in the 1950s: it had more than a century of laissez faire liberalism, during which time it leapt from being one of the poorest countries with a population with relatively short lifespans to being the 4th wealthiest and one of the healthiest. He unearths the heretofore little known (outside of Sweden) public intellectual, the pastor and journalist Anders Chydenius, who lived in the Swedish empire (in an area that is now Finland), and articulated ideas about competition, competitive advantage, and the gains of trade that were later made famous by Adam Smith. Chydenius came up with these ideas first, but only promoted free markets (including granting private property to peasants) in the Swedish language, so that the English speaking world had to re-discover them later on its own. To this day, though it has a variety of labor market regulations, Sweden has no minimum wage laws.
The documentary is timed, paced, and formatted perfectly for television. School Inc., an earlier project by the Free to Choose group, on the school choice movement, caused gnashing of teeth by "progressives" and opponents of school choice who believe politically incorrect fare should be banned from PBS and other government funded media.
"Sweden: Lessons for America?" caused its own controversy as the opening entry in a Q&A panel afterwords, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund observed that the film avoided Sweden's response to mass immigration and what lesson America should be learning from that. One audience member pointed out that there are now Swedish neighborhoods unsafe for a Jewish person to walk through, which another panelist hotly disputed. One speaker, Sengalese entrepreneur Magate Wade, addressed immigration again, arguing that the only way to stop the flow of immigrants to Europe or the U.S. is to encourage free markets throughout Africa and the third world, since what most of the people fleeing their countries of origin want is a job. But overall little cogent thought was offered on how libertarians might address voters concerns about mass immigration.
You can watch interviews with some of the speakers at FreedomFest - Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com, Steve Forbes, George F. Will, Whole Foods founder John Mackey. - by C-Span's Peter Slen (as well as on the internet channel ReasonTV).
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