Stuff That Interests Me

Something a little different for you today.I am speaking at the Battle of Ideas this weekend on three rather different matters:* Immigration and Demographics* Who Is the World’s Greatest Comic?* Why Cash Keeps Us FreeDo come. You can get tickets here. With this years Battle in mind, the Academy of Ideas asked me to write one of its Letters on Liberty. Here it is for your reading or listening pleasure. (There is a PDF version here).It begins with this note from the Academy.What are Letters on Liberty?It’s not always easy to defend freedom. Public life may have been locked down recently, but it has been in bad health for some time.Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today.We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we shouldn’t be complacent. We can’t simply rely on the thinkers of the past to work out wha