I returned Sunday from the Porcupine Freedom Festival, and here’s a selection of PorcFest stories that have come out so far (I will continue updating this post over the next days and weeks – I know New York Times Magazine, Concord Monitor, and The Economist will have stories as well):
- Union-Leader on the “DIY” theme
- Yahoo.com: brief story on Bleish-Bush family
- “Guns, Weed, and Bitcoin: Among the Freestaters” from Free Beacon – a fairly well-rounded piece, but mixes some ironic commentary in with the reporting and focuses on the outre
- “Inside the Libertarian Version of Burning Man” – from the Washington Post, focuses very one-sidedly on the outre – yes, there was one guy in a loincloth, and apparently another guy had an extreme mushroom trip with no long-lasting ill effects, but what about the 200 kids and their families, the new technologies on display, the great speakers including overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, etc., etc.? And gotta love “majority white male.” I would guess only a very narrow majority of attendees fit both categories. Basically meant to make smug proggies feel superior to scary libertarians.
- Update: The Economist story now out – short but largely fair, despite the silly headline, & well-written (“I’m an incrementalist,” explains Jason Sorens, the subdued intellectual who dreamed up the Free State Project while he was getting his PhD from Yale. Now a lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, he is eager to use New Hampshire to test libertarian theories about enlightened self-interest and reciprocal altruism, small government and large networks of voluntary institutions. “We don’t have all the answers,” he says, “but it’s worth the experiment.”)
- Update #2: Two Concord Monitor stories