It is not a given fact that freedom requires privacy. The relationship between the two is a function of power.

The trivial example is that of an all-powerful tyrant. Suppose you had god-like or superman-like powers; in this case, you could not bother to keep anything secret about yourself, and it would not affect your (total) freedom to act however you like.

Back to the real world, you can find corners of real life where this situation applies: one I like to mention occasionally is: suppose a dissident is on a plane out of their despotic country, the fact that the tyrant government sees them making a BTC transfer out of their wallet to another address, because their BTC privacy is poor is no longer relevant (while, if still in country, the government could use the blockchain surveillance effort to pinpoint them, hunt them down and imprison them perhaps, or just convict them of some made up crime).

Here, it's the power (or absence of it) to control the blockchain which is the crucial property.

"Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful" has sometimes been mentioned as an idea. You could imagine this being very relevant to the blockchain. The "weak", people with few resources, might use exclusively L2 because they don't need the perfect, iron clad security guarantees of L1, while very large, powerful entities do make that choice. Yes I know "corporations need privacy for business secrets", I'm not saying powerful entities will not engage privacy techniques, but the precise reason we have a transparent base layer is in the above sentence: "the power (or absence of it) to control the blockchain which is the crucial property" - we do not have CT on chain today because nothing is allowed to stand in the way of perfect verifiability and immutability - not even privacy!

For myself I have never liked Hughes' descriptions as per the "manifesto" whereas Timothy May I thought was always exactly on point. "A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know." - meh, this is somehow not the point, there's nothing wrong with some things being 'secret' (secret keys for example), the point is that privacy or secrecy can enable a changed power dynamic. The normie reader will think that there is a normative distinction being made (are secrets "bad" while private matters are fine? yeah I know that's nonsense but why make the distinction?).

Yeah I read the post - you're not answering the question though. What freedom do you lack if your transactions are public?

As soon as someone known your single-sig public key, privacy is kinda toast, isn't it?