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Bears vs. Libertarians in a Small NH Town

lpetrich

lpetrich

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A book has recently come out, "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)", by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.

Barbearians at the Gate — The Atavist Magazine
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling - The New Republic
Libertarians Took Control of This Small Town. It Didn’t End Well. | Washington Monthly

Quotes from The New Republic:

Some libertarians once founded the Free Town Project, where they would move into some town and take it over. They decided on Grafton, New Hampshire, a small rural town west of the center of that state with an area of 42 square miles and a human population of around 1000, and some of them moved in. Despite their numerous disagreements, they believed
... that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.
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But those projects did not turn out very well, and their would-be utopia in Grafton had problems of its own.
The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)

...
If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.”
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From the Washington Monthly,
Their effort was inspired by the Free State Project, a libertarian-adjacent organization founded in 2003 with the goal of taking over New Hampshire and transforming it into a tiny-government paradise. After more than a decade of persistence, the project persuaded 20,000 like-minded revolutionaries to sign its pledge to move to New Hampshire and finally force the state to live up to its “Live Free or Die” motto. (Despite their pledged support, only about 1,300 signers actually made the move. Another 3,000 were New Hampshire residents to begin with.) The project’s political successes peaked in 2018, when 17 of the 400 members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives identified as Free Staters—although all but two were registered Republicans.

The affiliated Free Town Project set its sights on Grafton in 2004 because of both its small size—about 1,200 residents—and its long history as a haven for tax protesters, eccentrics, and generalized curmudgeons. The Free Town Project leaders figured that they could engineer a libertarian tipping point by bringing in a few dozen new true believers and collaborating with the resident soreheads. Over the next decade or so, Free Towners managed to join forces with some of the town’s most tightfisted taxpayers to pass a 30 percent cut in the town’s $1 million budget over three years, slashing unnecessary spending on such municipal frills as streetlights, firefighting, road repairs, and bridge reconstruction. But eventually, the Free Town leadership splintered and the haphazard movement fizzled out. The municipal budget has since bounced back, to $1.55 million.
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The libertarians of Grafton faced another enemy.

Bears.

 American black bear

There are some 600,000 of these animals living in North America, 300,000 of them in the United States, and 3,000 of them in New Hampshire.

Despite their large population, and the large number of human visitors to their habitats, human-bear incidents are rare. Even so, there are well-known methods for avoiding incidents, like keeping garbage secure so that bears cannot break in, and not feeding the bears, so they do not become accustomed to being near us.
But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.
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Black bears are typically human-sized, though some of them grow more massive. But they have fangs and sharp claws, unlike our wimpy counterparts, incisor-sized canines and fingernails and toenails.
American black bears are highly dexterous, being capable of opening screw-top jars and manipulating door latches. They also have great physical strength. They have been known to turn over flat-shaped rocks weighing 310 to 325 pounds (141 to 147 kg) by flipping them over with a single foreleg.[40] They move in a rhythmic, sure-footed way and can run at speeds of 25 to 30 miles per hour (40 to 48 km/h).[41] American black bears have good eyesight and have been proven experimentally to be able to learn visual color discrimination tasks faster than chimpanzees and just as fast as domestic dogs. They are also capable of rapidly learning to distinguish different shapes such as small triangles, circles and squares.[42]
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What was going on?

Were many Graftonites unwilling to get bear-proof garbage bins?

Some Graftonites went further, feeding the bears. Like a certain "Doughnut Lady", who liked to leave out doughnuts and grain for the bears.

Back to The New Republic.
The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could.
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Like that Doughnut Lady.
... Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.
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lpetrich said:
What was going on?

Were many Graftonites unwilling to get bear-proof garbage bins?

Some Graftonites went further, feeding the bears. Like a certain "Doughnut Lady", who liked to leave out doughnuts and grain for the bears.

Back to The New Republic.
The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could.
Click to expand...
Like that Doughnut Lady.
... Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.
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Is this a work of satirical fiction?
 
I think it is evidence that Libertarians are Leptons... and two can't share the same space as they eventually would bitch to one another about the spin of the other. The Libertarian also has a tendency to repel all other particles... even Bosons... kind of the anti-gluon.


And yes, libertarians are quite self-satirical.
 
Yeah, we have some of tthose in my town. Their actions really can get self- satirical.
 
I must note that bears live in very libertarian fashion. They are mostly solitary animals, meaning that they live on their own in self-reliant fashion, finding and catching food for themselves and finding shelter for themselves.
 
lpetrich said:
I must note that bears live in very libertarian fashion. They are mostly solitary animals, meaning that they live on their own in self-reliant fashion, finding and catching food for themselves and finding shelter for themselves.
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..though it turns out they violate property rights, absent state interference. You'd think bears would know better, property rights being natural and all.
 
Why would nudists who can't spell be on the opposite side of libertarians, anyway?
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Why would nudists who can't spell be on the opposite side of libertarians, anyway?
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Who says they aren't?

The bears remind me of the bankers on Wall Street in 2008. "Give me handouts or I'll trash your house!"
Tom
 
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