https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/21534416\/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but there\u2019s something special about libertarianism.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean that as an insult, either. I love libertarians! For the most part, they\u2019re fun and interesting people. But they also tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people aren\u2019t. If you\u2019ve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean.<\/p>\n
And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that it\u2019s mostly abstract. You can\u2019t really prove anything \u2014 it\u2019s just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas.<\/p>\n
Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, says it\u2019s the \u201cboldest social experiment in modern American history.\u201d I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s the \u201cboldest,\u201d but it\u2019s definitely one of the strangest.<\/p>\n
The experiment was called the \u201cFree Town Project\u201d (it later became the \u201cFree State Project\u201d), and the goal was simple: take over Grafton\u2019s local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did!”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“in 2004, a group of them decided that they wanted to take some action on this deficiency, and they decided to launch what they called the Free Town Project. They sent out a call to a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians and told everyone to move to this one spot and found this utopian community that would then serve as a shining jewel for the world to see that libertarian philosophies worked not only in theory but in practice. And they chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“As the people of Grafton soon found out, a nontraditional housing situation meant a camp in the woods or a bunch of shipping containers or whatever. They brought in yurts and mobile homes and formed little clusters of cabins and tents. There was one location called \u201cTent City,\u201d where a bunch of people just lived in tents from day to day. They all united under this broad umbrella principle of \u201cpersonal freedom,\u201d but as you\u2019d expect, there was a lot of variation in how they exercised it.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“most of them just didn\u2019t have those family situations or those 9-to-5 jobs, and that was really what characterized them more than anything else.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“When they first showed up, they hadn\u2019t told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didn\u2019t want them there and they didn\u2019t appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.<\/p>\n
But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.<\/p>\n
They couldn\u2019t pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.” <\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town\u2019s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town\u2019s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn\u2019t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn\u2019t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.<\/p>\n
Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you\u2019re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.<\/p>\n
One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn\u2019t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat. <\/p>\n
As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.<\/p>\n
It was an absolute mess.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.<\/p>\n
There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.<\/p>\n
And then, a few years after that, a second woman was attacked, not in Grafton but in a neighboring town. And since the book was written and published, there\u2019s actually been a third bear attack, also in the same little cluster and the same little region of New Hampshire. And I think it\u2019s very clear that, unless something changes, more bear attacks will come.<\/p>\n
Luckily, no one\u2019s been killed, but people have been pretty badly injured.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“\u201clibertarian\u201d is such a weird umbrella term for a very diverse group of people. Some libertarians are built around the idea of white supremacy and racism. That was not the case with these libertarians. Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when they\u2019re at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, you\u2019ll have to distort or ignore reality to do it \u2014 usually with terrible consequences.”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“I think they bumped up against the follies of libertarianism. I really do think that there is a hard wall of reality that exists that\u2019s going to foil any effort to implement libertarianism on a broad scale. And I think if you gave a libertarian the magic wand and allowed them to transform society the way that they wanted to, it wouldn\u2019t work the way they imagined, and I think it would break down just as Grafton did.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1199,646,615,1198],"class_list":["post-4566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-bears","tag-libertarian","tag-libertarians","tag-new-hampshire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4567,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions\/4567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}