A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

As a fire deputy, Seamans could see the impact that fire was having, not just on unlucky families like the Watsons but on Grafton itself. Between 1943 and 1948 alone, fires were reported at the homes of Julia Custeau, Olif Harris, the Tuttle family, Frank Dean, Philip Paight, the Gray family, Weston Rollins, the Sulloway family, Laura Sweet, the Tyrrell family, the Sulloway family (again), George Barney, Lester Barney (it was a particularly bad year for the Barneys), and in the chimney of the house of train railman C. B. Lovering—and that’s not counting forest fires, such as the one that raged at Banks’s Pinnacle, or another along the Boston and Maine Railroad.

Between 1940 and 1950, roughly 20 percent of Grafton’s homes disappeared, many lost to fire. Wherever homes were abandoned, nature crept in.

Seamans and a core group of supporters participated in an intense round of horse-trading that finally, in 1949, yielded a deal. The town would spend $1,200 in tax money to buy a pump and some other pieces of firefighting equipment—but little else.

Though its entire seventy-year history has been plagued by a lack of funds, the Grafton Volunteer Fire Department was able to slow the pace of the fires, and of the town’s declining population. Around 1970, amid the ashes of the old community, a new Grafton began to slowly emerge.

In the early 1990s (another bad year for members of the Barney family, who lost a farmhouse and attached horse barn to fire), voters rejected, for three consecutive years, proposals to pay for a modern fire station before finally approving $25,000 in 1993. As part of that deal, the volunteer emergency responders were required to “donate” $15,000 to the project.

Though it now operated from a reasonably modern building, Grafton’s fire department never received funding on par with neighboring towns. In 2019, Enfield spent $220,000 on its fire department and ambulance services. Canaan spent $261,000. Grafton spent $29,000.

After a lifetime of pushing against statist taxes and regulations, Babiarz was now responsible for keeping Grafton’s people and property safe from fire. He took the role seriously, working to build and modernize the department. Babiarz doesn’t support some safety regulations—like, say, seat belt laws—but he sees fire safety differently, because reckless fire practices threaten innocent victims.

Though Connell was not as well resourced as Banks had been, he followed suit by boldly reimagining the church exterior, displaying a sense of flair that slackened the jaws of the area’s traditional churchgoers.

Purple was Connell’s signature color. A rich royal hue soon appeared in blotches on the church’s quaint white picket fence; it coated the door frames and most (though not all) of the church’s thirty window frames. Connell also purpled the church corners, the trim of the overhangs, and the architectural tiers that supported the beautiful old steeple.

Connell followed up by populating the churchyard with a hodgepodge of sculptures made from found materials. A thick-framed mirror and a thigh-high metal lion sat on a small stack of wooden pallets beneath a pyramid of hollow aluminum poles; wooden obelisks painted white memorialized those who had died at the hands of “government abuse”; slabs of rocks and concrete were piled and decorated with sacred Zen Buddhist enso symbols; there were assorted wind chimes, a man-sized crucifix, a repurposed traffic sign, a dozen banner-bearing flagpoles of varied height, and homemade benches where one could sit and contemplate the cacophonous glory all around.

On the spectrum of human communication, his personal speaking style often hovered within the narrow range between somewhat shouty and very shouty. But in the state’s libertarian community, he was a well-loved fixture.

He sometimes fasted to protest government actions, and in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, he joined other libertarian activists to burn FEMA flags.

God forbid you actually help.

Soon after buying the church, he filled out the town’s formal application for property tax exemption, based on his churchness. At issue was an annual tax bill of roughly $3,000.

dodging municipal property taxes comes with a certain irony: it’s a zero-sum game. Anytime one person successfully avoids paying taxes, others in town must pay more to make up the difference.

To take just one example, in 2011 the state recommended that all towns consider granting tax exemptions for blind residents. Grafton officials told voters that adopting the exemption would have a negligible impact on the town’s tax rolls, because Grafton was home to only one blind person, who lived on a fixed income and paid very little in taxes anyway. Libertarians didn’t directly object to that resident getting a tax break—a position too blatantly heartless—but they regretfully opposed the measure anyway on the grounds that, when word got out, scores of blind millionaires might flock to Grafton to take advantage of the loophole.

Though most felt that a tax exemption for Connell would be against their own financial interests, a healthy minority of more creative thinkers agreed, in a suspicious display of Christian generosity, that John Connell was a church.

Though granting the exemption was likely to ring a death knell for the town’s ability to provide municipal services, Connell seemed to have no problem with this scenario.

One way a municipality can safely identify legit charitable organizations is by following the lead of the Internal Revenue Service, which formally recognizes 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations, a designation that includes both churches and secular public charities. To get an idea of how broadly the rules define “public charity,” consider that the American public supports, through tax exemption, the National Hockey League, the National Rifle Association, the US Chamber of Commerce, and a rogues’ gallery of fringe hate groups that have taken up the ever-ennobling charitable mission of promoting white supremacy, nazism, and ISIS.