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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

But forevermore, in Grafton, the United States government, like the British before them, was simply an occupying force to be resisted.

When John Babiarz grew up as the son of Polish immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s in Southington, Connecticut (English is his second language), his household was haunted by the ghosts of monolithic governments run amok. “My father and my mother, during World War II, suffered government oppression,” he said. “My father was taken by Communists to Siberia, my mother to a Nazi work camp.”

then-nascent field of computer programming—a logic-based universe in which the right answers were ordained by constellations of bright green letters glowing against a black abstraction.

Libertarians have a vision for America that includes lots of personal freedom, very little government, and a pure marketplace that will sort out societal problems like climate change, education inequality, and rising health care costs.

Rather than religious values or a belief in a moral obligation to help the vulnerable, libertarians believe in rationalism. A 2012 research analysis of the personality differences between Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians found that libertarians place the highest value on using logic and cognitive skills to solve questions of policy.

Formed in 1971, the Libertarian Party became a magnet for hundreds of thousands of Americans like Babiarz, who appreciated logic and ...

But in 1988, when the party’s standard-bearer—former US representative Ron Paul—garnered just 0.5 percent of the vote in his bid for president, the fundamental problem facing the logicians became apparent. How could they bring their superior thinking skills out of the fringes and into the political mainstream? They needed to show their e...

Despite priding themselves on their logic, libertarians harbor a passion for individual rights that borders on fanaticism.

Under libertarian ideals, John Babiarz could have followed the example set by Eleazer Wilcox more than two hundred years ago—exercise his freedom to pursue the bear that killed his ram.

In 2000, he announced his first bid for governor of New Hampshire, driven by a successful petition drive by libertarians who collected thousands of signatures to get him on the ballot.

Of course, all this activity was of intense interest to a certain segment of the town’s longtime residents: the bears. From their perspective, a checkerboard of smorgasbords was suddenly springing up in their woodland territories, each camp burgeoning with calories.

The morning was bright and propitious. Before their departure, mass had been said in the chapel, and the protection of St. Ignatius invoked against all contingent evils, but especially against bears, which, like the fiery dragons of old, seemed to cherish unconquerable hostility to the Holy Church.

The property would also serve as a showcase for his artistic and spiritual expression. Though he had no formal training, he, John Connell, would live inside the church as its sexton and pastor. And, he vowed, he would not pay taxes. No matter what.

When Banks came to Grafton, he found a prosperous community that was reaping the twin benefits of bear extirpation and capitalism.

During this heyday, Grafton boasted of three post offices, eleven schoolhouses, a creamery, fourteen mines, and fifteen mills churning out processed forms of everything from grain to clothing.

They’d built a town with few taxes and little state involvement, where a man was free to build an epic, towering pulpit that, once scaled, rendered one nearly inaudible.

People were intensely interested, because 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. The system incentivizes people to champion their own reasons for not paying taxes, while attacking the reasons presented by neighbors.

In one sense, Grafton’s bears came from the woods, and in another sense, they came lumbering out of a distant prehistoric era. But in yet another, equally true, sense, they came from the Commonwealth of New Hampshire. Each bear in Grafton was put there, on purpose, by active changes to state policies that previously supported a bear-free landscape. By the time the Free Town Project began, Grafton was just one tiny part of a vast landscape in the midst of a great sixty-year bear expansion that was cheered by wildlife conservationists, photographers, and recreational hunters.

And if the quantitative approach has certain blind spots about bears, it has even bigger blind spots about people. The state assumes that there is a direct correlation between bear complaints and bear problems, but in fact different people have very different levels of tolerance for bears—and very different levels of tolerance for state officials.

If the state wanted to, it could dramatically reduce the number of problematic bear encounters. One way would be to dramatically reduce the number of bears, at least in those areas where human population densities are most likely to create conflict. Another way would be to codify all the best bear practices—force people to manage their garbage and bird feeders more responsibly, adopt strict zoning that would shape development in ways that are less likely to attract bears, and stiffen penalties for those who feed wild bears.

And yet a third way would be to fund the Fish and Game Department to the level needed to problem-shoot effectively, so that game wardens would have more time to exercise their judgment in specific situations, and to educate the public.

Such measures have proven to be effective in tamping down bear complaints in national parks, but to many New Hampshirites, the bill stank of statism and taxes.

But no such speedy resolution to human-bear conflicts has been proposed, and until someone comes up with an idea that costs no money and is politically palatable, the cash-starved Fish and Game Department has developed a budget-friendly stance on bear conflicts: it’s not him, it’s you.

In a very real way, the Fish and Game Department depends on bears, both for the bear-hunting permit fees and for the goodwill that comes with managing a banner species for conservation. There is little wonder, then, that the department pushes the upper limits of each area’s “carrying capacity” so that as many places as possible are populated with as many bears as possible.

The plan of New Hampshire’s bureaucrats was to stabilize the number at 5,100. But the plan of New Hampshire’s bears was slightly different: to make a thousand more bears. The bears prevailed. Between 2006 and 2013, their ranks increased by another 1,140 animals.

In the wildlife management region that includes Grafton, bears doubled in number between 1998 and 2013; by 2018, they outpaced their intended numbers by more than 50 percent.

There’s only one year on record in which there were no bear complaints from Grafton—2013, the year after the posse’s ursine genocide campaign. The woman tells me something else that she has heard from posse members. Since I came to town, she says, they have heard that a journalist is asking too many questions about illegal bear hunts.

And anyway, their vigilantism hasn’t helped, not really. It put a brief dent in the local bear population, but nothing more. With Fish and Game administrators still too overworked to step in, the woods soon teemed with more bears. Graftonites may have thought they had a bear problem, but you could equally say it was a problem caused by the retreat of their sworn enemy: taxes.

The church’s new directors found it easy to convince town officials to give them more time to resolve the tax liens; even though the ultimate remedy of a town against recalcitrant taxpayers is to seize the property, the officials wanted the tax revenue much more than they wanted the property. The freedom that Connell had found when he purchased the church was nothing compared to the freedom he felt when he gave it away.

Under the plan, once twenty thousand people signed the pledge, the initiative would be “Triggered.” No one knew exactly when, or if, the Free State Project might cross that lofty threshold, but once the Trigger was reached, all those who had signed on to the pledge were expected to actually move.

As they worked to sign people up, the Free Staters created a marketing campaign that promoted New Hampshire as the place to live.

For example, a slick Free State Project website boasted of New Hampshire’s breathtaking scenic views, numerous hiking opportunities along the Appalachian Trail, and state constitution that “expressly protects citizens’ right to revolution and does not specifically prohibit secession.” Other features tailored to the liberty-sensitive included New Hampshire’s many gun clubs, private shooting ranges, and black bear hunting opportunities; its lack of an income tax, general sales tax, or capital gains tax; and its status as the only state in the union that doesn’t mandate automobile liability insurance or penalize the uninsured.

Every Free State pledger, it seemed, had had experiences that fit this general pattern of governmental overreach and oppression. People began signing—first dozens, then hundreds.

Over the first few years of the project launch, as more libertarians gravitated toward New Hampshire, it became the de facto center of the national libertarian community. A small army gathered there, the suffering victims of bullshit traffic tickets, alimony burdens imposed by unsympathetic divorce court judges, and school systems that were unfair to their kids.

Though they had similar lineages, the Free State Project was markedly different in tone from the Free Town Project. Where the Free Towners were brash and extreme, the Free Staters were polished and sophisticated—an infinitely difficult demeanor to pull off given that libertarians are by definition on the political fringe and hold positions that have rarely been tempered by the burden of leadership.

Another oust-worthy Free Stater was Chris Cantwell, who earned a national reputation for his role in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, during which white nationalist demonstrators marched with tiki torches, chanted hateful messages about Jewish people, assaulted people, and, in one case, drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed one of them. Cantwell was dubbed the “Crying Nazi,” because he wept after he drew criminal charges for assaulting demonstrators with pepper gas.

Freeman’s main takeaway was that Cantwell had abandoned his libertarian principles and wanted to rule an authoritarian community—which, Freeman noted, would be far too statist.

When Sorens took the podium in 2016, he was exuberant as he announced that, after thirteen years of pledge-peddling, a five-month burst of 2,500 new signers had put the Free State Project over the 20,000 mark. The Trigger had been reached, and it seemed only logical that the hard work of mainstreaming libertarianism was about to pay off.

One such ally was an independent presidential candidate named Vermin Supreme, who declared soon after the Trigger that he was switching to the Libertarian Party. Supreme, who has been running for president since the 1990s, is easily recognizable for his signature look—a long gray beard that forms a vague counterbalance to the boot he wears on his head.

“The Libertarian Party is the only party that aligns with my core principles of anti-state, anti-war, and anti-authority,” Supreme declared. His platform consists largely of a mandatory tooth-brushing law, free ponies for every American, time travel research, and zombie apocalypse preparedness. In 2017, in a poll against seven other aspiring Libertarian presidential candidates, Supreme polled in third place, at 8.2 percent.

With the support of its new Free State lawmakers, the New Hampshire State Legislature did away with licensing requirements to carry loaded, concealed firearms and abolished criminal penalties for small amounts of marijuana or hashish. It also passed measures to deregulate cryptocurrency, legalize home poker games, require police to get a warrant to track cell phones, exempt hair braiding from barber licensing requirements, legalize fireworks, allow brew pubs to make cider, cut taxes on business profits, and eliminate a staggering 1,600 state regulations, many of which were considered obsolete.

At the Shire Society’s Church of the Sword, in-church activities include hard cider communion, combat with foam swords, and a “Ritual of Pie,” while out-of-church activities include lengthy legal battles over religious tax exemptions.

And they certainly didn’t realize that, soon after the Trigger, Grafton’s bear problems began to go statewide.

Unlike Colburn, Rogers didn’t get her hands up in time to take the brunt of the blow. “He just grabbed hold of my face and ripped it down,” she said.

It’s not so much that state officials or the freedom community are wrong in their approach to the question of bear management. It’s just that the two approaches are totally incompatible, and neither side is in a position to effect change on the other side of the divide.

As the disconnect spread statewide, wildlife officials continued to push the limits of acceptable numbers of bears, and libertarians continued to promote a culture of civil disobedience and individual rights, including the right to feed or shoot the bears in one’s backyard. The stage seemed set for more conflict, one that would involve more deaths for bears and perhaps human casualties as well.

I wondered what would happen if the bears instead threatened privileged, politically connected people. It didn’t take long to find out.

As the outrage cycle built, people looked down their noses from horses so high that they could barely be seen by the mere mortals crawling upon the surface of the earth.

In Grafton, public opinion had split between shooting and not shooting the bears. In Hanover, the schism was characteristically different—some people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to modify Mink’s behavior, while other people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to capture and relocate Mink and her cubs to someone else’s backyard.

And so, during Memorial Day weekend, the three yearling cubs were captured and relocated to Pittsburg, a remote town in northern New Hampshire along the Canadian border. Mink, meanwhile, disappeared from the area to find a mate.