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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Even when the bear situation threatened to get out of hand, Babiarz didn’t call wildlife officials. Seeking help from the government was not his style.

Shortly after embracing the somewhat novel concept of individual rights, America’s postrevolutionary leaders took up the bear problem. They soon found themselves, however, in a dilemma of their own devising: how to kill bears in the name of liberty.

And just as bear-killing fueled one’s manhood, lack of such prowess did the opposite. In neighboring Vermont in 1815, Governor Jonas Galusha, seeking reelection, proudly announced that he would hunt a particularly notorious bear known as “Old Slipperyskin” with a hitherto-unknown hunting method. Galusha slathered himself with female bear scent and strode off into the woods, only to return to his entourage at a full sprint, the bear behind him. (He lost the gubernatorial campaign.)

It took years. It took decades. Untold thousands of animals were slaughtered, bear by bear by bear; untold millions of trees were felled, trunk by trunk by trunk. Untold billions of dollars in natural resources were liquidated, pelt by plank by perch. When it was over, the settlers raised their grandchildren in a new world, built from the bones of a wilderness that—seemingly—had been vanquished.

The settlers hated bears with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear. But there was something they hated even more—taxes. Grafton’s founders had not braved the throat of this godforsaken wilderness to pay taxes. In fact, they demonstrated very little appetite for law of any kind.

Their first order of business was to completely ignore centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father John Hancock and other speculators. Hancock had bought the land from King George III. King George had gotten it from God.

Grafton’s settlers, very much on board with the anti-tax, anti-law sentiment, named their community after the Duke of Grafton, a notoriously lusty British nobleman who’d earned the honor by suggesting that the Crown impose fewer taxes on the American colonists.

Grafton’s petitions were in fact part of a simple, two-step plan. Step 1: Ask not to pay taxes. Step 2: Just don’t pay them.

Faced with the specter of being beaten by bumpkins, Weare called upon George Washington, then at the height of his power and influence, for help. An unamused Washington, who was still battling the British, vowed that, if Vermont persisted, “he would turn his back on the common enemy and lead his whole force against that State and destroy it entirely.”

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.

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

The ram didn’t last long. One day, after returning from a call at the fire station, Babiarz found that the animal had been violently torn apart. “The bear just eviscerated him,” he would later say. “This place is so…” he stopped. It was clear that Grafton’s distance from central authority could be as challenging as it was charming. His bear woes were heightened because Grafton was caught between settler-era wilderness surroundings and an obligation to follow modern-day rules about wild animals. 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. But under the state’s wildlife management laws, he could only shoot bears that were actively threatening his property, a description open to interpretation. Though Babiarz has never killed a bear illegally, it’s pretty clear that he disagrees with the law.

One of the pernicious obstacles to the growth of the party has been its commitment to following logic chains into whatever dark place they lead, regardless of social mores. That’s why, in one true sense, the philosophy is deeply ingrained with America’s founding principles but, in an equally true sense, still engenders earnest debates over whether consensual cannibalism should be legal.

Many libertarians feel a deep kinship with America’s early days, which they view as a utopian golden age when government was small and people lived freely.

If all went as planned, hundreds of Free Towners would concentrate their voting power to effect a political makeover, transforming a small American town from a stodgy and unattractive thicket of burdensome regulations into an “anything goes” frontier where, according to a website created by Pendarvis, citizens should assert certain inalienable rights, such as the right to have more than two junk cars on private property, the right to gamble, the right to engage in school truancy, the right to traffic drugs, and the right to have incestual intercourse. Oh, and also, Pendarvis sought to assert the right to traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights, in which people who are homeless or otherwise indigent are paid small amounts of money to engage in fisticuffs. Logic is a strange thing.

Instead of building from scratch, they would harness the power and infrastructure of an existing town—just as a rabies parasite can co-opt the brain of a much larger organism and force it to work against its own interests, the libertarians planned to apply just a bit of pressure in such a way that an entire town could be steered toward liberty.

The libertarians disembarked, stretching legs and cracking backs. They knew little about the town. The town, in turn, was equally ignorant about them. Though the would-be colonists were walking into a public building to talk about a matter that would have been of major public interest, the meeting itself was decidedly private. No one knew they were there—other than John and Rosalie Babiarz.

It’s not clear whether, at this point, the Babiarzes fully understood that the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.

Usually a sleepy civics exercise, the New England town meeting is perhaps the purest form of direct democracy left in the United States, dating back to the earliest days of the American colonies. When some pressing business arises, the town’s elected officials muster all the pomp, dignity, and ceremony within their means and invite the entire community to a single large room. Those who care to show up act as both voter and legislator, with full power to propose legally binding action and suggest amendments to actions proposed by their neighbors. Each town meeting is an opportunity for a small community to demonstrate that, given the reins of power, it can rise above the failings of Washington politicians. It is also an opportunity to flop spectacularly.

The Free Towners linked their messaging to liberty’s revolutionary salad days, when New England’s Americans founded their own communities, each one vibrant with the promise of a future shaped by its residents. But of course, they were not really breaking ground on some hitherto undiscovered frontier. In much the same way Englishmen had once crashed through the bramble of what they thought was a New World, they were actually inserting themselves into a long-established community of natives who regarded them not as benign colonists, or liberators, but as invaders.

During a television interview, a Grafton resident accused the Free Towners of “trying to cram freedom down our throats.” The libertarians circulated the quote widely, scoffing at the illogical notion that freedom could ever be seen as a negative. Though the accusation might have been seen as an early sign of trouble, most Free Towners still assumed that the tax-phobic Graftonites would treat them as liberators and political brothers. Condon was among the many organizers who expected that “the people of Grafton would welcome us with open arms.”

(Meanwhile, that same day, “Bass” told a New Hampshire Public Radio reporter that the public school system should be dismantled because it was “not right to force someone to pay to educate someone else’s child.”)

Though it didn’t yet have a large national presence, the Unification Church was already beginning to draw criticism for its unusual practices and its political beliefs—Moon was using his wealth and influence to mainstream his hard-line anticommunist messages into the media. On top of a faith-tinged business empire, he would eventually become a billionaire and attract a religious following of seven million.

The church, like so many others, had identified Grafton as a place where dreams could be pursued, uninhibited by the forces that had persecuted Reverend Moon.

For the residents of Grafton, whose homes were being probed with frightening regularity by a resurgent bear population, ursine intelligence levels were a key factor in a question most people never have to ask: how close am I to a bear right now?

The Free Town Project took on a distinctly masculine feel. Although the movement included some families, they were mostly individuals, and mostly men.

Adam is emphatically not a libertarian. And though he uses political labels all the time, he’s uncomfortable with being boxed in by any label himself. Don’t call him a liberal. American liberals are “too far—way too far—to the right for me.”

“Government isn’t ruining capitalism. Capitalism is ruining government. I think that’s kind of obvious,” he says. “If you take capitalism out of government you get simple public representation. If you take government out of capitalism, you get slavery.”

“What’s the endgame of capitalism, if not a big fat white man sitting on top of a pile of bloody bones with no one around him, crying because nobody’s around to make him a sandwich?”

In 2012, in a change that cannot be positively associated with New Hampshire’s libertarians, the state attained the highest per-capita rate of machine-gun ownership in the nation. Federal data indicated the presence in the state of nearly ten thousand registered weapons, which meant that if you were in a fully packed three-hundred-seat New Hampshire movie theater watching the latest Death Wish revival, there were, statistically speaking, two registered machine-gun owners sitting beside you in the darkness, drinking it all in and getting—if Bruce Willis did his job well—really into the idea of being pushed to a point where the only noble option was to open fire.

Free Towners began to show up “with a gun under each arm,” as one resident told me, at the general store and at the town transfer station (where residents bring their trash, because town taxes do not fund a municipal pickup service). At Grafton’s church-based town meetings, the once-civil tone of discourse became strained, as citizens debated amendments and motions under the double scrutiny of Free Towners openly displaying 9 millimeter handguns and armed officers from the Grafton County sheriff’s department, which decided it had better send someone, just in case.

“These assholes,” he rants, “these idiots who walk around open-carry, when there’s no reason to be open-carrying. You’re making people uncomfortable. You’re making them anti-gun. You’re making them vote against guns. You’re costing us our fucking gun rights. You’re not being responsible. You think you’re a fucking cowboy who likes to walk around with a gun on his hip because it makes you feel like you’ve got a big dick. No. No. Put that under your fucking jacket. If you really feel you need one, put it under your fucking jacket like a normal human being. Respect other people’s sensibilities.”

“I live with fuckin’ bears. I need my gun,” he says. “You know what I’m saying. Just in case, I need my fucking gun. And if I lose my gun rights, I’m not going after the fucking liberals, I’m going after the gun nuts who provoke the liberals into doing it in the first fucking place.”

Each day Grafton seemed to grow fuller. More full of bears. More full of libertarians. More full of guns. And more full of people who loved bears, libertarianism, guns, or some combination of the three—and who were increasingly prepared to fight for what they loved. Oh and doughnuts. The doughnuts were on the rise too.

“I said, ‘I will resist you by every means at my disposal,’” Goat Man told Goat World magazine. “If the sheriff comes, you’ll have to shoot me.”

The libertarian assault on Grafton’s mores was only loosely coordinated; every day, it seemed, some random Free Towner was pulling on another thread in the fabric of Grafton’s traditional way of life and enthusiastically giving it a tug, seeking to warp the weft. When they encountered resistance from locals, the libertarians chalked it up to ignorance: soon, they said, everyone would realize that life was better when the government left its citizens alone. But their educational efforts were spurned by a stubborn rearguard of civic-minded residents who seemed to feel that the Free Towners themselves were the main obstacle to left-aloneness.

“The libertarian movement is more cerebral, if you will,” he said. “They lack the ability to deal with people at the human level.”

In one notable town meeting skirmish, resident Rich Blair grew upset with the libertarians’ formal proposal to declare Grafton a “United Nations Free Zone.” Rather than simply voting against the idea, Blair submitted an amendment that replaced “United Nations” everywhere it appeared in the proposal with the name of a certain cartoon character. Thus, residents eventually voted on whether to protect the town citizenry “from taxation without representation, by forbidding the implementation within the town limits of any tax, levy, fee, assessment, surcharge, or any other financial imposition by Sponge Bob Square Pants.”

That town leaders had concerns about Connell’s intentions contained a great irony in that, had they been a bit more open-pocketed, the historic meeting place would have never been vulnerable to a purchase for a pittance by an outsider. The reason for its predicament dates back to the unique circumstances of the church’s construction in 1796, when Grafton voters—always eager for an avoid-tax-quick scheme—declined to finance the construction of a town meetinghouse. Instead, they agreed to buy a few pews in the planned church, which not only helped the congregation build its church but also gave the town partial ownership of the structure.

The church leadership, which no longer needed the building, offered to sell it to the town. For many, hopping on the chance to buy and control the fate of the property (which Grafton historian Ken Cushing called “the soul of the town”) was a no-brainer. But spending tax funds on a suspiciously sentimental concept like protecting “the character” of the town was opposed by a burgeoning population of libertarians. The Free Towners joined ranks with the reluctant taxpayers among Grafton’s longtime residents to form a large, vocal majority of those who expressed a position on the church’s disposition. In the end, the town rejected the offer. Remarkably, the church leadership responded to the rejection with an even more generous offer. They asked if the town wanted the property for free. Even more remarkably, the town said no. It came down, once again, to money.

Despite the best efforts of civic-minded people like Burrington, in the decades since Louis Banks preached from the Pinnacle, Grafton had gradually slipped down an entropic slope. In the early days, the hands on the clock of enlightenment busily swept away Grafton’s wolves and bears and trees in favor of houses and farms and sheep. But when its capitalistic motor was stilled, that clock began rusting away, a slow fade of civilization punctuated by fire and flood. Between 1935 and 2002, the county lost 92 percent of its farmland, and fields reverted to impenetrable thickets of bramble, then tangles of young trees. Roads once supported by tax dollars became blackberry patches favored by foraging bears. The most heavily farmed region in the state became the most heavily forested. And even as camps have arisen in the woods in the first decades of this century, census data show that a third of Grafton’s permanent housing units stand vacant. The wilderness’s encroachment is presaged by advance troops of mice building nests in homes and under the hoods of cars. Left unchallenged, the vermin unpave the way for further intrusions by larger animals, water, wind, and vegetation. The state now considers Grafton a single, near-continuous block of bear habitat.

For Grafton’s Free Towners, Rand’s vision of a market-driven society was what kept them privatizing and deregulating everything they could. For seven long years, they joined thrift-minded allies in issuing vociferous challenges to every rule and tax dollar in sight; one by one, expenditures were flayed from the municipal budget, bits of services peeled away like so much flesh.

Contrary to the libertarians’ expectations, however, real life in the Free Town seemed to be almost the reverse of Rand’s fictional vision—by 2011, while the rest of America was chugging along unperturbed, the holes in Grafton’s public services gaped stubbornly, creating a spreading malaise.

a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services. A theoretical private fire department run by Bob Hull never seemed to actually stop fires. A freedom-themed farmers’ market sputtered along for a while, then faded. A proposed public-service militia never got off the ground. Meanwhile, the constant bloodletting was turning the once-vibrant town government into a symbol of societal decay. On the town’s few miles of paved roads, untended blacktop cracks first blossomed into fissures, then bloomed into grassy potholes. After voters rejected a funding request for $40,000 to purchase asphalt and other supplies, embattled town officials warned that Grafton was in serious danger of losing the roads altogether. The town was also put on notice by the state that two small bridges were in danger of collapse, due to neglect.

All of these public services—roads, bridges, town offices, lighting, police mobility, and more—were sacrificed as casualties in the all-important battle to keep property taxes low.

Grafton and Canaan have drifted so far apart that no one would guess they started as virtually identical settlements. After 150 years of community building, Canaan had an elementary school, churches, restaurants, banks, a gift shop, two bakeries, pet boarding facilities, a metalsmithing shop, meeting halls, convenience stores, farms, an arts community, a veterinary clinic, and dozens of small businesses, each of which added something to the town’s identity and sense of community. Grafton, by contrast, had a single, struggling general store, one tourist attraction in the Ruggles Mine, a suite of chronically underfunded municipal services, and a church celebrating the singular ideas of John Connell. But Grafton had low taxes. Or, to be more accurate, taxes that were low in theory. I assumed that, after all those years of resistance, Grafton’s tax rate would be a fraction of Canaan’s, but I learned that the difference is actually quite modest. Because it has managed to maintain larger populations over the decades, Canaan can spend much more on public goods, while keeping tax rates in check. In 2010, the tax rate in Grafton was $4.49 per $1,000 of valuation, as compared to $6.20 in Canaan. That means the owner of a $150,000 home would get an annual municipal tax bill of $673.50 in Grafton, and $930 in Canaan. In other words, Grafton taxpayers have traded away all of the advantages enjoyed by Canaan residents to keep about 70 cents a day in their pockets.

In 2019, a group of Baylor University researchers decided to check in on people who favored low taxes over these sorts of “frills.” They looked at thirty years of data on public spending on optional public services and compared them to self-reported levels of happiness. Their findings suggest that Canaan’s success is no fluke, but in fact an entirely predictable outcome: states with well-funded public services have happier residents than those that don’t. This happiness gap held up among all sectors of society—rich and poor, well-educated and poorly educated, married and single, old and young, healthy and sick.

If that’s true, it would suggest that Grafton’s miserly approach to public spending didn’t necessarily cause unhappiness among its residents. Rather, the low tax rate may have been a predictable outcome for a town that had, over the years, become a haven for miserable people.

But when Seamans began advocating for a fire department, he ran up against a 170-year tradition of tax resistance from those who would rather see their neighbors’ homes literally go up in smoke than vote for a tax hike. 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. Seamans and the others would have to fight the fires for free, buy their own fire truck, build their own fire station, and donate the land to site it on.

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. Though Connell was simply staking out his own place in Grafton’s carefully nurtured tax-avoidant landscape, news of his request for a religious exemption spread like a shock wave throughout the community. 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.