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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

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.

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.

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.

Consensual Cannibalism??? Jesus Christ...

“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?”

“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.”

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

That was the norm in Grafton, where a strange alchemical brew of perception and reality has transformed the surrounding wood into a unique and alien landscape populated by creatures both toothsome and mythic.

In most places, the further back in history one goes, the murkier and more mysterious a forest’s denizens become, and indeed, Grafton’s earliest European settlers suffocated beneath a dangerously heavy mythos of demons, devils, witches, and vampires. But the new wood has acquired its own modern myths, which have set their hooks deep into the psyche of Grafton’s collective mind-set.

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.

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.

“They don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” said Rosalie Babiarz. “They don’t want anybody to impose anything on them, but they want to impose their ideas on everyone else.”

I find that, when one walks toward Tent City, one also walks away from civilization. The shared assumptions that underpin society—television ratings and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and presidential polls and, yes, even taxes—fade away, replaced by the tangible objects within the immediate viewshed.

Out here I am not in society but in the world. Though some part of me is fully aware that I’m within fifteen miles of a Subway eatery, when I stand in the woods with Adam, survivalism sounds much less nutty than it did when I woke up that morning. Out here what seems nutty is that people spend the workweek doing things they hate in exchange for white pieces of paper that represent green pieces of paper that used to represent yellow metal but now represent only a collective delusion of value. Out here it’s easier to be seduced by the apocalyptic survivalist notion that, instead of nature being inevitably steamrolled by the tide of progress, the natural world will bleed back into our lives, outlast our frail constructs, and carpet the world in moss and bramble.

that the bears, not the survivalists, were the interlopers here.

You are in bear country, starving bear country to be precise. If anyone is the interloper it is absolutely you

The “Free Keene” people, led by Ian Freeman, drew headlines for smoking marijuana in public every day at 4:20 p.m. and for harassing meter maids while plugging coins into parking meters, thereby saving the parkers from being ticketed.

They sound like fucking heroes lmao