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

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

This conceit served the ruling class much better than those ruled, and America’s revolutionaries, springboarding off ideas first widely disseminated by philosopher John Locke, called bullshit on the entire enterprise. In arguments that were firmly baked into the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they flipped the script on dictatorships, asserting that the right to rule came not from divine law but from the consent of those governed.

And when New Hampshire’s freedom-loving individuals were asked to bear arms against bears, Grafton County went to war.

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.)

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.

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.

Faced with a new tax bill for the murky benefit of “protection,” many Graftonites felt like they had merely swapped one unwelcome master for another. And so, safely beyond the reach of both Abenaki and royal law, Grafton’s third order of business quickly became the avoidance of US taxes. It’s a pursuit that continues today.

Even accounting for a certain looseness in spelling common to the period, the petition was glorious in its semi-literacy. It got off on the wrong foot by mistaking the state in which they lived as “New Hamsheir” and went rapidly downhill from there, referring to state officers as, variously, “your honours,” “your Honners,” and “your Onners.”

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.

The Hoyts and Barneys may have lacked a Harvard degree, but they understood that simply withholding payment wouldn’t stave off Weare’s tax collectors forever. And so they did what any community of reasonable people would do. They voted to secede from the country.

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.

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.

Just like the founding fathers, they tended to keep firearms within easy reach and were acutely aware of personal rights. And just like the founding fathers, they intended to father a new founding.

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.

Most efforts at planned communities involve artificially populating an uninhabited place, like a stretch of desert or an island—as in 1972, when a Nevada millionaire and his libertarian friends declared independent ownership of an island off the coast of New Zealand (a claim that was promptly quashed by the New Zealand military).

It’s one of only five states with no sales tax, one of two states that limit the governor to two-year terms, and the only state in New England that still allows the death penalty. (No one has been executed since 1939, but they like to keep their options open.)

Condon and the others asked their hosts if they had “any hesitation about a bunch of wild libertarians invading your quiet town?… Should we choose Grafton as the Free Town?” “Absolutely,” said Rosalie. 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.

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.

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.

To be clear, bear attacks are very rare. From a statistical standpoint, you’re more likely to suffocate in a giant vat of corn than be injured by a bear. But modern attacks do happen, with seriously not-good outcomes.

“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.” Graftonites in particular would suffer

“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.

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.

But there is one caveat. Public spending is associated with happiness, but it might not actually cause happiness, said the study authors. It’s also plausible that happy people of all income levels are simply more willing to spend tax money. 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.

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. (The measure narrowly passed over these objections, and over the following eight years Grafton’s population of blind millionaires remained relatively static, at zero.)

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.

The town told Connell that, if the IRS recognized the Peaceful Assembly Church as a public charity, it would give the town grounds to approve his tax exemption application without opening the floodgates to a tsunami of frivolous claims. Grafton officials were eager to put the matter to rest because by now it seemed that every time the issue was raised in public, two or three people would threaten to declare that their own houses were churches too.

But Connell had just one small problem with clearing the low bar that the town set out. To apply for nonprofit status with the IRS, he would have to first correspond with the IRS. And to correspond with the IRS, he would have to accept that t...

Barskey, the consummate freedom fighter, needed to provoke without being provocative. He sought to frame the exchange as a defense of his friend’s vehicle against the tyranny of being leaned on.

“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.”

The shuttering of the Gulch left Connell’s Peaceful Assembly Church as the only large-scale community project serving the libertarians. It wasn’t exactly commerce, but it did manage to pull off some successful programming, including a Sunday service that drew anywhere from one to eight people a week.

A 2019 study found that some wild black bears with access to sugary human foods (like doughnuts) are skipping seasonal hibernation; these bears also showed advanced aging at the cellular level.

The overall effect is a bear torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced.

In effect, Grafton seems to have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell bear policy, based in part on the reasonable suspicion that state-issued one-size-fits-all bear management advice could even, in some cases, increase the risk of a bear attack.

The Fish and Game Department doesn’t always have to look to lawmakers—it can also take action via administrative rules. For example, in 2014, when four bears died in an outbreak of mass chocolate toxicosis, wildlife officials, somberly noting that the case “likely represents the most significant case of chocolate-induced mortality ever,” made it illegal to feed bears chocolate. 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.

Telling people to change their behavior is far cheaper than investing in an effective trapping and relocation process (for the bears, not the owners).

Figuring that was enough bears, the department decided to bring the numbers down by encouraging more people to hunt bears for more days of the year. 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.

And yet the bear market remained quite bullish. In

No animal on the planet has infection rates as high as certain populations of black bears—80 percent in one Pennsylvania study, 84 percent in a population in North Carolina, and near 100 percent in other populations. The tendency of bears to snuffle, mouth, snort, and swallow everything they can get their greedy claws into probably has them gulping down lots of things that contain T. gondii.

affect the behavior of a 350-pound bear that can literally smell a candy bar in your pocket from a mile away? No one knows, because most of the science is conducted from a public health standpoint that largely ignores the unhealthiness of being attacked by a bear.

Libertarianism is entirely built upon the appeal of exercising free choice to own a gun, marry indiscriminately, commit suicide, shoot bears, curse in polite society, or buy unhealthy amounts of soda in New York City. That appeal is decidedly less palpable if those choices are actually the product of a parasite.

Sapolsky has become a standard-bearer for a theory that free will is more or less something people have made up rather than face the far less satisfying reality that most of our decisions are driven by culture, chemical processes within the brain, bacteria in the gut, and, not least, parasites.

“Thirty-five dollars is a lot of money,” he says. “I can make that in half a day’s work, but still, I’m a smoker and I like to drink beer, so I have my other expenses on top of other bills. And you can’t live without cheese.”

When I bring up the subject with Tom Ploszaj, he gives me a staple of Grafton’s small-talk playbook: Friendly Advice. When Ploszaj first came to the community, he says, he got Friendly Advice of his own when he started asking too many questions about how things worked and who had done what to whom. “There’s a lot of places around here where they’ll never put a shovel into the dirt,” he tells me now, his tone mild. “You don’t want to find one of those places.” When I don’t respond, he clarifies, holding my eyes with his. “If you ask too many questions, you might be in a hole in the woods and no one’s going to find you.”

Once, when she was preparing to leave the house to get to her volunteer shift at the hospital, she saw the bears outside. She called the police and asked for help to get to her car. The police dispatcher offered to stay on the phone until she got to her car safely. Beretta, correctly deducing that this was unlikely to lead to anything more helpful than an audio recording of her own dismemberment, instead hung up and dialed another number. She could not make it on time, she told the hospital, due to unforeseen bear.