What I Am Reading: "A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear" by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

I knew that I had to read this book as soon as I read the New Republic article about it. It is about how a town in rural New Hampshire was colonized by libertarians and eventually developed a bear infestation.

I guess I probably would have just left it at the article if it were a town in a different region, but I felt that the book was an important item for contemporary New England studies. The situation is that Grafton, New Hampshire, became a focus of the Free Town Project, an effort to move enough libertarians (small and big “L”) to a municipality to run it on their own terms, live free of laws and regulations, and demonstrate the viability of libertarian governance.

Grafton was already something of a libertarian model. The young town chose to join the independent republic of Vermont in 1781 rather than pay the taxes levied by New Hampshire, though Ethan Allen and his people were more interested in using this claim as a bargaining chip so that New Hampshire would respect their borders. The book is mostly a skim on Grafton history since then, but in the late 19th and early 20th century it was a prosperous farming community, mostly pastoral and linked by rail to centers of commerce. These attributes mark many rural New England towns in both their former presence and their current absence. According to the statistic I have memorized: a century ago New England, or maybe just Massachusetts, was 80% fields and 20% forested, and today it is the reverse.

Grafton, like many towns, eventually started going downhill (seemingly in the Depression, though that link is not explicitly made). The municipal government continued for centuries with a reluctance to levy or raise taxes, and town services often had to struggle against the specter of penny-pinching. By the early 21st century, the town was mostly woods and dirt roads, with only one municipal building (a fire station, even that built begrudgingly) and one general store. As with many rural New England towns, the town was sub-divided into villages, some of which had slightly denser clusters of housing. By and large, though, the town did not have zoning regulations or other such ordinances.

This made it a prime target when New Hampshire libertarians, guided to some extent by perennial gubernatorial candidate John Babiarz, worked on the Free Town Project. Over the course of roughly 2004-2009, the town was advertised online and by word of mouth as a place for libertarians to set up shop, to both prove the viability of their political beliefs and otherwise live their lives of rugged individualism. Despite the opposition of a vocal minority in town, roughly 200 or so people moved into the town in this timespan, mostly men. Some bought or built houses, others lived in temporary housing, trailers, or campgrounds. Ironically, in my mind, the libertarian community helped some set up shop, and provided temporary housing or other assistance to help people get on their feet after they arrived in town.

The takeover was political, and libertarian voters slashed as much of the town’s spending (already rather low) as they could. They got rid of the few streetlights, gave only a token budget to departments that they didn’t entirely eliminate, refused any update to the one-man police department and his twelve-year-old cruiser, and made other changes. The statistics reflected these changes. Hongoltz-Hetling reports that

“On the town’s few miles of paved roads, untended blacktop cracks first blossomed into fissures, then bloomed into grassy potholes…Grafton’s municipal offices declined from a state of mere shabbiness to downright decrepitude…what emerged from the fray was not an idealized culture of personal responsibility, but a ragged assortment of those ad-hoc camps in the woods, some of which began to generate complaints about seeping sewage and other unsanitary living conditions. Other indicators also seemed to be moving in the wrong direction. Recycling rates dropped from 60 to 40 percent. The number of annual sex offender registrations reported by police increased steadily, from eight in 2006 to twenty-two in 2020"…in 2011, Grafton was home to its first murder in living memory.” (p.92-93)

The fun comparison is with the neighboring town of Canaan, which, though not exactly socialist (“almost all public officials in Canaan would describe themselves as fiscally conservative”) actually built and maintained public infrastructure over the years, instead of Grafton’s constant spendthrift ways, which again long predated the Free Town Project. Grafton ended up with a tax rate of $4.49 per $1,000 of valuation, while Canaan’s was $6.20. In return for these higher taxes, Canaan had about three times Grafton’s population (still less than 5,000 people), and

“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…Grafton, by contrast, had a single, struggling general store, one [tourist attraction," and a church…” (p. 95)

Quelle surprise.

Though Babiarz himself ran the volunteer fire department, other voluntary services did not spring up, as some had predicted, to fill in the gaps. Indeed, Babiarz, a fire safety nut, only managed to buy himself enemies by enforcing basic fire safety ordinances. What did spring up were bears. Grafton (and the larger Grafton County) had largely been cleared of bears, as had much of New England in the latter part of the 18th and first part of the 19th centuries, as they were hunted for their bounties (the cheap way to do things, courtesy of the State of New Hampshire) and the woods were cut down. By our day, however, bears were making a return, abetted by the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game, which received income from hunting licenses.

Modern bears, however, have been changed by human contact. They are cut into isolated gene pools by impassable developed areas, made hungry by the depletion of resources and made hungrier by droughts (caused by global warming, which the book doesn’t quite mention). They are more likely to root around in garbage, less likely to have enough calories to hibernate, and more likely to be controlled by parasites that make them more aggressive. The Department of Fish and Game didn’t have enough funding to deal with them properly, either, in the spendthrift state of New Hampshire, so the primary resources they have to control them are public awareness campaigns that tend to blame victims for bear attacks.

This book tells the story of how those bears came to menace Grafton, though it is perhaps less apocalyptic a story than advertised. The libertarian lack of willingness to fund law enforcement or other animal officers, combined with the unwillingness to coerce people to clean up after themselves or even stop actively feeding their friends, the hungry bears, meant that the town had a lot of bear encounters, including several bear attacks, which would normally be rare. Bears went after livestock, bears entered houses, bears mauled people. This started around 2011 or 2012, when a couple of dry years restricted the bears’ natural food supply.

At the end of the year, there was a secret, illegal bear hunt, which killed about 13 bears in their dens. This was surrounded by some good ol’ boy omerta, and the author wasn’t able to get many details on it. He does make a good point, though, by illustrating how a similar bear incursion in affluent college town Hanover, NH was dealt with generously with state resources, while the couple of downscale women attacked by bears in downscale Grafton were (wrongly) lectured for not taking the proper precautions.

The book tells those stories, as well as the running stories of some other Grafton denizens: the donut lady who feeds the bears; an anarcho-primitivist survivalist type who is quoted, “what is 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?” (p. 59, from Mr. Adam Franz); the hippie pastor type who buys the historic town church, attempts to avoid taxes on it, makes a handshake agreement with the Free Town people, watches that agreement crumble, and dies as the historic church burns down. As you can maybe guess, it is written in a colloquial style, which mostly didn’t bother me. He does call Bernie Sanders the “governor of Vermont” at one point, though, which makes me wonder if a more thorough fact-check is in order. While obviously and sarcastically criticizing the libertarians, he does take at face value that they operate based “entirely on logic” (paraphrase), and don’t wade into the muck of emotional appeals. This, to my mind, is obvious nonsense. My drive-by opinion on libertarians is that they are unreliable allies: though the vote the right way on gay marriage, police accountability, and other social issues, they will always prioritize their finances, and sell out to the right in exchange for tax cuts.

Ironically, Grafton was done in when the larger Free State Project was triggered after a requisite number of sign-ups, activating a cohort of libertarian pledgees to move to New Hampshire (I’ve read of this many times, but not sure what the numbers look like right now). These new libertarians could pick any town in the state they wanted, and didn’t have to focus on the political/non-regulatory epicenter. As it turns out, they picked towns much nicer than Grafton. I am not sure what the situation in Grafton is like now, or if the bear situation has evolved in any way (I have to assume a follow-up article by someone will be forthcoming). If anything, the bear story just builds to a crescendo and then fades away. Bears are still out there, you know.