A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear – or Why Are People So Stupid?

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

This is the story of what happens when a group of people who think freedom means, “No one can tell me what to do even if it is absolutely in my own best interest” decide to find a town where they can live out their principles.

Grafton NH has always been a magnet for anti-social contrarians. By now it is smaller and has far less amenities than any of the neighboring communities so no one but the contrarians want to live there. Those people just keep voting to decrease any public service that may cost any money. In Grafton this is especially seen in the library and the fire department. As the community gets smaller through people moving away (and fires burning down buildings), the forests take over and the bears get closer. There isn’t money to pay for wildlife officials. No one wants those kinds of government agents telling them how to live their lives anyway. Now bear attacks are on the rise.

It isn’t happening just in Grafton. In a neighboring town a human-habituated bear was a local celebrity until she was moved and then taught to stay away. The public demanded she not be killed and they agreed to not encourage her to stay.

“…in a place with strong civic engagement, aggressive enforcement of best practices with regard to human food attraction, and political will, even a worst-case scenario of human-habituated bears can be resolved in a way that makes everyone happy.

The problem is that state and local officials can’t afford to leverage that kind of effort everywhere. And until they do, bears will be effectively managed only on the doorsteps of the elite.”

I’m a person who has no issue with paying taxes to keep a town running. I want to have a nice place to live. I like having parks and libraries and garbage service. These people would think I am awful. There was a lot of infighting. It was a form of purity testing. If you told anyone that they should do something then you were impinging on their freedom. One person was known for always carrying multiple recording devices to record all the hostile encounters he had in a day. Maybe, sir, that is a sign that you are the problem.

“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.”

That doesn’t even get into the guns. Everyone has to have so many guns to protect their freedom. I’ll never understand why people who are under no threat from anything (except maybe bears) are so scared and convinced that they are going to have to shoot someone at any given time.

Structurally the book is a bit of a mess. It jumps around a lot between times and characters. Honestly, it is more about the disaster of their government than about the bears. But it is funny in a really sad way. You can see that they are just destroying themselves but they are so proud that they are going down with the ship.

This book was written in 2019. My version was updated with an afterword that added in how they dealt with COVID because seriously, you just knew that was going to be a fiasco. I’d recommend making sure you have a later edition to get that part.

One of my favorite other quotes was:

“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?”

That sums up the Free Town Project people who poured into Grafton to free themselves from the government. I guess they could ask the bears.