A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
Out in the storybook land are many leagues of the wild
Wise and uncontainable as a windy-haired child
There are the youth truth movements and they’re springing from the ground
Freak flag wavers and you cannot chop them down
Hey, it’s the home of the brave, you’ll get the threat of the free
Go to the woods
Go to the woods and see
— Dar Williams, “Go to the Woods”
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear builds on its awesome title[1] in a charming vein: each chapter sports[2] its very own carefully-chosen literary epigraph about bears, kind of like the humongous chapter of whale epigraphs at the beginning of Moby-Dick. The book also holds out the promise of a carefully-researched account of how some libertarian idealism went awry in practice—in this case, a more-radical and smaller-scale predecessor to the Free State Project. Instead of trying to take over the whole state of New Hampshire, the Free Town Project proposed to take over just a single small town there. As you might already guess from the title, that didn’t turn out very well[3].
For me, the book also delivers on the humor that the punny title suggests; I laughed out loud quite a few times while reading it. Beyond the humor, writing on libertarian experiments gone awry seems significant to me because cases where libertarian ideals have been put into practice are few and far between, and so libertarians can often object that these ideals have yet to be tried. (An earlier contribution in this genre is James Grimmelmann’s law review article “Sealand, Havenco, and the Rule of Law,” which examines the downfall of the colo-in-a-microstate from a sort of legal positivist perspective[4].)
I first heard about this book from another review that drew the obvious parallel between “radical libertarians having a hard time coordinating against bear attacks” and “radical libertarians having a hard time coordinating against COVID-19.” And indeed, the question of how to respond to a risk that is affected, but not created, by individuals’ behavior is a challenging one for libertarian theory. I think it was David Friedman (he can correct me in the comments!) who pointed out that it seems difficult to decide from first principles on the acceptable levels of risk to which we can legitimately expose one another. It’s easy enough to agree that I mustn’t murder you, but may I fly an airplane over your house? What if it’s an experimental model I built myself? How about failing to finish a prescribed course of antibiotics, and thereby unwittingly giving some bacteria a tiny chance to evolve resistance faster? (They’ll eventually evolve it no matter what, but maybe you just gave them an extra 1,000 shots-on-goal out of 1,000,000,000,000 that they needed, or something?)
Diffuse externalities of many kinds crop up where discrete harmful outcomes are hard to connect to remote, possibly widespread risky individual actions. In the disease case, clearly I can’t deliberately infect you with a contagious disease (that’s widely recognized as a serious form of assault!), but exactly how careful do I have to be once I know I have it myself? How much effort do I have to take to find out if I have it? How careful should I be to avoid contracting it in the first place because of the subsequent risks to others? All of these questions apply to every contagious disease—even outside of pandemic situations.
These questions mostly lack obvious Schelling point solutions[5]. Instead, they’re likely to be answered by other means, like gut feelings, or tradition (which doesn’t help much at first for the antibiotics and airplanes), or political processes, or insurance companies’ actuarial assessments (maybe against the backdrop of legal liability rules), or whatever. The answers produced in these ways tend to smack of arbitrariness, which is particularly frustrating to people like me—and to some of the libertarians who moved to Grafton, New Hampshire.
So, Hongoltz-Hetling’s main story begins a decade or two before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. Lots of radical libertarians, meeting each other online, decide to move to the town of Grafton, described by some as a hospitable environment because of its existing culture (anti-tax, pro-gun, live-and-let-live). When they get there, they’re surprised that the residents are skeptical and worried about them. But why? Shouldn’t they be greeted as liberators, or something?
Well, most of the new residents are conspicuously more radical and explicit about their libertarian views than the existing residents, who are more culturally libertarianish than advocates of a clearly-articulated ideological view. The newcomers want to legalize various things that the old-timers are uneasy with (prostitution, drugs, duels to the death), and want to eliminate every tax possible. The old-timers are largely proud of the relatively small and inexpensive local government they’ve already achieved and don’t specifically think it needs to be shrunk further.
Various things soon go awry. (Hongoltz-Hetling is a local journalist who suggests he stumbled across some of these, in part, while conducting interviews for a different story.) While A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear happily chronicles several of the Free Town project’s misadventures, the front-and-center one is all about bears and property rights. Basically, the newcomers (and, to a lesser extent, some of the old-timers) have radically divergent intuitions about how to deal with their increasingly noticeable fuzzy forest neighbors. Levy taxes to hire animal-control personnel? Allow town residents to shoot the bears? Get someone from the state wildlife agency to trap and relocate them? Enforce rules about storage and collection of garbage? Have people who are concerned build their own walls or other bear deterrents[6]? Try to adopt them as pets?
The most obvious problem, shown through drawn-out, sometimes hilarious contrasts, is that some of these strategies require more coordination among the town’s residents than many of the newcomers are politically comfortable with. While the Free Towners felt they were all basically on the same page before they moved to Grafton, their experience of living there together seems to devolve into asking five libertarians how to respond to a problem in a libertarian way and getting six different answers. In what’s probably the most extreme case, one animal-loving libertarian resident becomes a sort of Crazy Bear Lady, spending what amounts to thousands of dollars to feed the bears because they’re cute and she can tell that they’re really hungry. Meanwhile, her neighbors have other ideas, and also, their pets are getting eaten by the bears.
The town also struggles to maintain its fire department. Notwithstanding the existence of libertarian ideas about how to fund firefighting services effectively without taxation, the newcomers don’t really succeed in putting any of these proposals into practice, and they also get mad at the libertarian volunteer fire chief—who had helped propose that they all move to Grafton in the first place!—when he tries to enforce state fire codes. In Chekhov’s Gun fashion, you have to wonder why the author is mentioning these issues...
Eventually, several tragedies occur, some of the newcomers leave for various reasons, and the Free Town Project pretty much breaks up. Meanwhile, the Free State Project people move to New Hampshire in larger numbers, win a number of elections, and succeed in getting the state to pass a slate of more moderate libertarian reforms[7]. In Hongoltz-Hetling’s account, these more moderate policy changes don’t seem to have any catastrophic effects, and aren’t quite as upsetting to other New Hampshire residents, though real controversies do exist and maybe the Free State Project will lead to future political and social divisions. Also, he finds that bear-human conflicts are increasing all across the state, which could be due to increased challenges in coordinating wildlife management policies exacerbated by Free Staters’ reluctance to rely on the government to do this coordination.
The author repeatedly expresses his view that funding some kinds of services through taxes can achieve virtuous cycles and produce externalities that make most taxpayers feel they were a good deal. He mostly tries to show this by comparing Grafton with neighboring or nearby New Hampshire cities that have different levels of tax-funded services, pointing out that the cities with more public services got hard-to-quantify but obvious benefits from those services and that most taxpayers were pretty happy with this method of funding them. This isn’t a specific theory of how large the State should be or how high tax rates should be, or anything; it’s more of an impressionistic observation that radical libertarianism doesn’t seem to beat “random small-town New Hampshire fiscal policy” at producing satisfied populations. I took this as a suggestion that people in various places may have levels of taxation that they’re culturally satisfied and comfortable with, and be resistant to outsiders wanting to change those levels either upward or downward. (Also, though libertarians have lots of creative ideas for institutions that can fund public goods voluntarily, those institutions themselves don’t just magically pop into being without anyone’s efforts!)
Relatedly, the book makes interesting and recurring use of the concept of “invasion” (juxtaposing different moments in which human cultures in or around Grafton have been destabilized or disrupted by human or ursine outsiders), which I found thought-provoking. It’s a reminder that many ecological and cultural equilibria are possible, and that there are even more possible ways of disturbing them. Chapter 8, while it feels a bit disconnected from the book’s main themes, also draws a striking contrast between Grafton and a wealthy New Hampshire town (Hanover, home of Dartmouth College) whose citizens were also distressed by bear incursions in the same timeframe, but managed to use their wealth and political connections to have the bears removed without violating anyone’s ethical or aesthetic sensibilities.
In Grafton, public opinion had split between shooting and not shooting the bears. In Hanover, the schism was characteristically different—some people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to modify [a local bear celebrity]’s behavior, while other people wanted the government to spend a lot of money to capture and relocate [the celebrity] and her cubs to someone else’s backyard.
It being Hanover, both sides got what they wanted.
The contrast is partly about class, partly about ideology, partly about power, and all in all extraordinarily bizarre. (The celebrity mama bear, relocated 1,000 miles away[8] after Dartmouth elites call in favors, subsequently walks back to Hanover, apparently because the food is better or just because she likes people’s kindness there. Somebody creates a Twitter account to channel her thoughts on the matter. The government’s expenditures and efforts continue to ensure that this story is cute and humorous rather than tragic, finessing the humans’ disagreements, but of course “state and local officials can’t afford to leverage that kind of effort everywhere,” so it’s not exactly a prototypical tale of coexistence.)
Back in Grafton, the author also manages to find humor, sometimes fairly dark humor, in all sorts of strange and unhappy events, even including several occasions when people obliquely threaten to murder him[9]. His treatment of the local gun culture, among libertarians and non-libertarians alike, is pretty funny; it’s not exactly sympathetic, but not super-judgmental either. There are amusing scenes in which people emphasize how unlike those crazy Free Towners they are, and then talk about their own deep love of and/or willingness to use firearms. If you have a strong view about gun culture, you’ll likely be annoyed at the book’s equivocal failure to agree with your view.
It would be helpful if the book were clearer on the extent to which the bear chaos can be laid at the paws of the libertarians’ actions and political beliefs. The book covers a period of about seventeen years, during which a lot of complicated things involving both bears and libertarianism happened in New Hampshire, both at local and state levels. In some places, the author emphasizes that bear population dynamics and behavior depend on many factors, including weather patterns, human settlement patterns, and actions and decisions by state government (which he notes did not seem to develop adequate capacity to respond to wildlife issues, even before the libertarians showed up en masse). While some Free Towners clearly actively encouraged bears to live in Grafton—like by feeding them—and libertarian culture and politics reduced the capacity for collective or coordinated action on wildlife issues, there are like eight other things that also increased the danger of bear attacks in the same timeframe.
One reason the chronology and causality are so hard to pin down here is that Hongoltz-Hetling is apparently mainly a newspaper journalist who originally mostly did these interviews and research for newspaper-style human interest stories. Newspapers are famously not that great at making detailed arguments about causation or giving you useful context for what you’re reading about, compared to reporting on an unusual event or interesting personality. A big limitation of this book, then, is that several chapters feel more or less like extended (often hilarious) newspaper profiles of some individual Graftonite. Good for understanding how that person thinks, or his or her life story; not so great for a synoptic view of the overall impact of libertarianism on bears, or the magnitude of libertarians’ role in exacerbating pre-existing problems. Later chapters also often reach back in time, through interviews, to events before those of earlier chapters, or even before the start of the Free Town Project.
I suppose the state-capacity part that the author emphasizes through the wildlife management issues is the flip side of Bastiat’s famous “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” argument, a classic libertarian thought experiment about opportunity cost. Bastiat is totally right that, if the government takes your money to subsidize a gilded bear effigy, people can see the shiny monument in the middle of town, yet not see the small business that you would have opened with that money, or the cool art project of your own that you would have made, or the jobs you would have created through your spending, or whatever. Conversely, if the government takes your money to relocate real bears a thousand miles away from the monument, you can’t see the absent bears. They’re not lolling about wearing “Your Tax Dollars At Work” collars. They’re somewhere else!
In the legendarily difficult text-adventure version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s an item called “no tea” which you begin the game with, and can later drop and pick up. (It becomes the basis of one of the game’s puzzles.) When you have it, it shows up in your inventory list (“You have: … no tea”). Much of the humor comes from making explicit one of the things that we don’t have in our “inventories” most of the time. So, if someone goes to some trouble to discourage bears from hanging out on your doorstep, you might not spend much time pondering the “no bears” item in your inventory, any more than you tend to ponder how you don’t have gold bars, or the Mona Lisa, or tigers, or penguins. These may all just feel like basic facts of life. But, depending on where you live, acquiring that coveted “no bears” item may well have taken a lot of unnoticed effort.
I’ve appreciated the observation that earlier generations were terrified of contagious diseases like smallpox and polio that have been virtually wiped out by vaccination campaigns, while today these diseases are so rare and unfamiliar that many people no longer viscerally fear them or even feel any familiarity with them. That in turn makes it unclear at some intuitive level what it is the vaccines are protecting against: if you don’t know anyone who has had polio, are you going to feel the same sense of Jonas Salk as a hero of humanity as someone like my grandmother, who anxiously followed polio outbreak news while worrying about how to protect her children? Are you going to have a clear intuition for why it’s important to vaccinate against it? Measles, to take a tragically contemporary example, does feel kind of unreal and unthreatening if you’ve never encountered it even once in your entire life. Wikipedia summarizes this observation, made by many medical and public health professionals:
The overwhelming success of certain vaccinations has made certain diseases rare and consequently this has led to incorrect heuristic thinking, in weighing risks against benefits, among people who are vaccine-hesitant. Once such diseases (e.g., Haemophilus influenzae B) decrease in prevalence, people may no longer appreciate how serious the illness is due to a lack of familiarity with it and become complacent. The lack of personal experience with these diseases reduces the perceived danger and thus reduces the perceived benefit of immunization.
Much the same logic applies to measures protecting against other kinds of threats. G. K. Chesterton and Joseph Henrich remind us: that thingy over there might be a weird and broken vestige of history, but it also might do something we personally can’t envision that responds to something we can’t see. Nothing makes a problem or danger feel imaginary or hypothetical like handling it successfully!
I recommend this book to libertarians interested in pondering either the theory or practice of libertarian ideas[10]. You’ll surely wish Hongoltz-Hetling had been more charitable to some of his subjects, or more interested in the substance of their ideas and values. (At one point he casually says Ayn Rand’s novels are the prototype for how Free Towners think society should work, even though he’s just finished interviewing several of them and seen how their views differ.) You’ll probably laugh at some of the wacky hijinks and maybe hold your breath through some moments of terror. (The description of the experience of making eye contact with bears really doesn’t make you want to go try it out.) If you feel confident in a particular libertarian ethical or political theory, you’ll probably have advice ready for the right way that the Free Towners should have done things. You may grumble that the book rushes too quickly past the many other factors that contributed to the dangers it describes, most of which were present in Grafton long before modern political libertarianism. But in any case, you’ll have lots of things to ponder about how our shared intuitions and understandings bear or don’t bear contact with unforeseen circumstances, and how institutions and culture facilitate human life in a world that’s not always warm and fuzzy toward us. Or one that can sometimes be a little too warm and fuzzy.