A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is an often funny, often tragic account of two major threads in American life that crossed in the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire.

The first is the Ideal of Liberty (caps intended), the notion that America was founded as a place where you could be free to live your life as you want, without inconvenient laws and regulations and especially taxes. Grafton has a long history of collective and individual tax evasion, backed by rural Yankee skinflint attitudes towards money. In 2004, a few of the locals decided that Grafton would be an ideal location for their Free Town experiment. They'd recruit Libertarians from the internet and pack the apparatuses of government with supporters, and then dismantle the state from the inside.

There were a few problems with this plan. First, Grafton is incredibly economically depressed, with essentially zero industry or commerce. While land is cheap, transportation is not. Second, internet libertarians willing to move to a small town are by definition difficult people. As newcomers squatted in various wooded shacks and tent encampments, tempers boiled over in a thousand small way, stressing the town's legal system. And third, there were the bears.

The bears are the second major theme. White settlement in New Hampshire was literally hacked from bear infested woods with musket and axe. But as small farms retreated and the conservation movement rose, bears returned in force. Bears are clever survivors, and humans leave lots of food lying around their property, from chicken coops to bird feeders to trash. Donut Lady, a local resident who started feeding the bears, is the headline, but the real story is a new ecology at the ursine-human interface, with bears as very large and very dangerous racoons. The bear population of New Hampshire has exploded, leaving Fish and Game totally overwhelmed. And one Grafton resident was mauled, while many suffered close scares.

Libertarian attitudes of "I do what I want" haven't helped the bear problem, with complications from laissez faire trash disposal to deliberately feeding the bears, but even organized state responses seem insufficient. The much more prosperous town of Hanover (Dartmouth College) had a celebrity bear, Mink, who was repeatedly trapped and tranqed by fish and game and relocated to deep wilderness at immense expense. Tahoe has a current (March 2022) problem with Hank the Tank, a bear that breaks into vacation homes. What worked, at least temporarily, was a vigilante effort in Grafton that illegally hunted bears and killed at least a dozen. The bear problem would rapidly disappear if people were allowed to open fire on bears sniffing around their garbage cans, use bait, and attack bears in their dens. But such actions are cowardly and despicable, whether done by private individuals or organized under the aegis of the public good.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is a fun story, and a good display of contemporary libertarian politics as emotional reaction against community and responsibility, rather than any kind of actual intellectualism or politics. It points towards changes in how Americans relate to nature, and a possible curve in the conversation movement, though one that hasn't happened yet. Charismatic megafauna is charismatic.