Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear ** 1/2

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the true story of a town (Grafton, New Hampshire) taken over by libertarians and how an increasingly aggressive bear population took advantage of the resulting lack of community services.

At least that's what I thought the book was going to be about. In fact, it's a collection of anecdotes about the eccentric denizens of Grafton and their crazy schemes. Only a handful of the folks who flock to Grafton are true libertarians; many of them are the kinds of loners, cultists, survivalists, and extremists you would expect to find in comparably small communities in Alaska or anywhere at the edge of civilization. For example, one chapter starts by introducing Doughnut Lady, who feeds doughnuts to the local bears, but ends up telling the story of Goat Man, whose 252 goats took over his property. In another chapter, the author speculates about whether the townsfolk (and/or the increasingly aggressive bears) are suffering from toxoplasmosis.

In 2004, a small group of libertarians launched the Free Town Project. They planned to take over Grafton and essentially eliminate its government. I have always thought that libertarianism is an intriguing concept that quickly turns problematic in practice, so I wanted to find out how this social experiment went. However, the Free Towners did not take over Grafton; they simply joined the already tax-averse population of the town and made lots of speeches at town council meetings. As the author's own research shows, it was not a qualitative change in the town's history.

The same goes for the bears. The increase in human-bear interactions is shown as the inevitable consequence of long-standing attitudes about wildlife and government funding.

There is only one chapter that (semi-)seriously looks at the libertarian project and compares Grafton (unfavorably) to its nearest neighbor Canaan in terms of its tax burden and quality of life. Another short section points out that "today's New Hampshire bruins are so different from their forebears of just five hundred years ago that they might be mistaken for another species." But these honest attempts to grapple with the issues get drowned out by the author's desire to be clever, exemplified by the title of the book and the alliterative chapter titles.