[ExI] "When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in."

[John Grigg]

And some of those Libertarian micro-nation discussions happened on this
list! Lol

"Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a
Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. *A Libertarian Walks Into a
Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781541788510>* sees him traversing rural New
England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in
recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein
a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New
Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian
ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch
meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over
the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on
online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were
inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical
freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that
“statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was
irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive
and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and
efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn
Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of
micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the
1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things
in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide
with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create
their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting
narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling.
Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its
“discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from
mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our
vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in
microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of
“freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for
impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a
United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless
corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one
tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed."
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
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