Book review again? Well, it makes a change from old goth music.
I can’t even claim an absence of politics with this one, because it will touch on politics. It’s mostly commentary on the US, because this is a US book about a US town, but there’s plenty enough of this sort of fuckwit here in the UK.
The book centres on Grafton, NH, a town that I’ve mentioned before here, and that I find both scary and darkly amusing. Grafton became a centre for libertarians, and an experiment of the Free Town Project, and the TLDR if you want to jump out now is that in an amazing life-imitating-art experience, things didn’t go smoothly.
funding a costly, state-run bear hit squad would require imposing unpopular taxes.
The settlers hated bears with the sizzling, white-hot hatred that comes from living in constant fear. But there was something they hated even more—taxes.
The libertarians want a small state, minimal government, and most of all, few rules and even fewer taxes, and I suppose I can see the appeal, in a very simplistic view. We’d all rather keep all of our income, and be free to do as we wish, but as I mentioned previously, this is problematic.
Libertarians have a vision for America that includes lots of personal freedom, very little government, and a pure marketplace that will sort out societal problems like climate change, education inequality, and rising health care costs.
One of the biggest issues, along with many people on that spectrum, like the free speechers, is that they generally find the structures and rules of society problematic when they are asked to contribute, but still want the benefits. The book tells the tale of how Grafton’s public services crumbled:
roads, bridges, town offices, lighting, police mobility, and more—were sacrificed as casualties in the all-important battle to keep property taxes low.
In 1909, not long after it first declined to fund a fire department, Grafton stymied a plan to build a $150 police station, leaving a chain of police chiefs no choice but to work, conduct interviews, and store criminal records in their own homes for the next eighty-two years.
and with them actually went other things like the only shop. It touches on how nearby Canaan, which opted for a less mental tax system, thrived by comparison and grew, because it provided the amenities people wanted to see.
It tells how some of the free town folks may have questionable motivations for wanting freedom:
Larry Pendarvis, the oldest of the group at sixty-one. Pendarvis was traveling under the pseudonym “Zack Bass,” possibly to prevent anyone from linking him with his time working an office job for a health unit within Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. That job had been abruptly terminated when coworkers, suspicious of his secretive computer habits, found digital files that led to a conviction for 129 counts of child pornography
but also has some (admittedly dark) humour: One Libertarian, desperate to show how he wouldn’t be oppressed by laws banning parties and enforcing mask wearing during the pandemic, arranged a party meeting:
then Act 3 took place on December 9. Having led the House for barely more than a week, Hinch died of COVID-19.
So then: why the bear?
Well, the area had a long-standing bear population, and the dual issues of people insisting that they weren’t going to be told what to do about the bears (don’t leave accessible garbage or other food, for example) and the lack of effective control by the state means that the bear thing gets out of hand, all because of a desire to avoid taxation.
It’s an entertaining read, with the real-life characters being by turn amusing and stunning, like the one character who buys the town’s church to live in, tries to declare his own religion in order to avoid tax, but is initially thwarted because his ideals prevent him from acknowledging the IRS (he later solves that issue by selling the property to a consortium).
