A funny, Bill-Bryson-esque look into a small town in New Hampshire. The humor mostly works, but I got the sense that Honglitz-Hetling was self-consciously hamming up the text to force a laugh, which somewhat detracts from the actual funny bits.
The story of the Free Town Project in Grafton confirms my suspicions of libertarians, who, instead of the logic-obssessed principled people that they see themselves as being, are actually just people who want to be unfettered by the usual constraints of propriety that the rest of us subject ourselves to for the purpose of community and solidarity. There is nothing logical about refusing to pay taxes to fund firefighting services for one’s community, when so many houses have been burned: it is selfishness masking itself as stringent application of first principles. Defecting in a prisoners’ dilemma---indeed, taking care of you and yours with not even a hint of realizing that you are indeed in a prisoners’ dilemma---is not rational.
Honglitz-Hetling depicts the bleakness of this selfish attitude particularly well with Jessica Soule, who becomes a shut-in after an frightful encounter with a bear. Her isolation was furthered by the fact that the road in front of her house stopped being plowed during the winter, because no one wanted to pay for road maintenance. The fact that Grafton seems so tepid and lifeless compared to its neighboring towns like Canaan also reflects the libertarian spirit of putting oneself above all else. They might try to ape forming communities, but when it matters, you cannot be sure that your fellow libertarians will have your back. The freedom that libertarians are working themselves toward is a perverse kind of freedom, one where you can do whatever you want, but ultimately left destitute in want of cooperation.
Hobbes famously described the state of nature, the state of human society without government, as being “nasty, brutish, and short.” As it turns out, the state of nature is also populated by quite a few bears.