God, it is known, acts in mysterious ways. But, after centuries of searching for answers, it seems that recent years have made something clear: God prefers libertarians.
At some point in 2020, this supreme being spoke to Javier Milei, who was then another economist in the media fauna. He told him that he had a “mission”: to get into politics, since he was “destined” to be President in 2023. We already know how that story ended, and the now leader of the Argentines must be more convinced than ever that he really He is a chosen one by this divine hand.
But, incredibly strikingly, he is not the only libertarian who has a direct line to God. The other was John Connell, a retired worker from Massachusetts, in the United States. In 2010, while spending a vacation in the town of Grafton, he stopped in front of an almost abandoned Church. Or rather, he stood in front of the sign that was on the door, which said “for sale.” And it was at that precise moment that he heard the same voice that, a decade later, Milei would hear. “Just do it, buddy,” she told him. And Connell, of course, did: he spent much of his savings to buy the old building.
But what was to happen in the following years was nothing like paradise. The Church would end up on fire with Connell inside. And the “Free Town Project”, the reason why God’s chosen worker and hundreds of other people with his ideology had landed in Grafton, would also have a tragic outcome: that project, the only real libertarian experiment in history, would end. facing wild bears. And not even the forces of heaven could stop them.
The bears, in what was the first recorded attack on humans in more than a century, would be the victors.
Hello everyone. “I consider the State as an enemy: taxes are a hindrance to slavery. I am a liberal libertarian, a market anarchist. “I believe in individuals, I believe in self-government.”
The speaker is not one of the approximately two hundred libertarians who flooded Grafton – a small town with just over a thousand inhabitants – starting in 2004, but Milei. The President’s ideology is identical to that of those who came to this place lost in the forests of the New Hamsphire district: libertarians who read Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, who fought for the disappearance of the State (and the hateful taxes through of which is present) and who came to support the same extravagant ideas that Milei once proposed, such as the legalization of the sale of organs, the free carrying of weapons and the implementation of a voucher system for education, among others. .
That is why the study of what happened in Grafton is so interesting: it is an example of what happens in a place if the President’s ideas are applied – without things like the obstacles imposed by the division of powers in Argentina. “Milei’s speech is likely to encounter several areas of friction between the theoretical libertarian ideal and the real world,” says journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, who investigated the Grafton case and captured it in his book “ “A libertarian crosses a bear.” “I saw this debate between theory and reality on a very small level. And it was a horror show,” he says, in an exclusive interview with NOTICIAS.
The king of a wild world. The first libertarians arrived in Grafton in February 2004. They were in a van and there were four of them: Tim Condon, lawyer, 55 years old, with thirty years of libertarian political activism, Larry Pendarvis, 61, a regular on extremist internet forums and who had been prosecuted for the consumption of child pornography, Tony Lekas, a software engineer who dreamed of becoming a firearms instructor, and Bob Hull, 58, who in his difficult adolescence in which he suffered bullying had incredibly won the lottery and would be one of the largest economic contributors to the project.
They had previously passed through 28 cities. But Grafton, very close to the Canadian border, was different. The town had a long history of tax evasion and anti-authoritarianism: at the end of the 18th century they had voted to secede from the United States to join what was the Independent Republic of Vermont… because it promised not to tax them. Furthermore, the state of New Hampshire has a tradition of valuing individual freedoms, which they express in their official slogan “live free or die,” or in the fact that they are the only province where it is not mandatory to wear a seat belt, where There are no sales taxes and – very important for the settlers – they do not have any zoning regulations, which allowed the erection of any type of construction, such as improvised stores or cabins.
There was also another reason to raise the “Free Town Project” in Grafton. There lived John Babiarz, a libertarian who had run for governor several times before and who, by the parameters of this movement, had not done so badly: in 2002, with the slogan “the government is not the solution, it is the problem” -a phrase that Milei could well say-, had obtained 3% of the votes in that election, in what remains a record for libertarians. It was Babiarz, in fact, who welcomed the four original members of the van into town. Some time later, he would regret this decision, when as chief of the town’s volunteer firefighters he saw the limits between theory and practice: he wanted to put out a fire in a wooded area but the libertarians who had set him on fire accused him of being a “statist” and of interfering with their freedom.
The forces of the ground. The idea of the libertarians was clear: to take over a town and influence their policies until they reached a non-existent State that would not burden them with taxes and that would then become a beacon for all libertarians in the world.
Through forums and networks, Babiarz and the other four began to invite people like them from all over the country, without any requirements: everyone was welcome. “This idea that we will welcome everyone as long as they sign this political agenda leads to a lot of tolerance towards things that would normally be dismissed: tolerance of racism, tolerance of intolerance. And what actually happened was that they summoned the most extreme libertarians from each community and took them all to the same place. “In other words, they selected a very particular group of people with very unbalanced views, and convinced them that those views should not only be okay for them, but they should be okay for everyone else in Grafton,” he says. Hongoltz-Hetling.
The libertarians burst in with everything. In June 2004 they made their first show of force at the town’s annual assembly. By that time, Hull had bought several lots and installed dozens of supporters of the cause there – who were mostly men, like the bulk of the hard core of Milei’s followers.
The changes would be noticed quickly, with support that would prove to be vital: many original residents of the town who welcomed the fight to pay less taxes. The Libertarians managed to cut Grafton’s million-dollar budget by 30%, an adjustment made worse by 20% population growth, defunded the county’s senior council, and closed the urban planning board. This is barely what they achieved: they also tried to close the Public Library and replace the educational system with that of vouchers, as Milei proposes. “They joined with thrifty allies to loudly defy every rule and every tax dollar. One by one expenses were stripped from the municipal budget and pieces of services were torn away as if they were meat,” says the author.
The consequences were not long in coming. The streets of the city fell into disrepair. “Neglected cracks in the asphalt first became fissures and then became grass-covered potholes,” Hongoltz-Hetling says in his book. Two small bridges were on the verge of collapsing. The Grafton municipal offices went from a state of mere ruin to outright decrepitude: they had to cut off the hot water service – in an area where the average temperature in winter is minus 3 degrees – and employees ended up washing their hands with water frost.
The “particular” people who moved caused other developments. The number of annual sex offender registrations increased from eight in 2006 to twenty-two in 2010. In 2006, three men were arrested in connection with a methamphetamine production lab in town and in 2011 a double homicide occurred, the first murders of which Grafton has memory. One of the dead had 16 shots. In 2013, police killed another man after an armed robbery. Conflict increased in the town, probably related to the appearance of weapons everywhere.
By 2010, the number of civil fights to which the police responded was double -compared to 2001, before the arrival of the libertarians-, and the number of disputes between neighbors was almost quadruple. This was while the police were losing funding each year and had only one patrol car so old it often wouldn’t start. The fire department, compared to the nearest town, was almost 100% underfunded.
The curious thing is that, despite all the cuts, taxes did not go down that much. The thing is that the demands on the people increased, between the libertarians who presented protections and the neighbors who wanted to defend themselves against them: in 2004 Grafton’s legal expenses were 275 dollars, but in 2011 they were almost ten thousand. Compared to Canaan, the neighboring town, citizens of the libertarian town spent just 70 cents less per day on taxes.
And there was also the matter of the bears. As libertarians transformed city life by doing what they wanted, the nature around them also changed. They did not follow regulations on waste disposal, set up camps anywhere in the forest, and refused to call state authorities every time they saw a bear – as protocol indicates -. By 2018, the number of bears in Grafton had exceeded predicted numbers by more than 50%.
In 2012, the first bear attack occurred on a non-libertarian resident of Grafton, causing serious injuries. It was the first event of this nature in that province in more than 150 years. Two more bear attacks would occur in the following years.
The experiment was thus coming to an end. In 2016 Connell would die in a confusing episode: while maintaining an open conflict with the authorities to avoid paying taxes for the Church that he had bought, one night the building caught fire with him inside. The investigation to determine if it was an accident, suicide or homicide is still open. Whether or not this was part of God’s plan is also unknown.
That year was also born what would end up being the ruin of this adventure. In the New Hampshire city – of a million people – the “Free State Project” would appear, which, being larger in scale, would end up taking the bulk of Grafton’s libertarians. As of today, this plan is still in its infancy. Only the ruins remain of what was the first experiment of Milei’s ideas applied in reality.
