Calling Out Libertarians for what they really are

What would a town run by libertarians look like? Wild, happy freedom? Prosperity for all? In Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s A Libertarian Walks into a Bear, the answer is much more uncomfortable. Libertarians have issues — with every one and every thing. They are miserable in their “freedom”.

Grafton, New Hampshire has always had a libertarian streak. Before they completed the US Constitution, Grafton was already trying to secede from the USA. Any hint of tax or authority set the residents off. It has been slashing budgets and avoiding services ever since.

The Libertarian Appeal

In this century, libertarians were drawn to Grafton by the promise of turning “a stodgy and unattractive thicket of burdensome regulations into an ‘anything goes’ frontier where…citizens could assert certain inalienable rights, such as the right to have more than two junk cars on private property, the right to gamble, the right to engage in school truancy, the right to traffic drugs and the right to have incestual intercourse…the right to traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights, in which people who are homeless or otherwise indigent are paid small amounts of money to engage in fisticuffs.” This was the Free Town Project, and the pitches are from its…