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The Wall Street Journal asked people of some prominence to name the best books they read in 2020. So I asked my colleagues. Honestly, I like this list better. Of course, we all recommend the books Cato published this year. But we read more widely, and here are some of our favorites:

The Little House By Virginia Lee Burton - This children's story tracks our heroinea well-built, 19th-century country home enjoying the stars at night and the changing seasonsas modern urban life creeps closer, surrounds her, and takes her land, her enjoyment of nature, and everything else. After skyscrapers have expropriated every inch of her once-peaceful hillside, a family finds the little pink house sad and lonely and, in contempt of modern permitting and historical preservation laws, manages to quickly load her onto a truck and return with her to the countryside. Perfect for ages 1-9.

--David Bier, immigration policy analyst

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis MD PhD (a recent McLaughlin Lecturer at Cato). A very timely overview of the pandemic, touching on a whole host of aspects of the crisis (though not much economics).

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. A very provocative thesis that suggests that church-pressured social changes in who it was acceptable to marry (not cousins) and then Protestant churches emphasizing individual interpretation and reading provided the foundations for the psychology that allowed individual rights, democracy, markets, and innovation to flourish.

--Ryan Bourne, R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety; by Eric Schlosser (Penguin, 2013). Investigative reporter Eric Schlosser explores the harrowing history of fatal mishaps and near-catastrophes in America's nuclear arsenal, culminating in the explosion of a fully armed Titan ICBM in its silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980. Widely heralded upon its publication in 2013, Command and Control was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was the source material for an Oscar-shortlisted PBS documentary of the same name. With a mix of dark humor and painstaking attention to detail, Schlosser explains how the appearance of safety and security surrounding nuclear weapons was always more illusion than fact. The book follows nuclear weapons designers and engineers as they sought to raise the alarm and adopt more stringent safety features from the Manhattan Project to the modern era. It explains how on several occasions America came perilously close to suffering an accidental nuclear detonation, often avoided only by dumb luck. The risk is still real today, and Command and Control offers a compelling libertarian lesson on the fallibility of human institutions and the dangers of assuming government competence.

--Andy Craig, staff writer

I read Animal Farm to the kids. It surprised me how relevant it remains. Now every time someone defends ObamaCare, I hear Squealer: Surely, comrades, you dont want discrimination against preexisting conditions back?

--Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies

I thoroughly enjoyed Kristin Kobes Du Mezs Jesus and John Wayne. As someone raised in a fundamentalist Protestant household and who still identifies as an evangelical, I found it to be an illuminating study of how early to mid-20th century cultural norms shaped Christian views of masculinity and ultimately energized a particular set of gendered politics.

--Paul Matzko, assistant editor for tech and innovation, Libertarianism.org

Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie is a wonderful book about the systemic failures in scientific institutions that lead to bad science, the spreading of wild unproven hypotheses, and mass public ignorance about the topic. His proposed solutions wont work as he doesnt seriously contemplated how to change the incentives of scientists, but his examination of the problem is masterful and funny.

--Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies

The most interesting book Ive read this year is Michelle Corsons Freedom of Motion: Working Families and the Transportation Revolution. After a successful career in commercial real estate development, Corson decided to focus on solving complex social problems using creative financial tools. She soon learned that if a low-income person with poor credit could buy a really good car, something relatively new that wouldnt break down, with a warranty, and had the opportunity to get some financial coaching, they were able to get better jobs, build financial stability, and gain a path to economic mobility. But banks charge such people up to 20 percent interest on car loans. Corson started On the Road Lending, which gives people low-interest car loans along with basic financial training. As this book shows, auto ownership has greatly improved the lives of her clients. On the Road Lending now operates in four different states. Though published in 2017, On the Road Lendings annual reports since then show that it continues to successfully help people get out of poverty.

--Randal O'Toole, senior fellow

I read Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. Stuck at home for so long, one has to expand one's kitchen offerings!

--Khristine Brookes, vice president for communications

Andrew McAfees More from Less is an environmental book with two twists: its optimistic and pro-market. Using real-world examples and extensive data on U.S. metals, fertilizer, wood products, and fuels, McAfee convincingly shows that technological progress and capitalism have not only made us more prosperous, but also sparked dematerialization the use of fewer natural resources to make more and better stuff. As he puts it, [t]he fuel of interest in in eliminating costs was added to the fire of the computer revolution, and the world began to dematerialize.

--Scott Lincicome, senior fellow

The best book I read this year is First, the biography of Justice Sandra Day OConnor by Evan Thomas. Rather than just a review of her jurisprudence based on her published opinions, the book goes behind the scenes with extensive excerpts from the journals of both Justice OConnor and her husband. It also features many observations from Justice OConnors law clerks and close friends. Its a fascinating account of how Justice OConnor rose to become the first woman on the Supreme Court through a combination of extremely hard work, intelligence, pragmatism, a keen sense for politics, and some key moments of good luck. The story of her appointment also presents a remarkable contrast to the much more arduous vetting process that occurs today.

--Thomas A. Berry, research fellow

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore: This historical fiction centers around the legal battles between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison over the lightbulb, as told by Westinghouses boy genius lawyer Paul Cravath. The characters are well-drawn, including the late 1880s New York City setting, and it hews close enough to fact to provide a good education on the battle between alternating and direct current. Who knew patent litigation could be so exciting?

--Jennifer Schulp, director of financial regulation studies

The most fascinating book I read in 2020 was a novel published back in 1708 by Simon Ockley: "The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (Full text available here.) This was the English translation of an Arabic novel penned much earlier, in the late 12th century, by Ibn Tufayl, an Aristotelian philosopher from Muslim Spain. It was a philosophical novel in fact, probably the earliest philosophical novel ever written which insinuated that human reason could discover all the secrets of the universe, even without the guidance of religion. This was a revolutionary if not dangerous idea at its time, as it still is in some parts of the Muslim world today. That is why a summary and analysis of this novel, along with its much-forgotten influence on European Enlightenment, is the theme of the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Reopening Muslims Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance.

--Mustafa Akyol, senior fellow

The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley, by Eric Weiner. I read this book while planning out HumanProgress.org's Centers of Progress series. The author does not provide a satisfying unified theory of what makes a city likely to become a site of "genius," while I would argue that in many cases relative societal openness has been key. But the book is a pleasure to read and contains some fascinating historical details. Vicariously experiencing the author's travels to each city that the book profiles was a nice escape while stuck in quarantine.

--Chelsea Follett, managing editor, HumanProgress.org

The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution, by NYT Bestselling Historian (and my friend) Chris DeRose. A great story of how some ragtag GIs fought backincluding literallyagainst a corrupt political machine in their Tennessee hometown.

--Ilya Shapiro, director, Center for Constitutional Studies

Despite indulging in caricature and campy Soviet-era jargon, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein (or TMiaHM, as it is affectionately called by fans) delivers an entertaining parable on the hazards of taking lightly legitimate claims to autonomy by people who hold both the moral and the physical high ground. Memo to Earthlings: never pick a fight with people who live on a giant rock at the top of your gravity well.

--Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice

The Sixth Man, by Andre Iguodala. Autobiography of one of the key, but unheralded, NBA players of the past 15 years. Interesting and fun read.

--Jeffrey Miron, director of economic studies

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) [originally published in 1942]. Acclaimed writer Stefan Zweig, who grew up in late 19th-century Vienna, gives an account of his life and of how quickly and unexpectedly the rapid progress, openness, and seeming security that characterized much of Europe came to an end in 1914. Through personal anecdotes and telling observations, he describes the madness of nationalism, the subsequent cataclysms that beset Europe, and the disturbing swiftness with which societies and educated individuals can abandon tolerance and pluralism.

--Ian Vasquez, director, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

I finally read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I regret it took so long. The tale of life for a poor immigrant family in early twentieth century Williamsburg, Brooklyn, put color and flesh on the day-to-day existence of people about whom one ordinarily just reads a perfunctory sentence or two in U.S. history classes. I found it particularly engaging, perhaps, because my own familys American origins would have been very similar.

--Neal McCluskey, director, Center for Educational Freedom

As for me, I hate to seem like a Cato cheerleader, but it's true: The best book I read in 2020 was The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement by my colleague Paul Matzko. He tells the little-known story of conservative talk radio in the 1950s and '60s, how the John F. Kennedy administration used the FCC and the IRS to crush those shows, and then the revival of conservative radio spurred by Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh. Not only a good story but a pleasure to read.

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The Books We Read in 2020 | Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute

The remaking of a nation is typically a process that unfolds at a glacial pace over time. A few bellwether events however stand out, both as catalysts of change as well as signs for posterity on how the nation was remade. Siraj-ud-Daulahs defeat at Plassey, the reconstruction amendments after the American Civil War abolishing slavery, Nelson Mandelas release from Robben Island are some events to which historians have attributed special significance in shaping the future course of history of their respective nations.

Whenever India has a government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, there is a narrative that the nation, founded on values of the freedom movement helmed by the Indian National Congress, is being slowly remade. Central to such a narrative is the cultural project of the BJP asserting the rightful place of Hindus in the nation. That project is well-documented and such a national remaking is core to theraison dtreof the BJP. But with the passage of the three farm laws in Parliament, the prime minister has demonstrated a definitive intent to remake the nation economically. Sure, there have always been murmurs that BJP governments have traditionally been best friends of big business. But that is something that can be truthfully said of all major political parties in post-liberalization India. Yet, the farm laws are the boldest and most candid declaration by the BJP that New India will not be founded on amai-baap sarkarbut rather with the hard work of the individual farmer supplemented by the enterprise of the private sector. This is as bold as it is surprising.

At its core is a seriously contested economic argument for farmers prosperity. That Indian agriculture is not as productive as it can be is an acknowledged fact. Small land-holdings, the lack of credit available to farmers, outdated farming methods, scores of middlemen and a skew towards paddy and wheat owing to selective government price support all contribute to this state of affairs. The new laws choose to address one dimension of the problem the dominant role of the State in Indian agriculture.

To this end, one of the new laws ends the monopoly of the governments agricultural produce market committee that runs the localmandi. It gives farmers and traders the freedom to trade in any trade area, including on an electronic platform. The second law, in tandem, empowers farmers to enter into contracts directly with buyers bypassing middlemen who are an endemic feature of Indian agriculture. The third law, an amendment to the Essential Commodities Act, is most revealing it limits governmental intervention in the agricultural market only in extreme cases of war, famine and so on. This, as the government has been at pains to point out, has nothing to do with the minimum support price for paddy and wheat, which is not provided under the Essential Commodities Act. Nonetheless, it is a clear sign of the determination of the government to be a facilitator rather than an active price-setter and regulator of Indian agriculture.

This is a distinct vision of how Indian agriculture can grow from the State-supported model in vogue at present. Central to this vision is the growth of new agri-businesses, which are expected to compete with State procurement processes. Whether such businesses will lead to greater benefits for farmers or worsen their lot is a hypothetical question that can only have hypothetical answers at present. But the bottom line is this the new laws provide options to farmers to either sell to the State in themandior to private producers outside it. Simultaneously, it opens up the sector to a range of private actors whose enterprise is expected to make the system more productive. This combination of individual choice and invitation to enterprise is not primarily an economic argument for reform it is an ideological one.

Economic libertarianism of the kind that underlies the farm laws remove the State from the equation and let the market show the path to prosperity has largely been tangential to traditional Indian right-wing thought. This conflation between the cultural right and the economic right in recent times is a fundamentally American idea born out of a distrust of the State and the championing of limitless individual freedom. The Indian right has never shared this distrust of the State or advocacy of individual liberty. In fact, with the exception of the Swatantra Party, the major intellectual strand of right-wing politics in India, the Jana Sangh and now the BJP moored by the philosophy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has been that of cultural conservatism together with aswadeshiState that plays a dominant role in the economy. In some senses, that is classic conservative politics as Eric Kaufmann has recently written, Most voters lean left on economics and conservative on culture but no one represents them. This is whom the BJP has traditionally represented, more so with the diminishing political smartness of the Left in India.

But with the farm laws, the BJP has taken a distinct libertarian turn on economics. As a party avowedly resolute about reform, it could have chosen to reform Indian agriculture in a number of ways conclusive land titles for agricultural landowners would have been a game-changer that would increase the creditworthiness of farmers in one stroke. That it chose to whittle down the role of the State, something that it hasnt done despite indications that it would do so to the MGNREGA or to the National Education Policy, is an unraveling of the traditional understanding of the Indian right. From a culturally conservative party, it is also becoming the Indian variant of the Republican Party of the United States of America imbued by the doctrinaire belief that small government is the way to prosperity.

This is why the protests against the three farm laws enacted by the National Democratic Alliance government are the sternest test yet of the resolve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of remaking the nation. The protests against the CAA-NRC, almost a year to the day, despite their largescale support and longevity, made no headway in their objectives. This was unsurprising given the focus of the protests was support for minority groups that are politically unimportant for the BJP. But the farmer protests are an entirely different kettle of fish. After all, thekisanin traditional political terms is theannadata, to be given free electricity and exempted from payment of taxes. Electorally, given that agriculture is the primary source of livelihood of 58 per cent of the Indian population, the vote of the farmer is the holy grail. When faced with such largescale farmer protests, the prime minister was quick to offer compromises with folded hands and bowed heads clause-by-clause readings, amendments and assurances that the MSP would not be touched. Only time will tell whether this is smart politics to fulfil his new economic vision or an unraveling of the vision itself.

Each of the prime ministers offers demonstrates the knife-edge the nation is on at present. In their resolution lies the ultimate answer on whether the farm laws will be a bellwether event in the remaking of the Indian nation or simply yet another footnote in the glacial changes always afoot around us. The Singhu and Tikri borders are no longer mere outposts they are the sites where history is being written.

The author is Research Director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.Views are personal

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History at the gates - Telegraph India

A new analysis from Sludge Magazine shows that Washington nepotism is just as unsurprisingly nepotistic and grossly disappointing as ever:

18 congressional Republicans and one Libertarian have received $21.7 million for 38 businesses with which they are associated. Nine Democrats received $6.1 million for 11 of their own businesses. An additional roughly $54 million went to nonprofits, think tanks and policy institutes, congressional caucuses, and higher education institutions tied to members of both parties.

[]

Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), net worth $77 million, received a $135,800 loan for his Geniecast, LLC.

Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), net worth $73.9 million and the fourth-richest member of Congress, received $2.8 million in loans for four of his 27 companies.

Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), net worth $60.9 million, received a loan of $1,070,000 for his KTAK Corporation. Hern, who owns 97 percent of the company, estimated its value at between $5 and $25 million last year.

Norman, net worth $43.4 million, received $306,520 for four of his 20 companies.

Mitch McConnell and wife Elaine Chao, with a combined net worth of $34.4 million, are tied to a loan for the Chao-family owned Foremost Maritime Inc. of $417,700.

Roger Williams (R-Texas), net worth $27.7, received $1,430,000 for his JRW Corporation. Last year, he valued the company at more than $50 million.

Greg Pence, net worth $12.6 million, received a loan of $79,441 for his Pence Group, LLC, which he valued on his financial disclosure as worth between $5 and $25 million.

T.J. Cox (D-Calif.), net worth $11.8 million, received $609,825 for two of his 26 businesses.

Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), net worth $10.9 million, is tied to a loan of $1,100,000.00 that went to her husband's law firm, Lowey Dannenberg P.C.

Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), net worth $10.4 million, received $974,100 for four of his car dealerships.

Ralph Abraham (R-La.), net worth $4.8 million, received loans of $38,300 for two of his four companies.

Earl Blumenaeur (D-Ore.), net worth $4.5 million, received $432,734 for his two companies.

Vicki Hartzler (R-Mo.), net worth $3.8 million, is tied to $451,200 for her husband's Heartland Tractor Company, which she valued at between $1 and $5 million and from which he claimed as much as $1 million in income last year.

Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), net worth $3.7 million, received $988,700 for his two family plumbing businesses.

While this kind of nepotistic corruption is always bipartisan, it is frustrating to note that Republicans were twice as likely to partake in such behavior. And of course, many of these same people also voted against giving more than $600 to citizens in the most recent round of COVID relief efforts, even after voting to provide immense relief to big businesses instead of smaller mom-and-pop shops.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that a lot of the conservative and Libertarian pundits opine about COVID relief being the single largest transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy and powerful. I agree with this assessment, and I agree that it's a problem. But I can't fathom how continuing to oppose any form of government relief and forcing businesses to resume as normal would help that either. It seems to me the problem rests with the same politicians who get voted into power on a platform of "The government is evil and corrupt!" who spend their entire lives trying to prove that prophecy true (and then somehow still get re-elected).

The rest is here:
Tens of million in CARES Act loans went to the families of just 28 Congresspeople - Boing Boing

It's tempting to wonder if history is made by stupid people as much as by clever people. The reputation of former adviser to Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, was enhanced by a television drama which presented him as a deep thinker and a deft communicator, two gifts that don't always go together.

ot that there weren't other voices ready to explain how bumping yourself out of the single market was effectively imposing sanctions on yourself, the sort of treatment we usually reserve for rogue states.

One of the qualities of a truly great leader must surely be the ability to hold fast against all derision when you are sure you are right. It is also the mark of a fanatic.

We only get to find out which term applies when the story is over and history has passed its judgment.

Fortunately, there are tests we can apply to political figures while they are still alive. Arlene Foster agitated for Brexit without foreseeing the danger of a weakening of the Union. It's hard to see how posterity will vindicate that.

Maybe foreign capital will now pour into Northern Ireland and we'll all be so rich in 10 years' time that we'll be called the Orange Tiger.

We got a nice insight into the workings of the mind of one of our conviction politicians on Any Questions on Radio 4 last week. Sammy Wilson came out as seriously sceptical of the efforts to curtail the Covid-19 virus.

He said the Government and advisers had succumbed to "Project Fear". This is a phrase that was coined to dismiss the warnings about how bad Brexit could be. Sammy applied it to the reaction to the virus. Now it's the handy phrase for mocking any doubts about any policy.

Sammy scoffed at the "deplorable way" in which old people have been left "cowering in their homes", because of measures to control a pandemic which has affected very few of us.

He didn't exactly say, "Give me liberty or give me death", but he did say that we are being kept in a state of perpetual fear to prepare us to accept curtailments on our liberty, as if he thinks the curtailment of liberty is the core objective.

His solution would have been to "protect the vulnerable and let others get on with their lives". He didn't say how that could be done without curtailing the liberties of older people. (It can't.)

Sammy is 67 years old. He is one of the vulnerable himself. I'm a bit worried about how red his cheeks are. He is a portly man.

The implications of what he says are that he himself should be removed from society, out of reach of a virus that could kill him, and that people who are less likely to die should be free to blithely infect themselves and each other.

So, on the one hand, he is saying that old people are cowering in their homes and, on the other, that that's where they would be anyway if he was in charge.

He is demanding freedom from curtailments and then endorsing curtailments.

Sammy rants a lot and yet one of his repeat themes is that we are all getting over-exercised about something or other. Like the chances of a united Ireland.

That question was a prompt for further self-contradiction. He said that the Government handling of the virus has demonstrated the merits of being part of the United Kingdom, a bigger and richer country.

I should have been on that programme. Somebody should have been there to point out that the Irish Republic's infection levels are proportionately about a quarter of those in Northern Ireland.

And how come these measures, which he dismissed minutes earlier as "deplorable", are now evidence of the merits of the Union?

Sammy builds up arguments on different issues and doesn't check whether they contradict each other. Then he did it again.

There was a question about whether electric cars will ever be affordable. Sammy said the Government's Green plan was "Stalinist".

This from the man who wanted the vulnerable to be sectioned off from the rest of society. He said he drives a diesel van and that people should have the option of driving whatever car they think they need.

So, one minute he is the social engineer who will lock up the vulnerable and the next he is a free market libertarian who would let anyone drive whatever they liked, regardless of the impact on the environment. He's a libertarian when it suits him.

If the threat is a virus, then the response should be targeted and thorough.

And if it is climate change, then everyone should do as they please.

We should have more of our local politicians on Any Questions in the hope that they will unpack their thinking, or lack of it, as candidly as Sammy did.

In the style of the programme, there is often a light question at the end. This was the week in which Barbara Windsor died. One of the clips played over and over again in the news reports showed her as the landlady in EastEnders, ordering someone out of her pub.

So, who would Sammy order out of his pub? The Chief Medical Officer. Sammy didn't remember his name. That's how much attention he has been paying to him.

The case against Professor Chris Whitty (write it on your cuff, Sammy) is that he ordered the pubs closed without having gathered sufficient evidence of the extent to which Covid-19 might be spread in them.

Some things have to be taken on faith and it seems to me that one of the easier ones to accept is that drunk people mingling in a bar and bumping against each other and shouting and blathering and squaring up to each other are more likely to spread infection than people sitting down to a meal, well spaced from each other.

You get the feeling that Sammy, when we were hit with a pandemic, would have spent a year gathering data on how it spread before taking measures against it.

I hope Sammy has a happy and restful retirement and that it starts soon. In fact, I hope the same for a lot of our politicians.

But one thing we have learnt in this strange year is that daft as some of our politicians are, they are not exceptional. There are others as daft everywhere.

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Malachi O'Doherty: Sammy Wilson is a libertarian... but only when it suits him - Belfast Telegraph

Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but theres something special about libertarianism.

I dont mean that as an insult, either. I love libertarians! For the most part, theyre fun and interesting people. But they also tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people arent. If youve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean.

And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that its mostly abstract. You cant really prove anything its just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas.

Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, says its the boldest social experiment in modern American history. I dont know if its the boldest, but its definitely one of the strangest.

The experiment was called the Free Town Project (it later became the Free State Project), and the goal was simple: take over Graftons local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! (I promise Ill explain below.)

I reached out to Hongoltz-Hetling to talk about his book. I wanted to know what happened in New Hampshire, why the experiment failed, and what the whole saga can teach us not just about libertarianism but about the dangers of loving theory more than reality.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

How would you describe the Free Town Project to someone who doesnt know anything about it?

Id put it like this: Theres a national community of libertarians that has developed over the last 40 or 50 years, and theyve never really had a place to call their own. Theyve never been in charge of a nation, or a state, or even a city. And theyve always really wanted to create a community that would showcase what would happen if they implemented their principles on a broad scale.

So in 2004, a group of them decided that they wanted to take some action on this deficiency, and they decided to launch what they called the Free Town Project. They sent out a call to a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians and told everyone to move to this one spot and found this utopian community that would then serve as a shining jewel for the world to see that libertarian philosophies worked not only in theory but in practice. And they chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could.

Of all the towns in all the world, why Grafton?

They didnt choose it in a vacuum. They actually conducted a very careful and thorough search. They zeroed in on the state of New Hampshire fairly quickly because thats the Live Free or Die state. They knew that it would align well with their philosophy of individualism and personal responsibility. But once they decided on New Hampshire, they actually visited dozens of small towns, looking for that perfect mix of factors that would enable them to take over.

What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes.

Wait, what do you mean by nontraditional housing?

As the people of Grafton soon found out, a nontraditional housing situation meant a camp in the woods or a bunch of shipping containers or whatever. They brought in yurts and mobile homes and formed little clusters of cabins and tents. There was one location called Tent City, where a bunch of people just lived in tents from day to day. They all united under this broad umbrella principle of personal freedom, but as youd expect, there was a lot of variation in how they exercised it.

What did the demographics of the group look like? Are we talking mostly about white guys or Ayn Rand bros who found each other on the internet?

Well, were talking about hundreds of people, though the numbers arent all that clear. They definitely skewed male. They definitely skewed white. Some of them had a lot of money, which gave them the freedom to be able to pick up roots and move to a small town in New Hampshire. A lot of them had very little money and nothing keeping them in their places. So they were able to pick up and come in. But most of them just didnt have those family situations or those 9-to-5 jobs, and that was really what characterized them more than anything else.

And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?

When they first showed up, they hadnt told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didnt want them there and they didnt appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.

But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.

They couldnt pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.

Then what happened over the next few years or so?

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a towns success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The towns legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldnt put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didnt have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.

When did the bears show up?

It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then youre essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.

One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didnt want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.

As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.

It was an absolute mess.

Were talking about black bears specifically. For the non-bear experts out there, black bears are not known to be aggressive toward humans. But the bears in Grafton were ... different.

Bears are very smart problem-solving animals. They can really think their way through problems. And that was what made them aggressive in Grafton. In this case, a reasonable bear would understand that there was food to be had, that it was going to be rewarded for being bolder. So they started aggressively raiding food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.

There are lots of great examples in the book of bears acting in bold, unusually aggressive manners, but it culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in the town of Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but, in fact, New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. So the whole state had never seen a single bear attack, and now here in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.

And then, a few years after that, a second woman was attacked, not in Grafton but in a neighboring town. And since the book was written and published, theres actually been a third bear attack, also in the same little cluster and the same little region of New Hampshire. And I think its very clear that, unless something changes, more bear attacks will come.

Luckily, no ones been killed, but people have been pretty badly injured.

Youre fair, even sympathetic, to the libertarians you profile in this book, but I do wonder if you came to see them increasingly as fanatics.

You know, libertarian is such a weird umbrella term for a very diverse group of people. Some libertarians are built around the idea of white supremacy and racism. That was not the case with these libertarians. Most of the libertarians that I met were kind, decent people who would be generous with a neighbor in any given moment. But in the abstract, when theyre at a town meeting, they will vote to hurt that neighbor by cutting off, say, support for road plowing.

So I guess what I noticed is a strange disconnect between their personalities or their day-to-day interactions and the broader implications of their philosophies and their political movement. Not sure Id use the word fanatic, but definitely a weird disconnect.

Theres a lesson in this for anyone interested in seeing it, which is that if you try to make the world fit neatly into an ideological box, youll have to distort or ignore reality to do it usually with terrible consequences.

Yeah, I think thats true for libertarianism and really all philosophies of life. Its very easy to fall into this trap of believing that if only everybody followed this or that principle, then society would become this perfect system.

Did any of the characters in this story come to doubt their libertarianism as a result of what happened in Grafton? Or was it mostly a belief that libertarianism cant fail, it can only be failed?

One of the central characters in the book is a firefighter named John Babiarz. And John had the distinction of running for the governor of New Hampshire on the libertarian platform, and did better than any other gubernatorial libertarian candidate has ever done in America. And he invited the libertarians to come in and begin the Free Town Project. He was their local connection.

But by the end of the project [sometime in 2016], he had really drawn some distinctions between himself and many of the extremist libertarians who came to town. He still considers himself to be a libertarian, and a very devout one at that, but by the end of the project he was at odds with most of the other libertarians. And it shows that until you actually have a libertarian-run community, its very hard to say what it is or what it will look like.

In the end, do you think these people bumped up against the limits of libertarianism, or is this more about the particular follies of a particular group of people in a particular place?

I think they bumped up against the follies of libertarianism. I really do think that there is a hard wall of reality that exists thats going to foil any effort to implement libertarianism on a broad scale. And I think if you gave a libertarian the magic wand and allowed them to transform society the way that they wanted to, it wouldnt work the way they imagined, and I think it would break down just as Grafton did.

Maybe thats the lesson.

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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project - Vox.com