A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 449 of 725
^ I won't throw the first stone.
But people who don't live on my block would do well to stay off my front lawn.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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Great cartoon reaver, and oh so true.
T 
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Great cartoon reaver, and oh so true.
T
Nah. Trump isn't giving pardons to any of Biden*'s cabinet picks. That's where the swamp is going now.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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One of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that it’s mostly abstract. You can’t really prove anything — it’s 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 it’s the “boldest social experiment in modern American history.” I don’t know if it’s the “boldest,” but it’s 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 Grafton’s 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 I’ll 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.
Libertarians have never been in charge of a nation, or a state, or even a city. And they’ve always really wanted to create a community that would showcase what would happen if they implemented their principles on a broad scale. So, 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.
What happened over the next few years or so? By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. The town’s 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. Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
Enter the bears.
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 you’re 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 didn’t 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.
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 hum
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Remember when the Republicans deferred the money from your paycheck this year? Guess what… You’re going to have to pay it back next year.
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^ I won't think about it.
I didn't defer my taxes, because I'm not an idiot.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Gravel Institute ran by a couple of trust-fund kids that aren't worried about medical bills.
What have you done today to earn your place in this crowded world? :)
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Quote:So, is the information incorrect?
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by reaverfan:
Gravel Institute ran by a couple of trust-fund kids that aren't worried about medical bills.
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