New Hampshire built a brand around hating freeloaders. The state motto demands “Live Free or Die,” the legislature treats welfare recipients like a moral case study, and the political class never tires of warning about people gaming the system. But the loudest political enforcement always seems to face downward — toward the renter behind on a deposit, the parent on a childcare scholarship, the worker needing Medicaid. It rarely faces up the wealth ladder, where the freeloading is structural and the dollar amounts are several orders of magnitude larger.
A recent New Hampshire Bulletin column walks through that contradiction by way of one resident in particular: Alex Karp, the CEO and co-founder of Palantir Technologies. Karp, whose company supplies AI-driven analytics to ICE, the CIA, and the U.S. military, lives in Lyman — a town of about 585 residents tucked between Lisbon and Bath in the North Country. He reportedly owns a 500-acre compound and, per Maureen Dowd’s reporting, surrounds himself with a Norwegian ski instructor, a Swiss-Portuguese chef, and an array of personal staff few Granite Staters could imagine paying for.
A Town of 585 and a 500-Acre Compound
The compound itself is not the issue. Plenty of New Hampshire’s beauty is owned by people who can afford to keep large parcels intact, and the state’s tradition of private stewardship has, on balance, helped preserve land. The issue is what happens at the layer above the land — at the tax-policy layer that determines how the costs of the country are split between people who fish in 39-acre Dodge Pond on a summer day and people whose effective tax rate quietly approaches zero.
The column makes the point with one of the more biting examples in modern American tax journalism: Jeff Bezos, in a year when his wealth balloon was in the tens of billions, drew a wage low enough to qualify for the Child Tax Credit — and claimed it. That tidbit, drawn from “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy,” is not a Bezos-specific scandal. It is a system feature. Through the deliberate use of unrealized gains, borrowing against assets, and pass-through structures, the country’s wealthiest residents have built what amounts to a parallel tax universe that runs alongside — and largely below — the rules everyone else lives under.
What “Freeloading” Actually Looks Like
When New Hampshire policymakers talk about freeloading, the picture they paint is small. Someone shaving a few hundred dollars off SNAP. A renter trying to stretch a deposit. A young person on a parent’s healthcare plan a year too long. The numbers, when they are real, are rounding errors against the state’s annual budget.
The freeloading that the tax code makes possible at the top is not small. It is enormous, and the dollars never enter the New Hampshire general fund or the federal one in the first place. The wealthiest American households move income into long-term capital, finance their lifestyles with low-interest borrowing against that capital, and pass appreciated assets through estates with stepped-up cost basis — meaning a lifetime of unrealized gains can vanish from the tax base entirely. None of that requires breaking a law. It only requires the law as written.
The Granite State angle is that New Hampshire is a high-net-worth haven by design — no income tax, no broad-based sales tax — and the wealth that takes up residence in places like Lyman or in the lakes region brings real benefits as well as real distortions. It funds local employment, preserves land, and props up tax bases for towns that would otherwise struggle. It also widens the gap between what is theoretically a “we-all-share-the-burden” state ethic and what actually happens when the burden gets divided.
The Politics of Where Resentment Goes
The column’s quietly devastating line is that we — Karp and the columnist, the billionaire and the line-caster — are equals only in the prism of the natural world. Below that, in the prism of policy, there are two tiers. One tier is told to tighten, prove eligibility, perform virtue, and watch its receipts. The other tier is largely waved through, on the theory that taxing capital aggressively will chase it offshore.
There is a serious counterargument worth naming. Federal capital-gains policy, estate tax structure, and the treatment of pass-through income are debated for real reasons. Aggressive moves on any of them can shift behavior in ways that hurt the broader economy — including, in some cases, the state economies (like New Hampshire’s) that benefit from being a residence destination for the wealthy. Reasonable people who care about growth can land in different places on those tradeoffs.
But “we hate freeloaders” works as a political identity only if it applies symmetrically. If it applies only to the household scrambling for the security deposit on HB 1336 and never to the household structuring its income to claim the Child Tax Credit on a billion-dollar net worth, the slogan is not a principle. It is a posture.
What This Means for the Granite State Debate
New Hampshire is not going to write the federal tax code. But the state does write its own — and decides every session how hard to lean on property taxes, business taxes, and the patchwork of fees that fund schools, roads, and services. It also decides whose behavior gets scrutinized when a budget runs short. The political habit of looking down for the freeloader rather than across or up is not unique to New Hampshire, but it is especially incongruous in a state whose identity rests on the idea that nobody gets to take advantage.
The Karp story is a single example, used in a single column, to make a larger point. The point is that the state’s “freeloader” rhetoric needs to mean something the same way at every income level — or it does not really mean anything at all.
