I Love Vermont More Every Day

Once again, I find the the sav­ing grace of the US is Ver­mont. A propo­si­tion has started to gain pop­u­lar­ity in the state to secede from the US.

As Frank Bryan’s elo­quent and per­sua­sive essay on the Ver­mont Com­mons Web site puts it:

What this coun­try needs is a good swift slap along­side the head.
A lov­ing slap, self-administered.
A slap that says, “Clean up your act or we’re gone.”
Ver­mont is just the state to give it.

He deliv­ered part of his argu­ment at the Blue Moun­tain High School in Wells River as they cel­e­brated the burn­ing of their mort­gage for the new school build­ing, which stood in stark con­trast to the inter­est on the US national debt, which he points out “threat­ens to take one-third of our tax money each year. To retire the debt would require a stack of thou­sand ­dol­lar bills more than two hun­dred miles high.”

He also answers some of the objec­tions to seces­sion quite well:
Isn’t this going against some con­tract with the Fed­eral Government?

Leav­ing the Union will involve the break­ing of no promises. Our con­tract with Amer­ica made two hun­dred years ago has been repeat­edly ignored by a national gov­ern­ment with an unquench­able thirst for power. When we signed on, the Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tion ensured us that “The pow­ers not del­e­gated to the U.S. by the Con­sti­tu­tion nor prohibit­ed by it to the states, are reserved to the states respec­tively, or to the peo­ple.” Is there any­one left in Amer­ica today over the age of six who does not under­stand that the reserved power clause has become a joke? The author of a lead­ing col­lege text­book puts it this way: “Actions by Con­gress and the Fed­eral Courts have grad­u­ally under­mined the 10^th Amend­ment. It now bears lit­tle rel­e­vance to the configura­tion of Amer­i­can Fed­er­al­ism in the 1990s.”

Ver­mont is too small to be a nation again.

Sit­ting in the United Nations today are the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of twenty nations with pop­u­la­tions smaller than Vermont’s. Each of these nations has vot­ing rights in the Gen­eral As­sembly equal to those of the United States of America.

Vermont’s tiny econ­omy would be swal­lowed up by giant inter­na­tional trad­ing systems.

In actu­al­ity, small nations have great advan­tages in the inter­na­tional mar­ket­place. Gary S. Becker, a high­ly respected Uni­ver­sity of Chicago pro­fessor, writes, “Big­ger isn’t nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter.… Smaller coun­tries tend to be more nim­ble traders in inter­na­tional mar­kets, off­set­ting their lack of economies of scale.”

A lit­tle state like Ver­mont is too depen­dent on the fed­eral dole to go it alone.

…for every dol­lar Ver­monters pay in fed­eral taxes, we get most of it back in cash but the rest in the form of a loan the gov­ern­ment has extracted from the Amer­i­can peo­ple, which includes us. If we kept our orig­i­nal buck we wouldn’t have to make out appli­ca­tions to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in order to spend it, and if we needed more we could decide whether or not to bor­row it on our own terms. Best of all, we could spend the whole damn thing as we see fit.

It is true that Ver­mont ben­e­fits from some­thing we might call “national in­frastructure,” the most obvi­ous exam­ples of which are the mil­i­tary and the inter­state high­ways. But think of the 1.3 bil­lion Ver­mont tax dol­lars that go toward U.S. defense-related expen­di­tures each year. Ver­mont will need no army after seces­sion. A cou­ple of dozen more state troop­ers and a mili­tia orga­nized from local fire and res­cue orga­ni­za­tions, at no expense to the Repub­lic, will be enough. Think we could come up with some other ways to spend that 1.3 billion?

If we tried to secede, the United States would invade.

Amer­i­can tanks rolling into Ben­ning­ton? It’ll never hap­pen. All we have to do is sim­ply assert our indepen­dence and leave. Our very act of seces­sion will be our great­est strength. We have an open bor­der to the north with a coun­try that owes us for our benign neglect dur­ing the War of 1812 and to a province of that coun­try with seces­sion­ist ideas of its own

It takes big gov­ern­ment to solve big issues.

My oppo­nent in the 1991 seces­sion debates, Ver­mont Supreme Court Jus­tice John Doo­ley, stated that, “Acid rain won’t be ended by cute lit­tle nations like a new Repub­lic of Ver­mont.” Wrong. The his­tory of the last two decades has shown an increas­ing inca­pac­ity of the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to make progress where real con­flicts among the states exist. Medi­oc­rity is the best you can hope for when prob­lems and bene­fits are dif­fused over large systems.

The fed­eral gov­ern­ment likes to “facil­i­tate” coop­er­a­tion and then take credit for nat­ural impulses for consen­sus that are locally inspired. It is the states and local­i­ties that are “putting Wash­ing­ton to shame,” as one publi­cation put it, in the field of envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion. In Ver­mont we find again and again that Washing­ton is a hin­drance to attempts to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment. It can be argued, for instance, that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment caused the acid rain prob­lem because it was forced to com­pro­mise over smoke­stacks and scrub­bers when it sought to pro­tect Mid­west­ern cities from their own pol­lution in the 1970s.

The fact of the mat­ter is that Ver­mont’s influ­ence as an inde­pen­dent repub­lic would be vastly greater than even the best efforts of our sen­a­tors in Wash­ing­ton can pro­duce. Internation­al coop­er­a­tion rather than intra-nation­al action is the emerg­ing dynamic in envi­ron­men­tal pol­icy. The twenty-first centu­ry must develop a global per­spec­tive on the envi­ron­ment. Both Ver­mont and the world of nations would ben­e­fit from our active and equal par­tic­i­pa­tion in this.

What About the Bill of Rights?

Many of the peo­ple attend­ing the seces­sion debates seemed wor­ried about giv­ing up the pro­tec­tions guar­an­teed under the Bill of Rights in the Fed­eral Con­sti­tu­tion. One won­ders why. Vermont’s record on civil rights and lib­er­ties is far stronger than America’s. It was our con­sti­tu­tion that first out­lawed slav­ery. It was our con­sti­tu­tion that first pro­vided uni­ver­sal vot­ing rights for all freemen.

It was Ver­mont that pro­vided much of the lead­er­ship in the anti-slavery move­ment. Lin­coln fought the war to save the Union. Ver­mont fought the war to free the slaves.

It was from Ver­mont that the first anti-Christian book ever pub­lished on the North Amer­i­can con­ti­nent was penned.

It was a Ver­mont Sen­a­tor that led the fight to cen­sor McCarthy. It was in Ver­mont that gays were first pro­vided the oppor­tu­nity to form civil unions. It is in Ver­mont that a citizen’s Bill of Rights guar­an­tee to keep and bear arms is strongly defended—not for hunt­ing, not for per­sonal pro­tec­tion against way­ward cit­i­zens, but for what is was intended: to insure that free cit­i­zens always have a means to pro­tect them­selves against gov­ern­ments, a pro­tec­tion that takes on spe­cial mean­ing as our civil lib­er­ties come under attack from Wash­ing­ton, the cen­ter of our own nation, our beloved America.

Well, that last bit had me a lit­tle puz­zled, but I guess if the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment starts to look more and more like a Dic­ta­tor­ship run by a guy named George over a pre­dom­i­nantly rural Colo­nial hold­ing, the idea of bran­dish­ing mus­kets starts to have a cer­tain ring to it…

At any rate, Pam has said many times that the place in the US that we nearly ended up in if things had not gone quite so wrong should sim­ply either secede, or do en masse what we as a cou­ple did: join Canada. It sounds like some who do live there would agree. In fact, one report had polls taken in Ver­mont in favour of seces­sion some­where around 13%.

The story was not lost on Fox News, who ridiculed it.