Vermont Should Focus on the Concept of Liberty

In its March 4 edition the Free Press published the views of seven prominent Vermonters on the topic "What Should Vermont be thinking about next?"

Preservationist Paul Bruhn focused on landscape, scale, and independent retailing. Education commissioner David Wolk emphasized educational technology, individualized learning, non-traditional school schedules, and parental choice (but, of course, only among government-operated schools.) Roberta MacDonald of Cabot Creamery pleaded for more government support for her coop's farmer members, above and beyond the dairy industry's present government-sanctioned price-fixing cartel.

Frank McDougall of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center asked that government provide fair reimbursement for the health care it offers under Medicaid. Mark Sinclair of the Conservation Law Foundation called for shifting the tax burden toward fossil fuel burning and pesticide use, and bestowing competitive advantages upon companies which meet advanced standards of sustainability. Bill Schubart of the Vermont Business Roundtable pleaded for a regulatory regime that fairly balances the costs and benefits of economic development. Bill Gilbert expressed an ambivalent concern about "the tension between freedom and responsibility", and decried "the fog of ideology".

What was striking to me was that none of the seven chose to address a topic that seemed to me to be paramount: What is the future of Vermont's historic tradition of liberty and self-government?

The incandescent idea of Liberty has been a paramount part of the Vermont tradition since the 18th century. It appears in the opening sentence of Ethan Allen's Narrative, in Middlebury College President John Martin Thomas's famous eulogy to "The Vermonter" as "liberty loving in the extreme", and in Gov. George Aiken's tribute to his mountain neighbors' devotion to "freedom of thought and action".

That ideal of Liberty had limits, to be sure. "The restraint of traditional institutions", as Gilbert put it, the pressure of social convention, a due regard for the rights of one's neighbor, and a religion-based sense of right and wrong set boundaries to an individual's liberty. But the premise remained: progress in society comes from individuals free to follow their dreams, to make choices about their own lives, and to invest their time, money, talents, and reputations in enterprises that lead to new wealth and social progress.

What becomes of that Liberty, the essential mainspring of human progress, when the increasingly powerful state, with its regulation, taxes, mandates, price-fixing, subsidies, and collectivization, controls more and more of the choices and opportunities of individual Vermonters?

Self-government, that other glory of the Vermont tradition, is also in jeopardy. Town meeting self government increasingly operates in a smaller and smaller sphere, as rules imposed from above limit a community's freedom of action. More and more decisions about more and more questions are made in Montpelier. The elected legislature and governor make many of those decisions. In recent years, however, unelected bureaucrats have governed by administrative rule not only when the legislature neglected to act, but even when it refused to act. Above all, decisions of great importance to Vermonters are increasingly being made by a thoroughly politicized Supreme Court, intent on advancing its own ideas of social progress with little or no foundation in the plain language and long-accepted meaning of our constitution.

What should Vermonters be thinking about next? About how to recapture their disappearing liberty and democratic self-government, before what is best about the Vermont tradition passes into history - or, as most schools call it today, "social studies."

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March 2001