Our mission is to cultivate peace and prosperity by promoting policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited, constitutional government, and individual liberty.
The Ethan Allen Institute is Vermont’s free-market public policy research and education organization. A “think tank.” Founded in 1993, we are one of fifty-plus similar but independent state-level, public policy organizations around the country which exchange ideas and information through the State Policy Network.
Last Friday’s paper brought the news that the Mid Vermont Christian School, in Quechee, had filed a lawsuit against the state Agency of Education, which had ruled that the school could not participate in future basketball tournaments, or accept students from tuition towns. Why not? Because the Christian school said it was simply unfair that schools that competed with it in basketball were using transgendered boys on their girls’ teams.
The Public Utility Commission has been charged with designing and implementing the Clean Heat ^Standard bill passed last session, over Gov. Scott’s veto. This measure is designed to raise the cost of heating oil, natural gas, propane and kerosene , supposedly to defeat the menace of climate change, The PUC wants people to pay a fee to the PUC so the PUC can raise the prices of their heating fuel, which doesn’t sound like a very attractive proposition to me.
One of the alarming crime statistics to emerge recently is car thefts. According to an analysis of federal crime data in major cities by the Council on Criminal Justice, there has been a 67% Increase in motor-vehicle thefts between 2019 and 2022.
Thirty years ago I spent four days in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, attending a liberty conference. In the Soviet era (1940-1991) communist apparatchiks appointed in Moscow ruled the three Baltic countries as sham Soviet “republics”. The enterprising Estonians were shackled, and by 1946 more than one-quarter of the population had been deported to a Siberian Gulag, or executed, or had fled the country.