One of the ideas I have been interested in for the past fifty years is the clash between centralism and decentralism in human affairs. Many times in these broadcasts I have disparaged centralized systems for beating up on ordinary people and their little civic platoons, as Edmund Burke called them.

Earlier this month Seven Days ran a remarkable story titled, Too Many Vermont Kids Struggle to Read. What Went Wrong — and Can Educators Reverse a Yearslong Slide in Literacy? It’s long. 5000 words, but very much worth the time. The piece details how for over two decades our public schools have been using unscientific, non-evidence-based teaching methods born of ultra-Left-wing, touchy-feely ideology resulting in a generation of insufficiently literate Vermonters.

On December 17, 2014, following a surprisingly narrow reelection victory, Gov. Peter Shumlin announced that he was abandoning his long-pursued legislative priority, enactment of the nation’s first single payer health care system. That date became an historic marker in Vermont’s modern political history.

Of all the problems facing today’s America, the most seemingly intractable is the intertwined issue of the physically and mentally sick and homeless, family breakdown , drug and alcohol addiction, street violence, retail theft, gang warfare, random shootings, protest riots, unmanageable students in classrooms, and similar afflictions.

Last summer the Vermont Public Service Department took a poll on Vermonters’ views on energy. Rob Roper summarized the findings thus: “the kind of energy policy most Vermonters are looking for is affordable, reliable, and with the least possible amount of impact on our natural environment, such as forests, rivers, and wildlife. We don’t particularly care so much if it’s renewable, reduces carbon emissions, or is produced in state – albeit those attributes might be considered nice.”

If you watch the Story TV Channel evenings you’ve surely seen an intense advertisement for the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. Its actors tell us how the ACLU is fighting for our rights and urges us to send a contribution right away.

The legislature passed the Clean Heat Standard (S.5) into law in the Spring of this year (over the governor’s veto) with a provision that Vermonters can start banking the so-called “Clean Heat Credits” – earned by installing heat pumps, insulating buildings, etc. – retroactive to January 1, 2023. The program itself doesn’t go into full effect until 2025. So, the geniuses in Montpelier created a situation in which folks, in order to get their early credits, are supposed to somehow file paperwork that doesn’t exist with a bureaucratic entity that is not yet in place following rules that have not been written. What could go wrong?