The New Vermont

Coolidge, of course, was the last 19th-century president, though he served in the 1920s. Afternoons, he napped, and he was famously laconic. Some wit — Dorothy Parker, perhaps — is supposed to have remarked, when informed that Coolidge had died, “How could they tell?” His reticence and his rectitude seem the stuff of an impossible dream, these days. A president given to silences, imagine.

George Aiken was a U.S. senator for years and years. He was a patriot who believed in balanced budgets and limited government when those were not even heretical ideas but more like quaint superstitions. His was a Yankee frugality carried almost to the point of caricature. But it was also a deeply moral posture: If you want something, you have to be willing to pay for it.

Six months after I arrived in Vermont, I went to my first town meeting. I was already sold on the place, but the town meeting sealed the deal. The voters actually sat in a room (the school gym) and argued over the budget and taxes and road building and whether we needed to continue to pay bounties for porcupines. Debate was sometimes robust and always sincere. Town meeting was serious business. This was how Vermonters governed themselves . . . a page right out of Tocqueville:

The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; . . . he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

Strong stuff. But I drank deeply of it. I got myself elected to the school board — which was certainly an education in the “nature of [my] duties” — became a trustee of the local Congregational church, and served a couple of terms as a justice of the peace. I took a robust interest in the life of the town, which was a little out of character. I’d never been much of a joiner and didn’t have much taste for committee work. I was moved, I suppose, by the spirit of Vermont.

Though I was not one of them, I felt a kind of kinship with the yeomanry of the state. At the church, on Memorial Day, someone would read the names of all the men from town who had died in the country’s wars, and a lot of those names would be familiar. I knew the descendants of the Civil War dead. They were the local electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and mechanics. I hunted deer with them. Did community work with them. Argued with them at school board meetings. I felt that in some way, I was the beneficiary of a tradition they had inherited.

That all seems impossible, and long ago, here in the New Vermont — a state that, alas, attracted not just migrants like myself but seemingly every tie-dyed hippie outcast from up and down the Atlantic Coast. The New Vermont has filled up over the past generation with cranky lefties who were outvoted everywhere else in the country, until they came here and finally found a polity small enough to take over. Small is beautiful, indeed.

Among people who do not live here, the most conspicuous event in the recent evolution of Vermont was the ruling of the state supreme court that opened the door to same-sex marriage. But that decision came as no surprise to those of us who live here. The only wonder was that it took the judges so long to get around to it.

The five supreme court justices are all career government lawyers who couldn’t get elected dogcatcher at most town meetings. To get even, they issue arrogant decisions. Three years before the same-sex marriage case, they emasculated town meeting and local control, ruined public education, raised taxes, and created antagonisms and resentments all over the state. Not a bad day’s work.

In the days before this ruling, known as the Brigham decision (1997), towns were responsible for schools. Which meant they had to raise the money — chiefly through property taxes — to pay for them. Some towns are wealthier than others and could afford better schools.

According to the Brigham ruling, this was unconstitutional. The court told the legislature to come up with something new and fair. That something was Act 60, which creates a statewide property tax and school-funding system. The state takes all the money and distributes it equally. Now the rich towns send in much more than they get back, and the poor towns get back much more than they send in. Every school gets about $ 5,300 per student from the state. Some towns were spending twice that.

The genius of Act 60 is in the way it treats those towns. If the voters of a town decide that cuts of this order in the school budget are unendurable, and they are willing to tax themselves above the state rate to cover the shortfall, they have to send that money to the state which will send it back to them at a rate that equalizes distribution around the state. The richer the town, the less of the money it sends into this “shark tank” it gets back. My town would get about one dollar back for every three it sends in. This, after it has already sent in far more than the $ 5,300 per student it gets from the state.

Act 60 makes town meeting and local democracy a joke. We still get to vote on bounties for porcupines (which eat trees and prickle unwary dogs). But the big decisions — how much to tax and what to spend for education — get made in Montpelier, the capital, where the teachers’ union is the boss hog.

Act 60 was sold by its supporters as a way to improve education. The argument depended on making quality dependent on spending, which is not unfair. As George Aiken believed, if you want something, then you have to be willing to pay for it. But it was plain that some towns would spend less for education than they had been. Education in those schools, then, would not be improved. To the contrary.

But Act 60 was never as much about education as it was about envy. If it took bringing some schools down to make all schools equal . . . well, then, fine. Some of the bill’s most prominent supporters, of course, sent their kids to private schools, so no skin off theirs. Some towns — like the one where I live — attempted to stay out of the shark tank and still keep school budgets at the old level (in our case, about $ 9,500 per student) by creating foundations that would raise non-tax money to be donated to the school. Our group of volunteers went around explaining to voters and property owners why it was in their interest to contribute over and above what the state had already hit them up for. It was a tough sell — even more of a grind, for me, than serving on the school board — but we did meet our goals.

This, of course, inspired the supporters of Act 60 to new punitive legal efforts. They proposed to outlaw foundations like ours. Or to require that we send our foundation contributions to the shark tank for redistribution. So far, they are still at bay.

Meanwhile, the shark tank has been experiencing severe shortfalls — because foundations like ours have, so far, been successful. So poorer towns that had voted increases in their school budgets in anticipation of money from the shark tank were looking at deficits. To bail them out, the state put almost $ 40 million (real money in a little state like Vermont) into the shark tank from general revenues. This is absolutely contrary to the intent and design of the Act 60 funding contraption. But never mind. We are on the road to some form of equality and everyone knows what you have to do to eggs before you can make an omelet.

The real absurdity of it all, though, is that while Vermont spends relatively lavishly on its schools (consistently among the top 15 states), student performance is mediocre, at best (usually in the bottom half nationally). One contemporary educational innovation that would dovetail nicely with the Vermont tradition of local control is the charter school. Thirty-seven states are experimenting with them, but not Vermont. The teachers’ union, which is easily the strongest political force in the state, is opposed. In fact, when it comes to using its muscle, the teachers’ union can demonstrate a kind of brutality that is a little breathtaking for a small, rural state. Last year, when a retired Air Force colonel offered to teach a course called “Conflict in the Twentieth Century,” without pay, at Williamstown High School, the union filed a grievance to keep the scab out of the classroom.

It seems that in the New Vermont, you may not volunteer either your time or your money to the schools. You will give what you are told to give, take what the state gives back to you, and leave the teaching to the experts who have done such a fine job. Private schools are springing up all over the state.

Self-reliance was the cardinal virtue of the men who fought with Ethan Allen. They homesteaded the Green Mountains to avoid the servitude of share farming, which was the way things were done on the big estates over on the Hudson.

The Green Mountain Boys were prepared to take care of themselves and horsewhip any sheriff, in the pay of nobles, who tried to tell them they couldn’t. That kind of spirit dies hard, and it was still alive, if feeble, when I got here. I knew people who figured that if they were strong enough to get out of bed, they couldn’t be sick enough to need a doctor. My first doctor — who looked after my infant daughter — did not carry medical liability insurance and explained this to you on your first visit so you could find another doctor if you thought suing would make you better when you got sick. He charged five bucks for an office visit. His degree, by the way, was from Harvard.

Being a little more mainstream than he, I bought some bare bones medical coverage from a company that specialized in that kind of thing. I figured the high deductible wasn’t likely to be a problem. Even a freelance writer could afford a lot of $ 5 office visits.

I did not realize, however, that Vermont was in the midst of a health care revolution. The state was on the road to a single-payer system and universal health care, where everyone could afford to have everything and we would all be taken care of no matter what.

My first insurance company got run out of the state for “cherry picking.” That is to say: They wouldn’t write a policy like mine for everyone who walked through the door. If everyone couldn’t have it, then no one could. Which pretty much sums up the prevailing ethos in the Green Mountain state. I tried Blue Cross, which in Vermont is a quasi-governmental entity and just about as user-friendly. After a couple of telephone shouting matches with some of the Blue Cross bureaucrats (good idea for a war: the Green Mountain Boys versus the Blue Cross Bureaucrats), I switched to a company that offered a high deductible combined with a medical savings account — an innovation that actually allows you to make your own medical spending decisions. I was happy with this, so, of course, last year that company was also run out of the state. Ultimately, you will be able to buy insurance only from Blue Cross.

In its quest for a single-payer system the state has run about a dozen insurance companies out of the state, and the three that are still here have jacked up their premiums by as much as 40 percent. As more people are unable to afford health insurance, the costs are shifted to those who can. In Vermont, taxpayers foot the medical bills of kids from families earning $ 50,000 a year. The jiggling of the health care books makes the “shark tank” accounting gimmicks of Act 60 look clean and elegant. But what is especially galling is not the political hustle that aims at convincing voters they are being served a free lunch, it is the way in which any notion of individual choice and responsibility is snuffed out because it might be unfair or unequal or something.

If you want to take responsibility for your own health — decide not to smoke, do drugs, slurp 64 oz. Cokes, indulge in unprotected sex, etc., etc. — that is fine with the state. But you will pay the medical bills of those who do. And if insurance gets to be too expensive, then you too can become a ward of the state.

My five dollar doctor has long since left Vermont.

As the state continues to take over and centralize health care and education in Vermont, one hears increasingly about the “health care crisis” and the “crisis in education.” No surprise there. And one finds ways to manage. But what is dispiriting, and cannot be fixed, is the way the old virtues of Vermont are being leeched out of the state and its citizens.

The state is a notoriously tough place to do business. Taxes and regulation are the chief culprits. Transportation figures in there, too. New Hampshire has the same topography, but it is booming, especially in the non-polluting high-tech sector where Vermont languishes. Perhaps because programmers are looking for good schools and affordable medical coverage.

Vermont sends three men to Washington. Senators Patrick Leahy and James Jeffords and congressman Bernie Sanders. Leahy is a pure Democrat. Jeffords is a soaking wet Republican. Sanders is an Independent and a Socialist who, when he was mayor of Burlington, liked to travel to Nicaragua to lend support to the Sandinistas. What they all seem most concerned about down in Washington is keeping Vermont’s dairy farmers happy. Jeffords is running ads these days showing Vermonters speaking into the camera to thank him for all the good things he has brought back to us from Washington, including a dairy compact scheme that gives New England farmers a subsidy on top of a subsidy. It may actually be good for Vermont, and if you know any of those farmers, you cannot help but admire them and sympathize with their struggles to stay on the land. Vermont has always been a tough place to make a go of it. Still . . .

The compulsion these days seems to be to find a way to make life easy, and then to get someone else to pay for it. The governor of Vermont is an energetic former doctor named Howard Dean who is as loquacious as Calvin Coolidge was laconic. He is everywhere. Talking. Always talking. About Act 60; about “affordable” health care; about “civil unions” (the secular alternative to same-sex marriage). He is running for reelection, and his coalition of urban exiles, old hippies, teachers, greenies, and various wards of the state will no doubt hold. It is a measure of his odd success that he has been mentioned, now and again, as a running mate for Gore. He would be ideal except that, in so many ways, he is a replica of Gore. Combative, condescending, captive of the teachers.

Vermont has become unmoored from its traditions and is drifting, derelict. The state was not one of the original 13 states and, at first, led by Ethan Allen, refused to join the new republic and argued that it might be better to reunite with Britain. Two centuries later, Vermont feels more and more like a province of Canada.

Geoffrey Norman last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about Jimmy Johnson and the thuggishness of pro football.