Ceres Triumphant 
By Martin Harris

If, on your next hegira to Montpelier, you elevate your deferential gaze to the symbolic statue topping the Golden Dome, you’ll see the image of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Why it isn’t St. Benedict or St. Isidore, both recognized as post-pagan patrons of agriculture, I know not, but I might guess that if a male choice were acceptable (subjunctive contrary to fact) today, it wouldn’t be St. Benedict, because his motto is "Pray and Work", both somewhat unwelcome notions in a predominantly irreverent Western culture in general and an increasingly passive-income-oriented Vermont economy in particular.

In that context, Ceres is an appropriate icon: not only isn’t she dressed for serious farm work, she’s also shown in Roman iconography as the goddess-with-harvest-basket who comes in to collect the goodies after the real labor of plowing, seeding, and cultivating has been done by some subordinate male gods. Thomas Jefferson on separation of religion and governance notwithstanding, a religious symbol for agriculture atop the State House was appropriate in 1790, when farming was 90% of the economy in Vermont and all through the country; but now, in Vermont, it’s only 12% of Gross State Product and 3% of employment, Wikipedia says. The StateMaster.com website shows Vermont as #52 in GSP, well behind both the District of Columbia at #36 and Porto Rico at #37, but the Wikipedia site show the State as #1 in craft breweries per capita, a grain-based ag enterprise. Even so, as I’ve documented in earlier columns in this space, agriculture is the fastest-shrinking major sector of the State economy, while passive income, some of it doubtless spent on craft beer, is the fastest growing. The domain of the grain goddess is now more symbolic than real, I’d argue, basing my conclusion in part on such equally symbolic sights as the fake stuffed sheep on the groundskeeper-manicured "pastures" on the sidehills of Route 4 east of Woodstock.

When you consider that agriculture is well under 1% of both Gross National (Domestic) Product and the total US labor force, you have to recognize that Vermont’s higher numbers reflect aggressive State policy in that policy direction. After all, there aren’t many Vermont farms which can match the 200 bushel per acre corn yield in Illinois, and the State isn’t the wheat basket for Atlantic Coast cities that it was two centuries ago. Vermont’s Golden Domers can’t (and wouldn’t  want to, a whole ‘nother subject) do anything to raise farmgate commodity prices, but they can use their fiscal-policy (tax-and-spend) powers to reduce farm tax burdens and improve farm survivability. They’ve done just that, with a variety of well-known programs. Although they would vociferously deny it, they’ve adopted the basic legislative principle articulated by conservative politico Jack Kemp more than 20 years ago, and economist Alan Greenspan more recently: whatever you tax more, like smoking, you get less of; and conversely, whatever you tax less, like agriculture, you get more of.

Similarly for the statistically-illustrated out-migration of business, the age 25-44 cohort (with their children, thus reducing school enrollments) and now the tax-targetted upper-income quintile; all these are driven in part or whole by Golden Domers’ deliberate use of the first part of the Kemp principle: whatever you tax more, you get less of. As last week’s column argued, the Golden Domers are, almost entirely, our intellectual superiors, fully cognitive of the predictable results of their decisions, and one must conclude that these out-migration patterns are therefore desired objectives. If they weren’t, these highly articulate folks would have said so.

My conclusion from the above documented facts is statistically-non-documented and mathematically non-proveable: it goes to the underlying political-calculus reason for using tax policy to encourage the above sectors to depart. I’d argue that, to quote similar language from erstwhile CNN commentator Lou Dobbs, they constitute an attack on the middle- and upper-middle-class of active-income earners (not passive-income retirees and trust-funders) because it’s the active-income voter who is most likely to resist –and has historically done just that—the various fiscal policy initiatives which Golden Domers have installed for them to pay for. If you can get them out, they can’t vote against your programs, or you.

There’s a minor proof for the above thesis; it’s the almost-absence of a Vermont exit fee (I’m told there’s one for property sales by recently-fled owners). New Jersey has one, (it denies the label but not the escrow fee) requiring homeowners who sell and flee to leave some money behind, supposedly as a deposit against future unpaid tax liabilities. Within Vermont, public school supervisory unions have long had one, requiring towns districts which might want out to pay their future share of bond liabilities before they can secede. Surely Vermont’s above-average-intelligence Golden Domers could have implemented an exit fee, if they had wanted the money of the fleeing sectors, but I’d guess they want their departure from the voting rolls more.

You can summarize your reasoning process with this: when policies promised as productive produce observeable results you consider destructive, and the authors of those policies respond when challenged with neither a "Gloriosky, Zero" nor a "we’re sorry", what’s left is a pleased celebration of above-average-intelligence Golden Domer policy: "we’re getting the results we’ve wanted all along". Those results include a multi-faceted pattern of higher cost-of-Vermont-citizenship, lower growth in private-sector career opportunities or capital investment, and resulting out-migration of some demographic sectors and in-migration of others. Why the Progressive Golden Domers should have specifically sought and then systematically accomplished these outcomes, and defend rather than apologize for them, is a whole ‘nother subject, for which I have no more column-inches in this issue. Stay tuned for further theorization.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights