The Northern Agrarians 
By Martin Harris

About the same time that the Rutland Herald was running stories about local efforts to de-rail (pun intended) the proposed new trainyard there, local papers here have been running stories about counties along the Crescent Route of the Norfolk-Southern competing against each other to land (pun intended) a new trainyard here. 

About the same time that the Herald was running multiple lengthy stories and side-bars about grass-roots campaigns to close down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, there was only a six-inch article in the local press about the expansion and re-licensing of a nuclear-fuel-processing plant near here; no street theatre protests by mobs of back-to-the-earthers, no too-clever-by-half attempts in the State Legislature to tax the atomic-industry villains into a premature departure.

And about the same time that Addison County papers have been reporting on successful local efforts to suggest to such businesses as Starbuck’s (Middlebury) and Home Depot (Montpelier) that they’d be well-advised to take their building permit applications elsewhere, a number of big-box retail applications has been approved around here, the major discussion centering not on the usual mom-n-pop victim rhetoric, but rather on whether vehicle parking under a store and a "green-roof" design over it could be economically feasible. 

The quantitative outcomes of such majority-public-opinion situations show up in such reports as the latest effort of the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s entitled Rich States Poor States and you can read it on line or in your own personal copy for about $15. It ranks the states in terms of economic competitiveness, using measures ranging from taxation and demographic trends to government employment and quality of state legal system. Vermont comes in at #50 out of 50 in this analysis by authors Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, while Utah comes in at #1. North Carolina, arguably the least-red (in terms of political philosophy, red being conservative and blue liberal under the now-famous USA Today color-coding of such trends in 2000) of the southern states comes in at #19, while New Hampshire, arguably the least blue of the northern states, comes in at #20. This being an opinion column, here’s my opinion: public preference driving public policy as it does in state governance, the majority of voters in both Vermont and Utah are getting just about what they want in no-growth or pro-growth policies, which then show up in the ALEC numbers. For example, Vermont now has high rates of growth in taxation and of shrinkage in certain aspects of population, while Utah has just the opposite. (Utah spends less than half of Vermont’s public-education per-pupil budget and gets about the same student test score results, but that’s another story.)

If you like a little historical reflection, consider this: the notions of an idealized agrarian society, anti-industrial and pro-environmental, anti-consumerism and pro-self-sufficiency, which presently underlie majority public opinion in Vermont, were originally set forth as a comprehensive theory by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers/academics of the 1930’s who argued that the closer you could get to a subsistence-farming social structure the better off you’d be, not economically which doesn’t matter, but philosophically which does. These ideas have since shown up in venues from academic/environmentalist Wendell Berry to the Natural Organic Farmers Association, from the nostalgic photo’s in such magazines as Vermont Life to the now-in-politics hippies who came to Vermont in the ‘60’s supposedly to live off the growing of green beans. And there’s much less of them here in what was supposed to have been the national center-of-gravity for small-scale agriculture, the Upper South, than in its new center-of-gravity, northern New England. I wonder how they might react to my writer’s-shorthand labeling of them as "Northern Agrarians". 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights