Behold the Silent Politicians 
By Martin Harris

"Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more" is a quote usually ascribed to the 1939 Dorothy of Wizard-of-Oz fame, but now it might be ascribed to the more northerly of a pair of Kansas brothers pursing careers as members of the Fourth Estate in Vermont. When you run the newspaper you get to put your opinions on the editorial page, and Emerson Lynn of St. Albans has done just that in his Messenger (the more southerly, Angelo, has the same privilege in Middlebury in his Independent) expressing surprise and displeasure with Montpelier’s Golden Dome folks. I mention Kansas to be in synch with the Golden Dome folks, who have similarly seen fit to take official notice of Entergy’s out-of-state (Louisiana) origins, Entergy being the nuclear-plant corporation which bought Vermont Yankee from a consortium of local utilities a few years back. Quoth the dismayed ex-Kansan, on the subject of the now-temporarily-derailed additional decommissioning fees for Vermont Yankee, which if adopted would have raised energy costs for both businesses and householders: "Ms. Symington and Mr. Shumlin understand the situation perfectly…by passing the bill they can energize their base…and the people most adversely affected are those who collect a paycheck every week. These are the same people who have the most at risk with [their] insistence that Entergy dig into its pockets for as much as $400 million. No company forks out that kind of money without needing to recoup it in the form of higher rates. And who pays? The average Vermont family struggling to make ends meet on two incomes". Lynn is dismayed because such political behavior wouldn’t even have been considered by the Golden Dome folks of the Sunflower State, whose most famous Fourth Estate citizen, just over a century ago in a time of declining farm-crop prices, editorialized that "farmers should raise less corn and more hell": Mary Lease. 

Now Vermont legislators, who "understand the situation perfectly", Lynn writes, are taking actions aimed adversely at employers and employees, but don’t explicitly say why. In fact they’ve been remarkably silent on their long-term social engineering objectives, which, over the last generation or so, have systematically raised the costs of living, of education, of housing, of governance, of entrepreneurship to the point where Vermont’s reputation is no longer one of frugal free enterprise Yankees but of enthusiastic government taxers and spenders, a poor environment indeed for business, capital formation, and ever-improving standards of living and a great one for no-growthers with independent sources of passive income: the coming "trust-funder economy", I’ve argued in these column-inches. If you don’t like the objective, or can’t afford it –indeed, while they won’t admit to a cumulative set of policy errors causing it, they now concede an "affordability" crisis of varying dimensions in a curiously detached way, as if it fell to the Green Mountain State from space and hadn’t been deliberately constructed under the Golden Dome in 40 years of Progressive (pun intended) legislative sessions—you’re free to leave. Many in some key cohorts already have; I won’t re-recite the substantial demographic shifts here. 

Why the strange politician reluctance towards a clear articulation of their long-term mission: re-invention of Vermont as a high-tax, high-governmental-service-level, high-anti-build and anti-business level, high-income-requirement sort of place for which, unless you’re part of the upper-income quintiles willing to pay generously to get in and stay in, you’d be priced out, unless you’re part of the new under-class, the subsidized lower-income quintiles who keep the lawns mowed, the tables waited, and the plumbing fixed? Maybe because it doesn’t sound quite so "American", this two-tier-economy-in-a-faux-bucolic-environment objective, when too clearly stated. 

Lynn’s op-ed nicely describes the Shumlin-Symington mind-set: if you can’t afford an electric power increase for your household or business, you’re free to leave, because we don’t need or want you here: you’re the troublesome type that votes against our annual tax increase proposals, too. We’d prefer the Vermont electorate to consist of three groups: 1, those wealthy enough easily to afford and to support whatever we propose in the way of government growth; 2, those lower-income workers whom we subsidize in various ways, who are thus suitably grateful and therefore eager to vote for us; and 3, those directly employed by the State in governance and education, who will reliably support us because we support them. 
 

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights