Indecent Proposal 
By Martin Harris

A recent event in Somerset and Glastonbury (sometimes, recently, spelled with an "e") brings to mind, if your memory span is relatively short, the 1993 movie in which an upper-income-quintile (trophy?) -wife agrees to engage in seduction with a playboy for a million dollars. The theme – what’ll you sell your honor for?--  was first put to print in a 1988 novel by one Jack Englhard. If your memory span is a bit longer, you’ll recall that many years earlier, the same theme was discussed in the form of a college campus joke: BMOC invites co-ed to an overnight dalliance for a million; she agrees, he drops the offer to a sawbuck, she angrily refuses with a rhetorical "what do you think I am?" and he replies with "We’ve already settled that question; now we’re just discussing price". It’s not a perfect analogy, but I’d opine that the legal-but-not-ethical confiscation, by the State, of collected-but-not-spent monies taxed from property owners in those two unincorporated towns demonstrates that the posted price of virtue-loss in Montpelier is a mere $400,000, less than a thousandth of the total State budget of $4.4 billion. In this case, it isn’t merely an "Indecent Proposal" presumably consummated with mutual consent, but an actual unilateral indecent action, backed by the full and ultimately lethal power of the State. 

You’d think there’d be a host of quotes on character-as-illustrated-by-small-events, but I found only one: from 17^th century French dilettante/author/moralist Jean de la Bruyere, who observed that "a man reveals his character even by the simplest things he does". And, of course, there’s the Old Testament, in which Esau sells his high-value birthright for a low-value "mess of pottage", variously construed as beef stew, lentil soup, or some combination thereof. I’d like to think, but can’t prove, that the Vermonters-in-government of fifty years ago wouldn’t have behaved so shabbily for so little, as the current Golden Dome crew has just done, but I draw some slight consolation from noting the discomfort with which some in the Legislature, operating in legal but not ethical mode, grabbed the money and ran: Rep. Alice Miller of nearby Shaftsbury describes the fiscal maneuver as "not pleasant at all", but her conscience was inadequate to the challenge of rising to the level of actually voting not to grab. She and her peers didn’t decline the money on the grounds, for example, that such demeaning conduct was beneath their pay grade. Because the Vermont media reported no gubernatorial objection, I conclude that even the nominally-Republican Governor Douglas chose to go along (without audible objection) with the petty little grab, both branches of State government now promising after-the-fact legislative changes to "stop us before we confiscate again". Normally, of course, towns aren’t supposed to run surpluses, and if they do, the money is supposed to go back to its taxpayer sources, not up the chain of command to higher levels of governance.

Most States (and cities like Chicago, where the dead famously rise, periodically but temporarily, to vote again) haven’t historically been above equally distasteful antics, as the county-commissioner scandals in Oklahoma in the ‘80’s, the Orange County hedge-fund-related financial fraud in California in the ‘90’s, and the mythical sewer-line construction in Alabama in the ‘00’s, have all shown. As far back as the ‘50’s, folks in Vermont used to joke with snide superiority about Southern counties with overweight sheriffs who used speed-traps (some readers will remember, in the time before Interstates, when US 1 and 301 were the pathway from the North to springtime foolishness in Florida) to cheat Yankee drivers out of a few dollars, under the cloak of superficial legality. We thought ourselves, and we were, better than such shabby behavior, then.

That was the underlying theme of Opinions Magazine, the newsletter of the Vermont Secretary of State’s office, when it was edited by Jim Douglas and Paul Gillies: a steady diet of excellence-in-Vermont-governance stories, from Town Meeting as the epitome of rural participatory democracy to selfless career State employees and the wonderful things they’ve done for their always-somewhat-feckless and dependent citizenry. Sure, Vermont governance costs a little more than elsewhere; but we’re so incredibly good at what we do that we’re worth it. Now, the not-honestly-defensible $400,000 confiscation suggests, maybe not.

There is a pair of interesting side-bars to this extraction of an up-to-now-saved $400,000 from residents of Glastonbury and Somerset: one is that the Rutland Herald was at pains to point out that one of the property-owners pays over $30 grand annually in taxes, implying that he’s a rich guy who doesn’t need all he (probably unfairly) has; and the other, in the context of the present SCOTUS Justrix-in-Waiting Sotomayor hearings, is the concept of "legal realism", whereby, in the words of  Georgetown Law School professor Randy Barnett,  the Progressive judicial intent seeks "…to respect the precedents that lead to the results they like". In this case, legal realism gives cover to Montpelier’s impulse to seize $400 grand so that State government, and not the money’s earlier earners and owners, can spend it elsewhere. Elsewhere in Vermont governance, some have chosen not to grab the money and run: More next week.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights