Lyceum Society of Vermont Reorganizes, Gets New Name

The Lyceum Society of Vermont has gone through a series of structuring efforts and now is reorganized under The Vermont Foundation for Western Cultural Education.

Peter Viereck is a forgotten founder of traditionalist conservatism.  Daniel McCarthy has a fine article on Viereck from The American Conservative.

Guest Editorial: Martin Harris on Testing

Testing, Testing, 1,2,4, Whatever

In spite of major efforts on my part to rise above contemporary-culture shock, I must admit failure, which perhaps can be excused because I tried really hard. The surprise came when a friend described to me his recent correspondence with Shirley Tilghman, highly skilled professional educatrix, presently employed as the President of Princeton University. He questioned her as to the knowledge base in the subjects of history and government of the present undergraduate body, particularly with regard to the recent survey finding that, in general, the incoming freshmen —oops, make that freshpersons—seem to know more about such disciplines than the outgoing seniors.

There’s an old joke on this subject: why are universities such vast repositories of knowledge? Because every year the arriving freshmen each bring a little in, while the outgoing seniors take very little with them, and so bit by bit the knowledge accumulates. And there’s a parallel pattern in the public schools, as a recent (17 Nov 08) op-ed in the St. Johnsbury Caledonian-Record describes “younger kids out-performing older kids year after year”. The NECAP test results in the St. Johnsbury school showed 36 % of 4^th graders proficient in science. By 8^th grade, the proficiency percentage is down to 9. We know that NECAP –New England Common Assessment Program—tests are designed to be easier than the Federal NAEP –National Assessment of Educational Progress—tests. This explains why Vermont schools spend extra money to purchase and administer the NECAP’s, and then publish the seemingly superior scores. Largely unpublished (by intent) are the much lower scores from the NAEP’s, which are free but mandatory, for a statistically selected sample of students. But this isn’t a case of comparing the pay-to-use tests with the free tests; it’s a case of measuring lower grade-level NECAP’s against upper-grade-level NECAP’s. The Caledonian-Record reports St.Johnsbury Superintendent Nicole Saginor describing the test results as “good news”.

That’s not how other Vermont Superintendents have chosen to be quoted on the painful subject of student test results: more typical is Shoreham Principal Heather Best, who is quoted in the Addison Independent (30 March 09) as arguing that “the NECAP results don’t paint a valid picture of what is going on in the classroom”. Valid pictures apparently aren’t being painted in the hallowed halls of post-secondary education ivy, either.

From Princeton, President Tilghman answered her West Virginia alumnus as follows: “Princeton students are such a remarkable group that they can’t be judged by fact-based tests”. That’s where I failed the contemporary-culture-shock test; within living memory, the educational culture once used fact-based tests at every level from K to 12 to determine grade-to-grade promotion, and universities used them to see whether engineers about to graduate were capable of designing bridges which wouldn’t fail under traffic load, whether wannabe economists had learned how to qualify mortgage loan applicants, whether future agronomists had become reasonably expert in crop-seed DNA analysis. As recent untoward events have suggested, that sort of educational rigor doesn’t prevail any more, illustrating just how fact-based tests have become the Rodney Dangerfields of formal education: they don’t get no respect. Except, superficially, when they seem to show improvement: a recent (25 Mar 09) Rutland Herald headline says “Test Results Improving Statewide” and you have to read deep into the article to learn that the “good news” is that 88 Vermont schools, this year, failed to meet Federal Adequate Yearly Progress standards, down from 116 last year.

If you were to speculate that educators, forced to explain poor student test results, choose to minimize test importance, you might likewise conjecture a similar response to AYP, the Washington requirement –oh, how unreasonable—that almost all students be testing at “proficient” by 2014, up from about a third now, using the NAEP tests, and be making annual progress toward that goal. You’d be right. Here’s a typical educator shot at AYP, from a new angle : any Federal demand that almost all students be “proficient” raises the Lake Woebegone statistical impossibility, referencing the fictional National Public Radio community “where all the students are above average”. Hence, AYP is silly, we are to conclude, along with its “proficiency” target.

Meanwhile, the federal NAEP test numbers show that, in 2007, only 41 percent of Vermont 8^th graders could achieve “proficient” (roughly, the skill to function at grade level) in math. If 50% could so achieve, would that be “average”? It would be quite an improvement.

Guest Editorial: Martin Harris on Waste

When Montpelier Steps in Table Waste

Readers of this column who are also in-migrants to Vermont from New Jersey (those two demographics may not overlap very much) and are of the Silent Generation or older will recall the pig-farms of the New Jersey Meadowlands. That’s the vast wasteland/wetland area which is the formerly-cat-tail-filled drainage basin of the lower Hackensack River, and more recently the filled-in site for everything from a sports stadium (East Rutherford) to a shipping dock system (Newark). At one point in fairly recent history it was the home of uncounted hundreds of small pig farms, centering around Secaucus, a village industry based on the re-cycling (before that word had become trendy) of porcine-edible table waste from New York City restaurants only a few miles to the east. At its height the pig-industry “employed” 40,000 short-term-career curly-tailed eater-workers, a 1984 Rutgers University study reports. Now it’s down to 24 farms, from 250 in 1963. Presently, Secaucus is more infamous as the demolition-dumping destination of the once glorious New York City Pennsylvania Station, a 1963 permitting decision by a bunch of NYC planners and zoners which I can’t adequately describe in this family newspaper, than as an odoriferous pig-farming enclave.

The Rutgers writers attribute the opening of the Secaucus pig-farm boom to the opening of the Holland Tunnel in 1927, efficiently connecting lower Manhattan restaurants to nearby available pig-friendly swamp acreage, and its subsequent decline to the opening of the Giants Stadium in 1976, when sports patrons reacted negatively to the then-famous pig-smell in the local air. By 1959, with the opening of the New Jersey Turnpike, it had already become possible for low-value land uses to move further from NYC by commuting their supplies and products in and out, and so the more distant pig-feeders are now part of the general urban dispersal pattern despised by anti-sprawl advocates. Yes, there are still table-waste pig feeders in New Jersey. Indeed, the Rutgers writers don’t even mention the 1982 adoption of Federal regulations requiring pre-feeding heat-treatment of meat-category table wastes, which you can read for yourself (it’s only three paragraphs) in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 9, page 914, as any part of a supposed pig-feed industry-killer. But soon there won’t be any pig-feeders in Vermont, which is a curly tale all by itself.

You can credit this huge step for mankind to gardeners/activists in the Town of Burke, who have gleefully blown the regulatory whistle on one George Wagner, a local who has been in the table-waste (partially from the town school lunch-room) pig-feeding business for 30 year, but no more. Now, the table waste will go to the gardeners in town for free compost. Their demand is based on a long unenforced Vermont statute prohibiting the feeding of garbage to pigs, according to reporter Amy Nixon of the St. Johnsbury Caledonian-Record. And it’s quite legal: read it for yourself in Vermont Statutes Annotated, Title 6, Chapter 113, paragraphs 1671-2. Unlike the Federal regulation, which requires that meat wastes be heat-treated prior to pig-feeding, Vermont law goes farther to prohibit such re-cycling entirely. What’s interesting about this tale isn’t so much the skillful use of the law to grab the table waste from one re-cycler and give it to others (themselves) more entitled, in their own opinion; it’s the growing list of areas in which Vermont’s Beautiful People and politically-dominant Gentry-Left (the two demographics pretty much overlap) have, on the basis of their own innately superior wisdom and judgment, made Vermont law more restrictive and demanding than Federal law.

A partial list of such areas includes the American with Disabilities Act, wherein Vermont has included a number of handicap-access requirements not found in Federal law; more stringent requirements for asbestos management in buildings; more stringent requirements for radiation management at Vermont Yankee; and even activist demands for more stringent air-quality standards at International Paper’s New York State plant because prevailing winds are westerly. One area in which the B-P’s have chosen easier standards: locally-purchased school achievement tests, to supplant the Federal requirements, so that Vermont students appear more capable than they really are.

It makes you wonder why Vermont bothers staying in the Union; but, of course, as you already know, it has its own little Gentry-Left secession movement, headquartered in Charlotte, in progress.

Guest Editorial: Martin Harris on Regulation

When Happy Regulators Contemplate Residential Sprinklers

Occupying a place of honor, sort of, on my interesting-clippings bulletin board is a 2001 quote from one Martha Kent, then Director of the Safety Standards Program for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In it she says that issuing a regulation is: “…a thrill, a high. I love it. I absolutely love it. I was born to regulate. I don’t know why, but that’s very true. So long as I’m regulating, I’m happy”. You can read the full account for yourself in the 11 March 01 issue of Reason Magazine.

Not occupying a similar place of honor is a recent news report discussing Forest Service plans to improve the Green Mountain National Forest in the Braintree area. On the budget: restoring long-abandoned 19^th century farmstead sites and apple orchards, which, like almost all other non-modern Vermont land development now universally deemed admirable and worthy of officially-sponsored protection, was originally executed entirely by individual design initiative and construction effort, without a single Act 250, local zoning, or design review permit required. The USDA could have earned the Harris Award simply by recognizing the merits of now-forbidden unregulated private initiative.

Now that we live in an age of happy regulators in which the only admired unregulated activity in Vermont is that of long-dead white guys who moved into unspoiled wilderness to kill trees to build heavy-timber houses and barns, and cleared forestland and drained wetlands to plant non-native crops like Red Clover and graze methane-emitting European-origin livestock like Red Devons. No surprise, then, that in the growing debate over the benefits of residential fire-suppression sprinkler systems, almost all the official chatter concerns the means and intensity of regulation. I’ve not read a single article in the Code publications or construction trade magazines directly advocating a non-regulatory incentive-based approach.

I did find one article, in the June ’91 issue of Sprinkler News, setting forth the numbers to show that, using the collegiate fraternity house example, the payback on retro-fit sprinkler installation was then 7.7 years. It didn’t say the obvious: that retro-fit is far more expensive than installation-during-new-construction, and that therefore systems installed in new buildings would, ideally, enjoy an even faster payback. Faster payback, of course, equates to increased owner-incentive, no mandatory regulation needed. Not a scenario to make the battalions of Martha Kents in governance-careers happy.

Payback is based on reduced fire insurance premiums, and therein lies the rub, because many insurers won’t reduce premiums unless the sprinkler installation meets Code requirements, including water-reserve requirements which are super-expensive to meet in rural areas off the municipal water system. Encouraging sprinkler installation in rural development would require easing the Code requirements, something the anti-rural-development “smart-growth” advocates would vociferously oppose because, as things now stand, the regulations work to pressure wannabe home-owners to locate in already urbanized areas with municipal water, not private wells. You can, of course, install a few sprinklers drawing from the water system in your own house-in-the-country but it won’t meet Code and therefore it won’t get you an insurance deduction. No deduction, no payback. No payback, no incentive.

I suppose that, if you could back the Martha Kents of happy regulation into a quiet corner and promise them that their comments would be un-recorded, they’d admit that having a few sprinklers in a rural house beats not having them, for safety purposes. But you’d be highly unlikely to succeed at getting them to reduce or change their beloved regulations, so that their subjects-of-governance might enjoy a financial incentive rather than a government mandate for doing so. 

Vermont Facebook Groups

I have created a number of Facebook groups for Vermont conservatives, including:

“Take Back Vermont” – its all in the title.

“Vermont’s Conservative Movement” – a sort of clearinghouse for conservative think tanks and blogs in Vermont.

“RINO Hunting in Vermont” – for those conservative Republicans who dislike the influence of Komline, Hube & Co.

“Friends of the Vermont Right to Life Committee” – an unofficial group for the pro-life organization.

“Friends of the Ethan Allen Institute” – an unofficial group for the free market think tank.

“The Lyceum Society of Vermont” – the official group for Vermont’s conservative forum.

“Vermont Renewal/the Center for American Cultural Renewal” – the official group for Vermont’s leading pro-family group.

“The Vermont Marriage Advisory Council” – the official group for Vermont Renewal’s anti-gay marriage project.

McCarthy on High Church Conservatism

The American Conservative has a great new article by Daniel McCarthy on “high church conservatism” that I highly recommend.

Guest Editorial: Martin Harris on Taxation

No Representation Without Taxation

When is a tax not a tax? When it’s a Contribution. Or, when it’s an Insurance premium, as in the situation wherein one is gainfully employed and is required, along with the employer, to pay into a (non-existent, but that’s not the point here) trust fund from which he will receive future Social Security benefits, out of current wages and employer chip-in. The legislation dates from FDR’s New Deal; it’s called FICA, which stands for Federal Insurance Contribution Act. Note the 9-letter word “Insurance”.

The above semantic exercise is prologue to the argument over whether those who don’t pay any federal income tax, but do pay their FICA premiums, are actually legitimate taxpayers just like those who pay both. As a generalization, I might observe that folks of a Left-leaning mind-set insist that FICA-payers are real taxpayers, while folks of a Right-leaning mind-set are more likely to argue that, when the legislation mandating the payment specifically calls the future-pay-out program insurance, then it is indeed an insurance premium and not a tax. This is more than an argument over whether a non-quacking duck is still a duck; it goes to the question of the percentage of US citizens who enjoy all governmental services without paying for them. And that, in turn, is relevant because it goes to the question of innate human behavior, and whether people who are shielded from paying for any government service are more inclined to vote for more of it than those who aren’t so shielded. (Think Act 60 and Son-of-60, 68, and the income-sensitivity provision of the property-tax program which funds the public schools; presently, Dwinell Political Report publisher James Dwinell reports from Randolph, well over half of Vermont home-owners are shielded from paying the full costs of school-budget growth they have been voting for.)

People who think and write about such things have recognized the problem, from philosopher Plato in Classical Athens to politician Ari Fleischer in present-day Washington, who recently (13 April 09) had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Everyone Should Pay Income Taxes”, his thesis focusing on the adverse effects on the overall economy (supported only by actual tax-payers) of the pro-spending voting tendencies of non-tax-payers. The best quote, in my opinion, comes from 18^th century Scottish professor Alexander Tyler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they vote themselves largesse from the public treasury…” or, to be more precise, the majority legally placing the monetary burden on the minority, who, of course, will eventually flee or resist. (Think California’s past experience with the pattern of upper-income real-tax-payer flight, one which Vermont is about to repeat.) A similar quote comes from 19^th century French commentator on all things American, Alexis de Tocqueville: ”A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax increase can escape the obligation to pay for it”, an eerily apt description of the design intent of Acts 60 and 68. It’s probable, maybe not proveable, that Vermont wouldn’t be #1 in the Nation for tax burden if it weren’t for its highly ‘‘progressive” tax system, in which the majority votes for the minority to pay the costs of various free-to-them goodies.

At the national level, it’s widely documented that over half –the dominant voting majority– of all citizens are tax-exempt, voting for benefits they don’t help pay for; the rebuttal of these non-tax-payers is that they pay FICA “taxes”, which, of course, are better described as personal retirement insurance premiums: within broad limits, what you pay in determines what you eventually are paid out. As a 2006 Tax Foundation study (which shows, for example, that 66% of household 1040 filers pay no tax) drily observes, non-paying majorities are “indifferent or will positively oppose” tax reform, just as Alexander Tyler predicted. The solution to the representation-without-taxation (R-W-T) problem is as obvious as it is unachievable: that everyone pay at least a token tax amount for the government services they want. Skin in the game, you might say.

Tyler predicted governmental collapse. In an era before American States, he didn’t predict inter-State tax-payer flight. Now, in a pattern which is already well-defined, payers flee from R-W-T jurisdictions, in a self-reinforcing cycle where those States they flee become even more R-W-T while their destinations become less so; in fact, when real taxpayers relocate, everyone in their destination State benefits, tax wise. Taken to its logical conclusion, it means eventual bankruptcy for high R-W-T States, a prospect which their Legislatures won’t fix because, as the Tax Foundation observes, once the non-payers out-number the payers, they can vote whatever they want from the minority.

Guest Editorial: Martin Harris on Development

Shut ‘em Up and Drive ‘em Out

My essential daily newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, has long allocated quite a few precious weekly column-inches on the op-ed pages to a selected-for-the-task Token-L, presumably so non-L readers can gain enlightening insight into a different, for them –us—world-view. There’s never been a Token-AA, that I can recall, nor a Token-W, nor a Token-HS, but the Token-L slot has long been filled, until fairly recently, by one Albert Hunt. His arguments were logical, well-phrased, usually based on proofs in the form of authority-quotes and/or statistical facts. But eventually Mr. Hunt’s Token-L slot became vacant. It was re-filled by one Thomas Frank, possibly most well-known for his 2004 What’s the Matter with Kansas? book in which he argued that rational voters should choose the candidate who appeals most to their pocketbooks, not their governance ideals, and that Kansas voters hadn’t been self-interestedly rational, therefore, in their recent conservative-politics shift; they could have pocketed more OPM (Other Peoples’ Money) by voting Liberal. Similarly, in an 8 April op-ed, Mr. Frank chose to apply his analytical techniques to the 2009 decision of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford to reject, for his State, some of the OPM “stimulus” money being offered to all States by Washington.

One component of the Frank stimulus-rejection econometric analysis dissects Mr. Sanford’s use, while a Congressman, of a futon for sleeping in his office. Another, more mathematical, dissects Sanford’s use of the long-recognized 8 percent figure for long-term historical-average stock market return (as if it weren’t so) against the recent two-year downturn, writing sarcastically “that’s why the Dow stands well above 20,000 today”. Gauge for yourself how much insight the reader gains, from such use of the op-ed-page column-inches, into the actual merits (or not) of Keynesian deficit OPM spending economic stimulus strategy, which is never, in all 23 column-inches, once specifically addressed. Conversely, William Henry Harrison’s use of a non-existent log cabin as a Presidential campaign device is. There are actual historical and economic grounds for adult pro-and-con discussion of the once-widely-accepted Keynesian thesis, not much except cheap shot benefit for references to theoretical 19^th century skinned-alive tree-trunk housing. Albert Hunt didn’t use his column-inches in such manner, while Thomas Frank does; therefore I conclude that, in L-land, there’s been a change in approved debate, discussion, and op-ed-writing tactics. Predictably, it was a WSJ LttE-writer who sent in (11-12 April issue) a cogent description of “tactics which play well in the quick-hit, scorn-filled arena that is the 21^st century ideological Left”.

These tactics came relatively late to the op-ed pages of the Journal, but they’ve long been standard practice at Town Meetings and public hearings in Vermont, I can testify from personal experience, and at similar events in Massachusetts and Oregon, based on witness reports from those States. Recently (17 April) some L’s in Brattleboro shut down a federal NRC hearing by throwing compost, the L-method of addressing questions of nuclear physics and quantitative regulatory oversight. These tactics are used because they work: there’s nothing like the physical or verbal ad hominem attack to deter a non-supporter from attending future events, nothing like the phoney manufactured statistic or regulation to silence the opposition; hours later, when a bit of research has revealed the falsehood, it’s far too late for it to matter. Such tactics have become a part of the expected atmosphere primarily in school budget or bonding discussions, which explains why there’s such widespread non-L support for Australian ballot, but I’ve also seen them used at discussions of subjects ranging from farm-field disposal of municipal sludge to traffic burdens from proposed development projects. I haven’t seen them used in sprawl-vs-smarth-growth discussions, because I haven’t yet seen the subject presented in such venues; but I have seen them in speaker presentations, the stand-up verbal equivalent of the sit-to-read op-ed. Like Mr. Frank, the speakers could have done better had they so wished, because, just as with the Keynesian argument or school spending, there’s a vast body of historical fact and documented statistics with which they’re familiar and which might be used to support a rational argument for or against “sprawl”. Instead, speakers like former NJ Governor Christine Whitman equate suburban sprawl to global communism in level-of-threat terms.

The real-info resource includes a couple of failed experiments in New Town construction in the US: Reston, VA, and Columbia, MD, which were supposed to be truly independent new cities but ended up as Washington and Baltimore suburbs; or the New Town developments outside London and Stockholm, which pretty much succeeded, complete with inter-urban green belts, all descended from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City theorizations, variously described (remarkably) as both sprawl and smart-growth schemes. There’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s no-urban-center-very decentralized Broadacre City proposal, pre-planned but never built, and new intensely-centered-not-much-sprawl Edge Cities like Tyson’s Corner, VA, built but never pre-planned. Applying rational analysis to these models would be more useful than calling anti-smart-growth theorists all sorts of names. Or maybe not; after all, it shuts ‘em up and drives ‘em out. That’s how real winners win, I s’pose.

Amazing YouTube Speech Given by Campaign for Liberty’s Sean House

Sean House is the Interim Coordinator for the Campaign for Liberty.  Recently he spoke at the North Oakland Republican Club of Michigan and gave a fantastic speech.  You can view the speech here.