Via Ryan
Most
Likely to Secede: What the Vermont Independence Movement Can Teach Us
About Reclaiming Community and Creating a Human-Scale Vision for the
21st Century, Ron Miller and Rob Williams, eds., Chelsea Greeen. 272 pages
I presume to review this book, even though I am a contributor to it,
because it is a fine representation of an increasing tendency across
this land of resistance to a federal government grown inept, corrupt,
overreaching, overlarge, and overintrusive. That tendency may be
labeled, for convenience: nullification.
It doesn’t matter that the word does not appear in this volume, for its spirit does. The volume is called
Most Likely to Secede,
and it grows out of a secession movement in Vermont that has been
active, off and on, for a decade now. But I don’t think secession really
is in the immediate future. Instead the subtitle comes closest to what
this book is all about—state independence. It is a collection of essays
from a magazine called
Vermont Commons, which started publishing
in 2005, and they deal with every aspect of what it takes for a state to
assume unto itself all the processes that have been ceded to (or seized
by) the federal government over the years: money, business regulation,
energy, health, education, democracy, food safety, information, the
commons, and social policies such as abortion and marriage.
Obviously, every attempt to increase or establish independence on the
state level will eventually run up against laws and regulations on the
federal level.
