This commentary is by Bill Schubart. He is a retired businessman and active fiction writer, and former chair of the Vermont Journalism Trust, the parent organization for VTDigger. You can find all of his bimonthly columns at his website.
Two books that look at the past and future of Vermont through two different lenses have just hit bookstores.
They are Will Patten’s “Rescuing Capitalism: Vermont Shows the Way” and Roger Allbee’s “Turning the Soil: 250 Years of Vermont Agriculture.” Their coincident publication brings readers two in-depth looks at Vermont; Patten’s from the perspective of 50 years of Vermont business entrepreneurs and the distinctive values that have guided their business decisions, and Allbee’s from the perspective of 250 years of agriculture — Vermont’s working people and landscape. Although each has its own focus, they both offer the reader incisive views of what has made and still makes Vermont unique.
Will Patten, who grew up in Shrewsbury and now lives in Hinesburg, himself a serial entrepreneur, extols the virtues of capitalism in its purest form and its unique ability to generate wealth for those who add value. From a time when the Church owned all knowledge and the King owned all material wealth, capitalism, an invention of 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers, gave birth over centuries to a productive middle class that created and thrived on its own wealth.
Ever since the Reagan era and its self-serving promotion of “trickle-down economics” by the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who stated that leadership’s sole obligation is to enrich its shareholders, the key metrics of a healthy nation in which the good of the individual and that of the commons are in balance have deteriorated.
Capitalism itself has become a divisive battleground between business interests inveighing against regulation and taxation and the working class who create the value. This has led to the demonization of the very economic theory that enabled millions to rise out of penury by being compensated fairly for the value they add.
Patten presents us with a multicolored palette of Vermont companies whose leaders chose to see capitalism differently, balancing shareholder interests with those of their employees, their communities, and the environment. Patten offers readers a middle ground in a country desperately polarized and unable to speak across ideological lines as well as a panorama of Vermont values that embraced capitalism at its best.
Roger Allbee’s beautiful book gives us a 250-year overview of Vermonters working on and living off their land, from the arrival of new settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut, seeking land of their own by way of the New Hampshire grants and then defending their new land from tax predators in New York and New Hampshire until, under the leadership of the notorious Allen brothers, the short-lived Republic of Vermont was formed.
Allbee then leads us through the continuing challenges wrought by changing market tastes, competition from pioneer settlers populating the western prairies, emerging agricultural and transportation technologies up to today and the emergence of regenerative farming by Vermont’s many young farmers.
The continuing thread in this finely researched book, like Patten’s book, is the embrace of hard work in the face of endless challenges wrought by change and the deep connection between Vermonters and their working landscape. But unlike most historical perspectives, the two Vermont authors make clear how the past continually informs the future initiative of rugged Vermont farmers and business entrepreneurs.
The concurrent publication of these two fine books not only lays out Vermonters’ capacity to live not just off the land, but to live with the land amid the 250 communities that dot Vermont.
As both books make clear, Vermonters have chosen to take seriously our Vermont motto: “Freedom and Unity.”
I urge you to read both books. Even though each looks at Vermont through a different lens, they share a similar message about Vermont and its hardy inhabitants’ intuitive ability to learn from and be guided by their past.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: Two vital new books about Vermont and Vermonters.