Hundreds of miles from the ambitions and deceits of Washington there is a little town in New Hampshire where I live. This town is tucked under the arm of an impressive mountain and is surrounded by resplendent gauds of foliage in the autumn and wreathed in downy coverlets of snow all winter long. Delicate spires of colonial church steeples nick the cloud-chased New England sky, and a pellucid trout stream rolls and chuckles in the shadow of the old woolen mill, now a historical landmark. A mere fifty-one hundred souls make their home here. There’s not a stoplight or a parking meter to be seen. The whole town could be a Norman Rockwell painting come to life if Norman Rockwell had been better at depicting towns that have convenience stores on half the street corners and are filled with pseudo–Cape Cod tract houses, each with a snowmobile for sale in its front yard.
Still, my little town—let’s call it Blatherboro—is as decent a place as you will find in America. In 1989 the Blatherboro Police Department received twenty-nine reports of lost property. In the meantime, town residents turned fifty-nine items of lost property in to the police. The citizens of Blatherboro are decent to the point of defying arithmetic.
The citizens of Blatherboro are also employed. Virtually no one in the town is out of work or stays that way long. The town welfare officer, a very practical lady, has been known to come by people’s houses early in the morning and take them job hunting. Only sixty-three Blatherboro households required any charity in 1989, and that charity was, as the word indicates, charity. The $21,000 that the town spent on public assistance was all supplied by private donations.
Blatherboro’s residents are educated and sensible—literate enough to support three local weekly newspapers and sensitive enough to their neighbors’ feelings to make sure that no very juicy news appears in any of the three. They are a calm, law-abiding lot. Shootings, stabbings, rapes, and so forth are unheard of in Blatherboro (though there is a certain amount of discreet wife beating and child abuse, especially during the midwinter doldrums). The last murder of any note took place in 1919 and is still discussed with indignation.
Blatherboro is a nice town, but not so nice as to be eerie. The people of Blatherboro are good people but not dreadfully good. Blatherboro is an uncommonly comfortable place for comfortably common people, like me, to live. It is an economy class Shangri-la.
The government of Blatherboro is as homey and reasonable as Blatherboro itself. There is a traditional New England town meeting held once a year. Here the business of democracy is disposed of in one sitting. And here I go to do my civic duty and help dispose of it.
There is nothing at all of a Rockwell painting to a real New England town meeting, and nothing of a Robert Frost poem either. “Whose woods these are I think I know …” Hah. Whose woods are whose everybody knows exactly, and everybody knows who got them rezoned for a shopping mall and who couldn’t get the financing to begin construction and why it was he couldn’t get it. And you’d hardly use our town meeting as a calendar photograph. It’s held in the high school gym, a windowless space barely large enough for full-court basketball, redolent of damp socks and painted two-tone yellow in the two worst tones of yellow ever seen.
This political arena is filled with folding metal chairs of an ingeniously uncomfortable design. The front rows of the folding chairs are occupied by elderly know-it-alls in lime-green blazers—business executives who retired (much to the relief of their respective businesses, no doubt) and moved to Blatherboro to reside in their summer homes year-round. These former items of corporate deadwood spend most of their day basking in the warm glow of New Hampshire tax policy. (New Hampshire tax policy is to not have any taxes—there is no state or local income tax and no sales tax either.) And the rest of the time they devote to thinking up great ideas and swell notions for improving everything in Blatherboro, especially the efficiency of its government.
Sitting in the back rows of the folding chairs and standing around the gymnasium walls are the Blatherboro natives, ranging in type from deer-poaching swamp Yankees to frayed Emersonian Brahmins and including a large number of working-stiff French Canadians. The natives live in fear that the improvements in efficiency proposed by the blowhard retirees will send the one tax New Hampshire does have, the town property tax, soaring. This property tax keeps soaring anyway, despite the fact that every single person at the town meeting has a plan to reduce taxes.
The Blatherboro selectmen (who are the equivalent of city councilmen, except this isn’t a city and there’s no council) and the Blatherboro town manager sit at a folding table facing the earnest crowd, and the town moderator stands behind a podium and calls on people. Members of the local Boy Scout troop carry microphones to the orators in the audience, and a combination of bad PA system and typical gym acoustics produces a voice of the populi that is more pox than vox.
Despite the minimal nature of Blatherboro town government and, indeed, the minimal nature of Blatherboro, and despite the goodwill, good sense, and good New England parsimony of Blatherboro’s residents, the result of the annual town meeting is always a stupid and expensive mess.
Much of the stupidity is common to all government. There are certain subjects about which people are incurable boneheads. Humans apparently cannot rationally consider what constitutes a danger to humanity or how likely any given danger is to occur. Thus, Blatherboro has fifteen police officers—the same ratio of police to population as New York City. The annual Blatherboro police budget is $425,000. This in a town that, in 1989, had 520 crimes, of which 155 were minor incidents of teenage vandalism. The cost of police protection against the remaining 365 more or less serious malefactions was $1,164 each—more than the damage caused by any of them.
On the other hand, almost everything in Blatherboro is built out of wood. Half the town is too rural to have fire hydrants, and a lot of the town is too cheap to have smoke detectors. Every home has a fireplace, most have woodstoves, and quite a few have wood-burning furnaces so that in March 1989, for example, there were three chimney fires in four days. But the Blatherboro Fire Department is a completely volunteer organization with an annual budget of less than $50,000.
People are also very stupid about what makes people smart. The local school system, which serves Blatherboro and the nearby town of Quaintford, isn’t very bad. But it isn’t any good either. The Blatherboro-Quaintford School District Annual Report expounds at length on “competency-based programs,” “whole-language instruction,” and “curriculum coordination” and devotes a dozen pages to discussing “budget objectives” and listing the various administrators, speech pathologists, special-education consultants, and so forth that are thought necessary to modern education. But nowhere does the annual report remark on the fact that the high school’s ninth grade has 124 students, while the high school’s tenth grade—whose denizens are of legal age to leave school—has 79. This is a 36 percent dropout rate, about the same as the dropout rate in most inner-city slums.
The Blatherboro-Quaintford schools have a total of only 1,488 students, kindergarten through twelfth grade, yet there is a complete school-district office with a staff of fifteen people, including a superintendent of schools, an assistant superintendent, and a business administrator. And there are an additional twenty-eight principals, assistant principals, counselors, aides, and other people who don’t actually teach anything on the school-system payroll.
Blatherboro’s annual per-student spending is over $5,000—almost three times the national average for state college tuitions. If Blatherboro’s parents and taxpayers were as serious about education as they—and every other parent and taxpayer in America—always say they are, they could gather the youngsters into miniature academies of perhaps fifteen students each and hire $75,000-per-year private tutors to teach them. In the academic-infested groves of New England, $75,000 would hire a fine tutor. Alternatively, Blatherboro students could be packed off to the local Catholic schools, where they’d get a better education—and a good, sharp rap on the knuckles if they showed any need for counseling—for less than half the price.
City planning is also beyond Blatherboro’s ken. The town has a Planning Board, a Board of Adjustment, a building inspector, a Conservation Commission, and a Historic District Commission, and the place still looks like hell. Of course, there are patches of twee and precious prerevolutionary beauty, as there are in all old New England towns. Sections of Blatherboro are so overrun with white clapboard and green shutters that if a man were to unzip his fly the Historic District Commission would probably make him put green shutters on either side of that too. But the rest of the place looks like every other piece of overpaved, cheap-jack, fake-front highway sprawl in the nation. I don’t happen to mind this sprawl myself, at least not in theory, because in theory I’m a private-property strict constructionist. But I do mind all the boards and commissions and employees of the town wasting my money failing to prevent it.
Besides the ordinary and general kinds of idiocy, the Blatherboro Town Meeting also deals in some witlessness specific (but no doubt not unique) to Blatherboro.
The retired blowhards had gotten together with the Blatherboro elected officials, the members of the Chamber of Commerce, and all the other people in town whose method of torturing their neighbors is good citizenship and decided that the town offices were too small. Too small for what was not explained, though the selectmen gave an elaborate presentation, complete with slide show, detailing just how much too small. The proposed solution was to sell the snug and handsome little Town Hall that sits on the Blatherboro common and sell the Mayberry RFD storefront police department down the street and buy an empty factory building out on the east side of town and put everybody in there. This would cost $1.3 million but would, it was said, save the town money in the long term.
The Town Flake stood up to speak. He is an old and addled gentleman with hair in long, white tangles—WASP dreadlocks. He’s been making a complete and utter pest of himself at town meetings for over thirty years. He owns his own mimeograph machine and runs off reams of smudgy philippics accusing town government of incompetence and waste. He knows all the regulations in Robert’s Rules of Order and uses them until he has to be shushed by the moderator or shouted down by the townspeople. And he is always and invariably right on every issue. “Save money in the long term! Save money in the long term!” said the Town Flake with high scorn. “Government’s always full of ideas to save money in the long term. Just why is it that government never has a single, solitary idea about saving money now?” The Town Flake was shushed by the moderator.
A very old lady wanted to know, if we were going to sell the town office, were we also going to sell the World War I monument on the common? It was patiently explained to her that monuments (or commons either) don’t get sold. Whereupon another even older lady asked, if the town office got sold, did the World War I monument go with it? The question would come up twice again in the debate.
Someone else wanted to know why a factory couldn’t go in the factory building—and provide jobs and pay taxes. To which the selectmen replied that the economy’s a bit slow in New England these days, and no business is likely to buy the factory.
“Well, if no business is likely to buy the factory, who the heck is going to buy the Town Hall and the police station?” hollered the Town Flake.
The arguments continued for two hours. And these arguments were, in their effect, much more persuasive against democracy than for buying the factory or keeping the Town Hall. It is remarkable, on close inspection, what a lousy way to get things done democracy is. Not that democracy necessarily makes the wrong decisions. Private enterprise can do this with equal or greater ease. But in a democracy the decision-making process must be listened to. The great thing about the invisible hand of the market is not that it’s invisible but that it’s silent.
Buying a factory to put the town government in was at last voted down, 241 to 207.
Debate now moved to whether the town should spend $1.7 million to build a new water tank.
The Town Flake pointed out that one reason the tank would be so expensive is that the town intended to build it in a valley with pumps instead of on a hill with gravity. He was shushed by the moderator.
New Hampshire is—with the exception of tropical rain forests (which I hear won’t be around much longer)—the wettest place on earth. When the snow melts in spring there’s not a basement in the state that you can’t launch a boat in. A summer day without rain is considered something to tell your grandchildren about. You cannot walk half a mile in a straight line anywhere in New Hampshire without drowning in a stream, lake, beaver pond, or somebody’s flooded cellar. Yet the town of Blatherboro was running out of water. This was a stupidity beyond the range of local talents. Anything as astonishingly dumb as this must have the federal government involved in it somehow. And, indeed, it did. Congress had passed the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1982, which assumed that people in small towns were too far removed from Senate subcommittee hearings and presidential fact-finding commissions to know whether their drinking water was safe. Federal law now mandates that all water taken from surface sources in small towns everywhere must be filtered and chlorinated whether it needs to be or not.
So Blatherboro is obliged to build an entire new water system. The $1.7 million water tank is the first step in a three-phase construction program that will eventually cost the town $6.2 million. Never mind that that’s enough money to drill a nice, new, clean, private artesian well for every household in town.
The only thing more depressing than democracy at work is democracy not allowed to. The debate on the water tank had just begun when the town’s attorney pointed out that if Blatherboro didn’t comply with federal water regulations, the town would be fined $25,000 per day. The water tank was approved by a grudging 251 to 108.
Next was an article “To authorize the Board of Selectmen … to apply for, accept and expend any and all Federal or State grants, gifts or funds that may become available during the ensuing year.” This was passed overwhelmingly, as well it might have been, with loud shouts of “Aye!”
There followed an hour-long argument about whether to close a small section of the old Town Road. The blowhard retirees claimed that the road should be closed because the town natives liked to run their four-wheel-drive vehicles through there at all hours of the night, and the town natives argued that the road should be kept open because they liked to run their four-wheel-drive vehicles through there at all hours of the night. The natives won on a voice vote by being able to yell “Nay” louder with no teeth than the retirees could yell “Aye” with false ones. After that the $4 million town government operating budget was passed with no debate whatsoever, the reasoning being that the thing had already been debated at public Budget Committee hearings, although no one had attended them. There was one “Nay” from the Town Flake.
With these mundane matters out of the way, it was time for the gist of the town meeting, the big fight everybody was waiting for, the keen excitement and high drama of quarreling about sewers.
It really is impossible to overstate the tedium of government. As boring as civics classes were back in high school, they were a bacchanal compared with civics itself. The next six hours of the Blatherboro Town Meeting were devoted to bickering about whether the Department of Public Works should have exclusive authority to approve sewer-line hookups. Of course, I have used the words quarrel, fight, and even bicker in a strictly poetic sense. I doubt that in the course of the evening’s long and brutal fray so much as a voice was raised except by the Town Flake, and then only to calling-the-dog level. A town meeting is tedious with that amazing and inexplicable tedium of a large number of people behaving themselves in public. It is the opposite of a mob or a riot, the flip side of human collective behavior. Taking part in a New England town meeting is like being a cell in a plant.
Nevertheless, there were very strong feelings about effluvia in Blatherboro. An article was proposed that, if passed, would require that a Special Town Meeting be convened to approve any expansion of the town sewer system costing more than $50,000. The idea was not to save money on sewers. User fees and hookup charges already reimburse the town for all sewer costs. The purpose of the proposal was, instead, to control growth. Every commercial, industrial, or housing development of any size would need to be approved by the town as a whole or wind up swimming in its own waste. Specifically, this article was aimed at stopping a golf course and condominium complex already under construction on the west side of town. The golf course developer had been punctilious in meeting the town’s Planning Board, Board of Adjustment, Conservation Commission, and Historic District Commission requirements and in obeying all applicable state and federal laws. The golf course and condo complex owner had needed to obtain forty-seven permits from eleven different government agencies in order to start construction. But he had done so. An all-sewage Special Town Meeting was the last possible way to stop the plaid pants and spiked kiltie shoes.
As I mentioned before, I hold private property rights to be sacred—in theory. Which is like saying I’m rich—in Bulgaria. In theory we’re all lots of things: good, kind, and, above all, consistent. I hold private property rights to be sacred in theory, but in practice I had thrown in with the anti–golf course faction.
To be fair, we weren’t opposed to the golf course for any Pals-of-the-Animals, Eco-Stalinist reasons. Most of us play golf. We didn’t have any cutesy-artsy objections to seeing trees cut down. It’s a lot easier to shoot a deer on a 350-yard par-four fairway than it is in the deep woods. And we weren’t opposed to growth itself—in theory. But the sad truth of local government, like the sad truth of national government, is that people are no longer an asset. Humans do not benefit the modern state. Total 1989 Blatherboro town expenditure—including the town’s share of county government and school system costs—was $9.5 million, or about $1,860 per person. Almost all this money was raised through property taxes and automobile registration fees. A typical new family moving to Blatherboro, with a mom, dad, and two kids (for families still come in that configuration in New Hampshire), would be buying a town-house condominium with a tax-assessed value of $100,000. The current property tax rate on that condominium is $2,860 a year. If the new family owns two late-model cars, registration fees (which are based on the blue-book value of the automobile) would be about $340. Add in a few miscellaneous levies and charges, and the new family ends up contributing approximately $3,500 per annum to the Blatherboro town coffers. But that is almost $4,000 less than what the town will spend on these people. A family of four must own at least a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of property to carry its own weight in the Blatherboro town budget.
Theory is important, sure, but it shouldn’t get between a man and his wallet. You can’t serve theory for dinner. People have a theoretical right to do what they want with their property, and people have a theoretical right to move into my town. But …
It was at this moment, in the middle of the Blatherboro sewer debate, that I achieved enlightenment about government. I had a dominion epiphany. I reached regime satori. The whole town meeting was suddenly illuminated by the pure, strong radiance of truth (a considerable improvement over the fluorescent tubes).
It wasn’t mere disillusionment that I experienced. Government isn’t a good way to solve problems; I already knew that. And I’d been to Washington and seen for myself that government is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. I understood that government is wasteful of the nation’s resources, immune to common sense, and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. I had observed, in person, government solemnity in debate of ridiculous issues and frivolity in execution of serious duties. I was fully aware that government is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence, or fame. What I hadn’t realized was government is morally wrong.
The whole idea of our government is this: if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it. And here, in small-town New Hampshire, in this veritable world’s capital of probity, we were about to commit just such a theft. If we could collect sufficient votes in favor of Special Town Meetings about sewers, we could make a golf course and condominium complex disappear for free. We were going to use our suffrage to steal a fellow citizen’s property rights. We weren’t even going to take the manly risk of holding him up at gunpoint.
Not that there’s anything wrong with our limiting growth. If we Blatherboro residents don’t want a golf course and condominium complex, we can go buy that land and not build them. Of course, to buy the land, we’d have to borrow money from the bank, and to pay the bank loan, we’d have to do something profitable with the land, something like … build a golf course and condominium complex. Well, at least that would be constructive. We would be adding something—if only golf—to the sum of civilization’s accomplishments. Better to build a golf course right through the middle of Redwood National Park and condominiums on top of the Lincoln Memorial than to sit in council gorging on the liberties of others, gobbling their material substance, eating freedom.
What we were trying to do with our legislation in the Blatherboro Town Meeting was wanton, cheap, and greedy—a sluttish thing. This should come as no surprise. Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores.
The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.