Reader Stephen Humphrey points to this this CNN story:
Officials in the popular ski resort area of Killington want the town to secede from Vermont and join neighboring New Hampshire in a dispute over taxes.
They say the town’s restaurants, inns and other businesses send $10 million a year to the state capital in sales, room and meal taxes, but the state returns just $1 million in state aid to Killington.
Even more galling to the town is a statewide property tax imposed in 1997 to fund schools. The town of 1,092 won a Superior Court order that called the state’s method of assessing local properties “arbitrary and capricious,” but the state Supreme Court reversed that decision.
“It kind of reminds us of Colonial days,” Town Manager David Lewis said Thursday. “The Colonies were being faced with the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, the Sugar Act. England wasn’t giving them any rights. They were treating the Colonies as just a revenue source.”
New Hampshire, just 25 miles east, has no income tax or sales tax. . . .
Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Killington has little chance of secession “absent an armed insurrection type of thing. . . .” . . .
Well, the New Hampshire Constitution does mention a right of revolution:
Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
But I don’t think the Vermont Constitution does — and I think that even New Hampshire would frown on “an armed insurrection type of thing” from one of its towns.
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