“With resistance like that” in Grafton….

500 feet to late if your are living the New Hampshire lifestyle
Democrats are working to make NH more like their favorite state….

I blogged about the latest brouhaha (and threatened lawsuit) in the Free Town of Grafton yesterday; the fight was caused by hubris and abuse of local power in my small hometown. So in the last 24 hours people have been asking me “Why are they acting like that?”

I told ’em to re-read the posting.

So today I get an email from my libertarian buddy “AJ,” who just read the blog post. He said it should be made into a movie…starring “Bill Murray as Tim Condon, Bruce Willis as Stephen Darrow, directed by Steven Spielberg!” Then he said…

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Calvin Coolidge Comes to Grafton, Part I

The Town Seal of Grafton, NH
To spend more, or not to spend more? That was the question in the town of Grafton

Calvin Coolidge, President from 1923 through 1928, was a famous skinflint from Vermont. He didn’t believe in today’s political-class sport of incessant taxing and spending to win elections (Grokster Steve MacDonald has recently highlighted this excellent president HERE). Coolidge was so adept at refusing the pigs at the political trough in his time that he insisted that “government employees were issued one pencil at a time, and the government purchased lighter, less expensive paper. The Weather Bureau stopped sending out postcard forecasts, since citizens now turned to their newspapers for that information; the post office made bags with new, cheaper material, and government-wide red tape was replaced with simple white string.” (This and much more is in a book review online at the City Journal about Amity Shlaes’ new biography entitled, simply, Coolidge.)

What does all this have to do with political piggery and push-back from small-government activists in the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire? I’ll tell you….

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The magnificent small-government activists of Grafton, New Hampshire

I have written and spoken in the past that because of the Free State Project, “New Hampshire is the luckiest state in the history of the United States.” (State Rep. Cynthia Chase—a statist transplant from statist Rhode Island—recently

The Town Seal of Grafton, NH
The Town Seal of Grafton, NH

reinforced that view with her public outburst that “Free Staters are the single biggest threat New Hampshire is facing today”; after my Grokster buddy Steve MacDonald broke the story on GraniteGrok.com it went viral, resulting in priceless national publicity for the Free State Project).

The power of native New Hampshire activists joining with Freestater immigrants was demonstrated Monday night at the annual town meeting in the Free Town of Grafton where efforts to increase local spending and taxing were decisively defeated and reversed. An initial motion to reduce— instead of increase—the annual town spending budget by 20% failed by a single vote. A following motion to reduce the budget by 10% passed. Successive motions to reduce various spending warrant articles by 10% also passed. How could this happen? Easy….

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