Can We Save NH Towns & Schools
from State Takeover?
NH “Liberty Alliance” Seeks to Restrict Local Options
Towns in New Hampshire have long controlled their own schools, elections, zoning, environmental and public nuisance laws. Strong communities, local control and town meetings have been part of the Yankee way of life for centuries. But some forces, many of them outsiders, are trying to change that. They have found that by focusing on state legislatures and governorships, they can control what happens both within and across the nation. And nowhere are those forces more obvious than in New Hampshire, as shown by the gallery below of candidates supported by a single, externally funded Libertarian PAC.
Below are NH legislators funded by a single out-of-state “Make Liberty Win” PAC. This is just one of many. Libertarians go by many names: the “NH Liberty Alliance”, the “House Freedom Caucus”, the “Free-State Project”, “Americans for Prosperity” and many more.
WHY REMOVE LOCAL CONTROL? The Koch brothers and other industrialists that make up the 0.1% benefit. They started ALEC to write bill templates for states. These templates slow the transition to renewable energy, reduce corporate taxes, let banks charge exorbitant interest rates, ensure states do not outlaw profitable agri-chemicals and much more to increase corporate profits. They don’t want towns to be able to undo at the local level what they’ve paid to make law at the state level.
Given money from the 0.1% who profit from massive de-regulation, Libertarians have been able to pursue their naive dream of a lawless society. In the Libertarian utopia, everyone is naturally well-behaved, but armed and able to shoot anyone whom they perceive as a threat to them, their family or even bystanders. [This latter “stand-your-ground” is current law, broadened year by year from the Castle doctrine that lets someone shoot a home intruder.] Libertarians believe that their rights trump everyone else’s. It is their right to set off tannerite explosions so loud they shake neighbors’ windows. If bystanders are intimidated when they strut the streets with automatic weapons, that’s the public’s problem. And, of course, it is their right to crowd hospitals and increase deaths by refusing vaccinations and masks during a pandemic. In fact, it was the COVID death of Libertarian House Majority Leader Hinch that put the even-more-extreme Free-Stater Jason Osborne in charge.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER is the strategy, starting with schools. Despite running on a campaign of local control, Chair of Senate Education Ruth Ward joined House Freedom Caucus members in sponsoring HB1679 to dissolve all regional school districts. Students in towns without a school would need to tuition and find transportation to another town’s school. Taxpayers in towns without a school would have no voice on a school board.
Libertarian PACs want to dismantle public education for both financial and ideological reasons. Because they think society is unimportant, Libertarians do not care if children from disadvantaged backgrounds never achieve their potential. In the survival-of-the-fittest Libertarian utopia, if children have addicted, neglectful or impoverished parents, it is up to them to rise above their circumstances, unless a benevolent person chooses to help them. Thus, EFA vouchers that hand parents $4600 per year toward their child’s education are sufficient in Libertarian viewpoint. If public schools disappear, the 0.1% pay lower taxes. And children escape the clutches of schools that teach sharing and social responsibility. EFAs even let the racists among Libertarians keep their children in all-white schools. [The voucher law explicitly allows schools to deny admittance to anyone they please. And Libertarian membership includes admitted white supremacists. One of these may have typed the tweet below.]
Libertarian Party of New Hampshire’s Martin Luther King Day tweet.
The tweet was later removed.
CURTAILING LOCAL COMMUNITY CONTROL Divide and conquer is also being used for towns. When a mainly Democratic bill permitted municipalities to combine to share large solar generation plants, Republicans amended the law to ban towns’ combining resources or sharing power under net metering. Worse yet is a bill that would deny towns the right to join together and lobby for their shared self-interest, or even to testify at a hearing in their own self-interest!
Many Libertarian measures try to curtail simple town authority, as well. HB1272 tries to limit the authority of town health officials. HB1021 denies towns the ability to regulate churches, but is so broad that a minister’s living room might be considered a church. SB315 controls how towns allocate revenues from the Rooms & Meals tax. HB307 allows the governor to remove a locally elected official if that official tries to ban guns in schools, town hall or polling places. SB400 continues the state’s paring back of town planning and zoning controls. It would make towns liable for all attorneys’ fees if a developer contests a town decision and fails. Thus, every planning and zoning decision would represent a potential town liability. SB249 denies towns the right to regulate short-term rentals.
YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, BUT I’M THE BOSS OF YOU seems to be the Libertarian “Freedom Caucus” mindset. HB 1195 would require every public meeting to include 15 minutes for public comment, whether needed or not, rather than let locals allocate appropriate time. Another bill would stop the use of electronic voting machines and force local volunteers to count all ballots by hand, even in Manchester. Another forces officials to separate out ballots from newly registered voters without ID, waiting to count them if ID is mailed in and reaches them before a deadline.
The point is that a tiny, radical minority, with the acquiescence of the Republican majority, has taken over the NH State House. We must make others aware of what they are doing so that we can vote them out this Fall.
