Those folks were so dialed into the community, they had the pulse of the “Common Sense”. That is how things used to work in my lifetime. They set the tax rate right then and there.

He told me that the way they used to set the tax rate for the town was for the Selectboard to get together out in a field on a bail of hay, reckon with the issue and deliberate as to what was fair and what folks could afford. He had fought his way from Normandy to Germany. I worked with a old guy in my town when I was like a 24 year old freshly appointed Tax Assessor (I wanted a career in politics for like a minute). They talked about how important it was to not need “government” help and how, if we pulled together, we can raise a barn or help a neighbor in distress or just follow our own guide in general matters of every day life. Keep the cows close to home they would say. In fact, I spent some of my mis-spent youth helping those old guys fix theirs. Freedom to those guys meant something much more. Freedom, to those of us who were blessed to not have fought to preserve it, is an academic topic. What they did talk about were simple principles and a fierce devotion to Freedom in a way I am not sure we can comprehend. As a young man, I worked for WW2 Vets and they really did not talk much, if at all, about their experiences in The War. Having lived my whole life in a bucolic New England town, I can report from the front lines…… In order for Town Meeting to work, there needed to be some set of commonly understood parameters and basic rules to live by. Town Meeting relied heavily on a set of guiding principles we referred to as the “Common Sense”. Our model of governing was the wonder of the world and heavily influential upon intellectual giants like Toqueville, Jefferson and Paine.

The Town Meeting form of government is the last bastion of democracy and an examination of the “Common Sense”.įrom it’s earliest roots in New England’s heritage, the Town Meeting has offered the citizenry direct say in how they were governed and that included bedrock principles of self-governance and self-reliance. While the disconnect between the government and the governed seems to get ever wider, in New England, we have always shared Paine’s devotion to local democratic principles. He was railing against the faraway British Monarchy at the time, but the same principles could hold true today as to how many feel about our own government. In his pamphet titled “Common Sense”, Thomas Paine, in 1775, shared with the world his views on governance, which included a devotion to democracy at the most local level possible. Common Sense seems increasingly uncommon.

Thomas paine and common sense