How to Be an Expat Without Leaving Home

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"We are not talking isolation," he emphasizes. "There are 600 firms in Vermont that engage in foreign trade. That will continue."

Noting that studies show a "Made in Vermont" label boosts a product's sales by 10 percent, he envisions a robust economy based on high-quality goods that appeal to discerning customers around the world. Naylor also muses about Vermont's initiating a European Union-like trade federation with nearby Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (especially if Quebec were to secede from Canada, cutting these provinces off geographically from the rest of the country) and perhaps an independent New Hampshire or Maine.

As radical as Naylor's idea of a Vermont republic sounds, he's found surprising pockets of support across the country. John Kenneth Galbraith, noted economist and former ambassador to India, has endorsed the plan, as has legendary diplomat George F. Kennan, architect of the Marshall Plan programs after World War II. More importantly, the idea has caught fire with some people in Vermont. The famous Bread and Puppet Theatre troupe is doing skits advocating independence, and alternative publications are promoting the idea.

"I have no illusion that Vermont will soon leave the union," Naylor concedes, but adds that in the 1980s few people in Eastern Europe dreamed that the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia would soon break apart, peaceably in most cases. Naylor, who is married to a Polish woman and once did a lot of business consulting in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, sees similarities between the centralized bureaucracies and militaristic leaders of the old Soviet empire and the huge corporations and militaristic leaders that now run America.

To avoid a sudden collapse like the Soviet Union's, he says, "it's time for the United States to begin planning its own peaceful, orderly disunion. States should be allowed to split without hassle from Washington. . . . Shouldn't tiny, idyllic Vermont lead the way?"

For more information, visit vermontsovereignty.com. You can order The Vermont Manifesto from: Orders@Xlibris.com or 888/795-4274.

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