Vermont Business Magazine America’s fragile environment is in danger; her social fabric is unraveling. One man believes that Vermont offers the country a way to avoid catastrophe. Retired business executive Will Patten places the blame for our dire condition on the supply-side economics experiment that for 40+ years has encouraged a singular focus on maximizing corporate profits without considering the impacts on natural and human resources.
In his book, Rescuing Capitalism, Vermont Shows a Way, Patten recounts that Vermont has never participated in the supply-side experiment. Instead, Vermont businesses have been thriving financially while innovating solutions to our social and environmental problems. He describes a democratic capitalism that still exists in Vermont, a fractious balance between public and private interests that existed in America before the advent of “Reaganomics.”
Over his 50-year career, Patten has worked with companies that promote and protect the common good. That is the capitalism he wants to rescue from the misguided supply-side experiment.
He tells the stories of dozens of Vermont businesses, both manufacturers and farmers, that are innovating solutions to our national dilemma. Now, he concludes, only capitalism, once rescued, has the agility, scale, resources, and motivation to prevent human extinction.
The book will be available at local bookstores, bookshop.org and at rescuingcapitalism.com.
About Will Patten:
I grew up in a hardscrabble town in Rutland County working for side-hill dairy farmers who were trying to support a family milking 30 head. And I laughed at the notion that Vermont was in any way special, even as flatlanders started buying up the run-down farms.
Today, after a 50-year career in business, I know that Vermont is indeed different. A very good kind of different. My business career had an awkward start. I graduated from a conservative all-male university in 1967 and was accepted into a doctoral program in history at the University of California. When I arrived in Berkeley that summer there was a lot going on.
Some called it “The Summer of Love” but I recognized it as a social revolution. I decided that I would much rather make history than study it. I fought for civil rights and women’s rights, and against the war in Vietnam and the giant corporations that I thought were ruining our country. Big business was my enemy. But I really missed Vermont and the rhythm of her seasons.
So, after three years in California, I came back home and looked for ways to keep the revolution alive. In 1970 in Rutland that was difficult. But I knew that a lot of “revolutionaries” were moving to Vermont, living in the hills. So, I started a natural foods café as a gathering place where we could all share our radical ideas.
In other words, I became the enemy: a businessman. But I was using that business to bring about positive social change. Not surprisingly, some years later, I hooked up with a couple of guys in Burlington that were doing the same thing with ice cream.
I retired from Ben & Jerry’s in 2007 as Director of Retail Operations overseeing more than 500 scoop shops in a dozen countries. All of them agents of social change. Then I quickly unretired to work for Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility and then unretired again to open a community-supported restaurant in Hinesburg because the town needed another gathering place. I came full circle.
And soon after I had planned my retirement from the Hinesburgh Public House in 2022, I was asked to write a book about Vermont’s unique business community. And two and a half years later, here it is.
When I was working at Ben & Jerry’s there was an oft-quoted slogan that said, “No Margin; No Mission.” We knew that if we didn’t generate profits, we wouldn’t have the means to advance our social mission. So, we ran a profitable business and made the world a better place. That is the capitalism we need to rescue. It is the only force with the agility, scale, resources, and motivation to prevent our extinction.