Mormon Tycoon Wants to Build Mega-Utopia in Vermont
As a very active member of the LDS (Mormon) faith (former Missionary, active weekly attender, holder of a volunteer calling, etc), as a person who lives in Utah, and as someone with business and investment experience, I&#x27;ll give a few thoughts. You can take them for what they are worth knowing my background.<p>First of all, in my area, people who talk like Mr. Hall generally scare the daylights out of us. I work with some rather wealthy Mormon investors (Peterson&#x27;s, Sorenson&#x27;s, Marriott&#x27;s, Romney&#x27;s) in a technical capacity and I have never run into Mr. Hall. But I have met plenty of people who believe they are resurrecting some idea from Joseph Smith. They generally use these sorts of ideological fallacies to attempt to extract investment money from well meaning but less than experienced middle class Mormon &quot;investors&quot; (read: retirees with 401k&#x27;s and pensions). It&#x27;s sad but in Utah one of the best places to find a crook or a fraud is in your church congregation.<p>Second, there was a time early in church history when Mormon&#x27;s had a really hard time finding a safe place to live. There are a few reasons for this (in the world according to me, again take it with a grain of salt). In the early days of the church, Mormon&#x27;s would ALL move together. Look at Nauvoo, IL, as a good example. It started out as a single road village that was in essentially the swamp lands along the Mississippi River and in no time grew to tens of thousands of people who all thought very similar to one another, and more importantly controlled politics together. That had to be scary for the residents of villages, counties, and states that we would move into. So people fought back against the Mormons. Of course there were also some horrible massacres against Mormons [1] [2]. Nevertheless, moving together, planning communities, and sustaining ourselves was a big deal at the time.<p>Now, things have changed. The church actively teaches that you are to build up the church community where you are. You are to participate in local and national politics according to your own conscious and education. We should not all gather in one spot but help in our communities bother civicly and religiously. I have not heard a Church leader in public or private in my lifetime even hint at the idea of moving together to a planned community or &quot;Utopia&quot;.<p>One final note. Mormon&#x27;s (myself included) are generally very conservative. There is no doubt about that. With that, one of the things that really stuck out in the article was this idea that anyone moving to this community would give up all they had for the greater good in some communist style ownership and profit sharing scheme. That is nearly laughable. Many of the more wealthy church members I know are generous and knowledgable philanthropists but they are not going to suddenly wake up and say &quot;A ha! A scroll from Joseph Smith which says we should make planned communities and turn over all of our wealth to said community!&quot; [3] Mormon&#x27;s are conservative and often unapologetic capitalists.<p>This is either someones delusion or someones horrible scam.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Haun's_Mill_massacre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Haun's_Mill_massacre</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Missouri_Executive_Order_44" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Missouri_Executive_Order_44</a><p>[3] Yes there is some historical precedence for a communistic Mormon idea called the United Order, aka the United Order of Enoch, which is honestly where some of Mr. Hall&#x27;s ideas came from. There are some within the Church who believes we will at some point live in this way. The idea is well outside of the scope of my comment here and suffice it to say, the United Order cannot be overseen by some random guy who read a document in a library.