The good news is that Bain Capital, associated with
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was not asked by the owners of Deco
Products of Iowa to intervene and streamline its processes at a time when the
company was suffering business losses. Deco has for more than six decades been
in the family of Elizabeth Esty, a Democrat in true blue Connecticut running
for the U.S. Congress in the 5th District. The further good news is
that, owing to a mishap involving the FBI in Chris Donovan’s campaign for the
same position, Ms. Esty prevailed over Mr. Donovan in a democratic primary.
Mr. Donovan’s
political parts were assembled in a union hall. One can only imagine what hash
he would have made of Mrs. Esty had it been known during the Democratic primary
that Mrs. Esty is the beneficiary of a family owned company that, way back in
2009 when times were tough, laid off 53 of about 225 NON UNIONIZED workers.
According to a news report, “Esty received between $35,000 and
$115,000 in 'partnership income' during 2011 – and between $15,000
and $45,000 in the first four months of 2012 – through her role in a family
partnership connected with Deco Products Co. The zinc die-cast manufacturing
plant was co-founded by her grandfather some 60 years ago in the northeastern
Iowa town of Decorah.”
In the kindergarten of quasi-socialist progressive Democrats
here in Connecticut, -- some of whom, such as Democratic contender for the U.S.
Senate Chris Murphy, receive their marching orders from Washington D.C. via
President Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign operation -- Mrs. Esty occasionally
stands out as the lonely grownup.
To survive as a corporate entity in a competitive business
environment, a company sometimes is forced to let go workers during business
slowdowns. A business that always draws breath in and never lets it out is
fated to explode. A business that does not year after year make a profit –
which it then uses in part to improve its product, deepen its market share and
thus provide additional jobs, salaries and benefits to more workers, not to
mention additional taxes to state and federal governments -- will soon be measured
for the coffin. All grownups know this. And although a particular worker may
nightly envision his or her boss hanging on a hook in the fourth circle of
Dante’s Hell, where Plutus, the wolf like demon of wealth holds court, the
worker never-the-less is happy to have a job, earn a salary, put bread on his
or her table, and rejoice that he or she does not live in present day Greece
amid the fire and brimstone of “social unrest.”
In made in
Washington Democratic campaign rhetoric, profits are the first deadly sin. The
second deadly sin is independence from overseers in Washington D.C., the tax
and spending capital of the Beltway Empire that, having deprived private
enterprise of its profits and weakened the vitality of corporations through a
massive regulatory apparatus, then proceeds to direct company’s business
activities though regulatory wavers and aid in the form of tax credits to their
preferred crony capitalists. Grownups and some few reporters and editors
familiar with a 20th century full of autocratic regimes know very
well where such command economies end up. German and Italian fascism and Soviet
communism, all centrally directed authoritarian political structures, were
eventually tossed on the ash heap of history for reasons best summarized by the
Iron Lady of Britain, Margaret Thatcher: “The trouble with socialism (i.e.
command economies) is that, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s
money.”
Greece, Spain, Italy
and other Western countries already have run out of other people’s money. In much
of Europe, deeply flawed, democratically elected governments have been replaced
by anti-nationalist eurocratic technicians now in the process of dismantling
both democratic governments and quasi-socialist policies that have gone broke
for reasons eloquently stated by Mrs. Thatcher.
Here in the United
State -- and perhaps most especially in true blue Connecticut -- the Democratic
Party seems fated to repeat lessons unlearned from the European theatre. If the
nation and Connecticut continues to spend its way into poverty by means
discredited in Europe, it must go the way of Europe. Who chooses the means
chooses the ends, a proposition that not even the most eloquent of our quasi
socialistic, authoritarian, democratically elected pied pipers may rationally
dispute.
Unfortunately for
Connecticut and much of New England, a rational discussion of economic do’s and
don’ts is rarely permitted in campaign debates, and the lessons of Europe, now visible
under our noses, remain unheeded and unaddressed. There are no Maggie Thatchers
anywhere in Connecticut. Mrs. Esty hardly comes close, but she is that rarest
of all Democratic birds of paradise, a moderate Democrat, a breed of political
animal long thought to have been extinct in the state.
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