“No man's life,
liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session”― Mark
Twain
And the legislative session is now opened for business.
An item in a state-wide newspaper notes on its front page
the “Key Issues” the Democratic controlled legislature in Connecticut will be
addressing in its short session. The short session -- less wearing on life,
property and liberty than the General Assembly’s long session – mercifully will end in 4 months, at which point the ghost of Mr. Twain may remain untroubled
until the long session begins.
Key Issues during the short session will include, according
to the paper: “Minimum Wage: proposed increase to $10.10 – Assisted Suicide:
Whether doctors may prescribe a lethal dose of medication to terminally ill
patients – Puppy Mills: Proposal to require new pet shops to sell only rescue
and shelter animals.”
Curbs on spending are not among the items listed that the
General Assembly will be addressing in its short session.
Connecticut Commentary has already pointed out the pitfalls of the proposed minimum wage legislation,
among which are: The legislatively mandated labor cost increase will seriously
distort wage scales, increase unemployment and fall like a ton of bricks on the
shoulders of the poor.
The proposed Puppy Mill legislation appears, on the face of
it, to be a humane measure. However, a bill that taxes puppy mills much in the
way Connecticut taxes tobacco products and at the same time frees from any
taxation all business or organizations that rehabilitate and sell to the public
mistreated animals would address animal welfare far more effectively. The
reason such bills are rarely proposed is because they require politicians to
sacrifice tax receipts.
It remains doubtful whether a legislature may
constitutionally require a business to sell a specific product. Vested with
such an authority, there is not a business in Connecticut that would not be
marching on the State Capitol to press legislators for equal treatment.
To take but one example in thousands: One might expect the largest maker of tires
in the country to flood Connecticut’s General Assembly with lobbyists, there to
press relevant Democratic committee members to favor them with a bill
preventing all tire distributors in the state from selling any product but their
own; it goes without saying, of course, that these petitioners would be very
generous to obliging legislators come campaign season. Short sessions are much
too short to entertain such a massive increase in legislative business. And
then too, the Supreme Court has been less than clear on the issue of the forced
selling and purchasing of products by crony capitalists who in consequence specialize
in purchasing legislators.
One can only imagine what lightning bolts Mr. Twain might have hurled at the General
Assembly of his day had legislators seriously entertained the passage of a bill
that would have required cigar makers to sell Mr. Twain only one brand of cigar. At the mere intimation of such an immoral
restriction, Mr. Twain’s pen, dipped in the fires of Hell, would have scorched
the impudent backsides of those intent on depriving him of his property and
liberty.
Mr. Twain’s taste in
cigars required a varied choice of products:
“At last it occurred to me that
something was lacking in the Havana cigar. It did not quite fulfill my youthful
anticipations. I experimented. I bought what was called a seed-leaf cigar with
a Connecticut wrapper. After a while I became satiated of these, and I
searched for something else. The Pittsburgh stogy was recommended to me. It
certainly had the merit of cheapness, if that be a merit in tobacco, and I
experimented with the stogy. Then, once more, I changed off, so that I might
acquire the subtler flavor of the Wheeling toby. Now that palled, and I looked
around New York in the hope of finding cigars which would seem to most people
vile, but which, I am sure, would be ambrosial to me. I couldn't find any.”
Connecticut continues to produce high quality wrappers, but
it also has produced Dick Blumenthal, whose suit while Attorney General against
Big Tobacco had helped to make Connecticut’s Tobacco Valley into a much reduced
backyard patch of ground. As soon as Mr. Blumenthal figures out how he might
tax into oblivion the harmless vapors expelled by those of his constituents who
choose to “smoke” electronic “cigarettes”, this promising industry – which, by
supplanting cancer causing, real tobacco products, very likely may reduce
tobacco tax dollars flowing into Connecticut’s bursting revenue streams – will
vanish like a puff of smoke, done to death by solicitous, tax hungry
politicians.
Mr. Twain, who valued the right word as against a word that
was almost right – “The difference between the almost right word and the right
word is really a large matter: It's the difference between the lightning
bug and the lightning” – certainly would have quarreled energetically with
the expression “assisted suicide.”
In a suicide, the corpse and the corpse maker are one and
the same person. The word is derived from the Latin suicidium: sui “of oneself” + cidium
“a killing.” In Anglo-Latin, the term for “one who commits suicide” was felo-de-se, literally “one guilty
concerning himself.” Just as soon as a second person is involved in the
killing, a bar is passed from suicide to either manslaughter or murder. Both
the man upon whom “suicide” had been committed and his “assistant” participate in
guilt.
Such truthful plain-speech, careful never to violate the
language, does create difficulties for obscurantist, oleaginous politicians
whom Twain – How he is missed! – would have poked mercilessly with his pen
fired up in Hell or, better still, with a shattering lightning bolt, about
which Mr. Twain in an essay “on The Weather” once wrote, “The lightning there
(Hartford?) is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing
it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell
whether -- Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had
been there.”
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