It took a while, but Connecticut is now lying prostrate on
its back, thrashing about and gasping for air.
Those who have not fled the state in search of more
propitious business circumstances elsewhere remember a time when Connecticut
was a magnet for companies that provided high paying jobs and, not
incidentally, a rich source of revenue that kept the wolves – other ambitious
states that seek to lure Connecticut companies to their own lairs – at bay.
It seems only yesterday that former Governor Lowell Weicker,
attending a function at the Hartford Club, clutched his head
in his hands, when shown a graph that depicted Connecticut’s disappearing
surpluses, and moaned loudly, “Where did it all go?”
An elderly, elegant looking businesswoman seated beside me
whispered, though not loud enough for the father of Connecticut’s income tax to
hear, “They spent it, you ninny!”
Only recently has Governor Dannel Malloy, author of the two
largest tax increases in Connecticut’s history, discovered the necessary causal
connection between excessive government spending and deficits. They are Siamese
twins. The state has not been well served by its ninnies.
A severe drop in the state’s revenue streams, business
flight to other states – the embarrassment of being the only state in the union
not yet to have recovered from a spending binge recession, the longest in
post-World War II history, which officially ended, according to the authoritative New York Times, seven years ago -- and the approach of an election
that may, some suppose, erode Democratic hegemony in Connecticut’s spendthrift
General Assembly have convinced Mr. Malloy, if only temporarily, that
Connecticut must attack its spending problem.
At the end of August, the Yankee Institute, which regularly
provides common sense elixir for what ails the state, will be marking, with a
brunch at the Stamford Sheraton Hotel, the “25th Anniversary of the
Connecticut Income Tax." It is doubtful that Mr. Weicker will be in attendance but
altogether appropriate that the event will be held in Stamford, Mr. Malloy’s
old stomping grounds when he was Mayor of the city from 1995 to 2009. “In
addition to [guest speaker] Grover Norquist, founder and President of Americans
for Tax Reform,” a brochure advises, “we will feature guests who fought to
defeat the income tax in 1991,” the politically outnumbered, battle scared
warriors for prosperity who were not able, 25 years ago, to turn back the
forces of darkness and ruin.
All this is, as the progressives like to say, old hat.
Certain that the future belongs to tradition-denying, bold, populist reformers,
progressives have been in the habit of dismissing as outmoded anything and
everything that precedes their own birth dates.
A partial listing of outmoded
institutions would include: orthodox
family structures, authoritative religious pronouncements from pulpits,
educational institutions in which teachers teach students necessary subjects, previously
honored Constitutional provisions, along with such liberty shielding amendments as may impede the forward progress
of progressives, politicians who in happier times attempted to represent the
general good rather than special interests, modesty in women, courage in men,
restrooms that appropriately segregate women from men, livable cities in which
children do not shoot-up children with weapons NOT bought at the local gun
store, and much more, which for space reasons must here remain uncatalogued.
The future, as most progressives will acknowledge, is made
in the smithy of the present. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say
that nothing done by progressives for the past few years in Connecticut has
worked -- because their campaigns have worked. Progressive campaigns invoke the
creation of a super-state that in effect oversees every function once ably
performed by what G. K. Chesterton used to call, approvingly, the little
platoons of democracy: the family, the neighborhood, the church, voluntary
civic organizations, effective teaching institutions and vibrant,
self-directing municipal governments. All top-down authoritarian government
sucks democracy from the marrow of every other competing institution.
Historically, where authoritarian regimes have been most successful, the people
over whom comfortable rulers maintain their intolerant sway have been deprived
of basic human liberties.
In Venezuela, a failed socialist state, people are no longer
free to use highly inflated currency to purchase the necessities of life.
Grocery store shelves are empty, stomachs are empty, and toilet paper is as
rare as the fulfilled extravagant promises of socialist saints and well-fed
millionaires such as Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, a “president” who has been
ruling by decree for most of his term in office and whose sole support is the
Venezuelan military. Mr. Maduro’s latest decree forces the citizens of the country to work on farms to counter the increasing poverty and food shortages caused by his
socialist policies.
Connecticut is not yet Venezuela; that’s the good news. Citizens
of Connecticut have yet to awaken and throw out of office their anti-democratic
political rulers; that’s the bad news.
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