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| St. Lamont |
While Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt&Whitney and Collins Aerospace, according to a recent story in a Hartford paper. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover.
According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and
pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to
hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes
said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, “as of
September 4, commercial air traffic is down about 45% globally. To save costs,
airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which adversely affects Pratt&Whitney
in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick.
Two questions present themselves: 1) Are the airline
restrictions Governor Ned Lamont deployed in Connecticut at least partly
responsible for the job losses related to a reduction of airline traffic? And
2) Will politicians such as Larson suffer because of these policies?
The answer to 1) is: A policy that discouraged air travel through
the imposition of unusual restrictions – passengers coming from restricted
states were required to self-quarantine for 14 days if they had not submitted
to a Coronavirus test – certainly does not help. And the answer to 2) is:
Nothing short of a nuclear winter in gerrymandered districts such as Larson’s 1st
District and Rosa DeLauro’s 3rd District may interrupt their
political careers, although this year DeLauro, a fashion maven who has spent nearly 40 years at
the Congressional helm, has a worthy opponent in Republican Margaret Streicker.
The Lamont directives are not only unusual; they interrupt normal
business activity, do not provide uniform continuity of political action, may be unconstitutional, and are whimsical and palliative
rather than curative.
The real cure for political action that adversely impacts
entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut – How is any restaurant to survive when
it is being ordered to reduce its seating by half? – is to put a halter on
runaway gubernatorial directives. And this cannot be done in the absence of a
General Assembly that has been put in “park” for the last half year. There are
some faint indications that, at some point down the road -- possibly after the
2020 elections, during which all the seats in the General Assembly will once
again be secure in Democrat hands -- the state may return to some sort of
normalcy. The real threat facing Democrats is not that Coronavirus will mutate
into the Red Death, but rather that Democrats, who have refashioned Connecticut
into a quasi-socialist wonderland, may lose their majority status in both
houses of Connecticut's recumbent General Assembly.
The signs of the times, at least in Connecticut – no longer
the pearl in New England’s crown -- suggest a continuation of ruinous business policies. Connecticut’s General Assembly – more properly a fistful of Democrat
legislators, a rump legislature – has just extended Lamont’s extraordinary
powers by five months. Those powers allow Lamont to open and shut Connecticut’s
entrepreneurial valves at will, and businesses, we know, react with
horror at uncertainty.
We may well ask for whom is this a problem? Qui bono? Who profits by it -- certainly
not representative government? Among Connecticut journalists, only Chris
Powell, for many years the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer, seems to be
troubled by Connecticut’s highly unorthodox political arrangement. Powell suspects
that Democrat government, rather than democratic government, is the principal
beneficiary of the new, now nearly year-long constitutional re-configuration.
The extension of arbitrary gubernatorial directives allow
Democrats to claim hero status at both ends of the politically caused pandemic.
Through the imposition of fickle gubernatorial powers, the governor saves us
from a fate worse than death; and, by calibrating the business closures, he
appears to be saving us from the economic pandemic he and his Democrat
do-nothing compatriots in the General Assembly have caused. The German critic
Karl Krauss once described Freudian psychology as “the disease it purports to
cure.” Similarly, the inscrutable and lawless Lamont business shutdown is the
disease he and other heroic Democrat legislators are now purporting to cure –
by partly opening the businesses they have closed through dubious
constitutional means.
Lamont is not up for reelection in 2020, but all the members
of Connecticut’s General Assembly will be on the political chopping block this
November. So, Lamont is content to take the political thwacks for the time
being; the memories of average Connecticut voters are short-lived, and any
autocratic directive issued by Lamont, both in the recent past and for the
un-foreseeable future, will not bear the fingerprints of Democrat legislators,
many of whom will be left unpunished in the coming elections.
It is doubtful that any directive issued by “King Ned” will
benefit anyone but autocratic politicians. All such directives destroy creative
solutions by restricting normal business decisions to a governor who cannot be
corrected by either the legislative or judicial branches of government. A
deliberative legislature may produce far superior solutions than those forcibly
imposed by Lamont and his close advisors on the entire state, no corner of
which is now represented by members of the General Assembly pretending that
they are doing their jobs. Most recently, the Hartford Symphony has furloughed
all of its musicians; restaurants are closing; the workforce at Pratt&Whitney
will be reduced; principals and superintendents of public schools lack uniform
direction from a government that appears to be operating on the throw of dice;
and at some point down the line an exhausted public, frustrated and powerless,
will turn against its self-appointed benefactors.
There are two incalculable benefits in hitting bottom: 1)
the bottom marks the end of the downward fall, and 2) those who hit bottom know
that the way up lies in an opposite direction.
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