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“Government is force” – George Washington
The waiter at the diner thrusts a finger at a below the fold
story in a Hartford paper, “Hibernating to survive,” and smiles ruefully.
“Have you read that one,” he asks?
The reporter has interviewed Joe Sweeney, whose restaurant,
Pomona Pete’s, is “temporarily closing” for the winter.
“With the cold weather,” Sweeney says, “we no longer have
access to the patio. The colder it got, the headcount started diminishing. Put
that on top of restrictions to be in compliance with the law, and that it still
takes the same amount of labor – we can’t do the sales we need.”
Pomona Pete’s, the paper notes, “is one of about 100 restaurants
statewide that have gone into hibernation,” in anticipation of the return of
fair weather in the spring. Tempered by hope that springs eternal in the human
breast, the story sounds this death knell: “But Pomona Pete’s is not closing
forever, as 600 Connecticut restaurants have done since the COVID-19 put the
whole state on lockdown.”
It is necessary to read between the lines of such stories --
as my wait-server has done -- and notice 1) that a virus cannot impose
regulations that force restaurants to shut down or hibernate; this is the
province exclusively of autocratic politicians wielding undemocratic powers,
and 2) the notion that Pomona Pete’s is not shutting down forever is only a
consummation devoutly to be wished. Among the 600 restaurants closed in
Connecticut owing to regulations enforced by a governor who has been given
plenary powers by a hibernating General Assembly, there must have been a few
restaurant owners who supposed they would not be closing forever.
The wait-server shoots a glance that says – “We know who’s
responsible for these closures, don’t we?” – and points his gloved Coronavirus
free finger at a picture of Connecticut’s governor featured in the paper's lead story,
“Lamont calls for caution, restraint.”
Within five minutes, the breakfast has been put before me.
There are only two wait-staff members in the diner, which in happier days boasted
a wait-staff of about six people, all of them working a full week, but these
two, the residue of Lamont’s executive orders, are among the most efficient
waiters in a state restaurant not yet in hibernation. Some restaurants across the state still
opened are hanging on with their fingernails to a plummeting state economy.
Naturally, those suffering from crippling impositions are
grateful for any help from a compassionate state government. However, somewhere
sloshing around in their minds is the unsettling perception that those helping
them are also responsible for their plight. More and more, compassionate
government officials begin to resemble arsonist firemen who set the fires they
extinguish for their own greater glory.
Connecticut’s economy – suffering for decades from an
indisposition of the General Assembly to cut spending – has been on the
downslope long before Coronavirus persuaded Democrat legislators to adorn
Lamont with the extraordinary plenary
powers he has exercised for a year; the Democrat dominated General Assembly
recently extended Lamont’s autocratic powers an additional four months.
Lamont has consistently asserted that he does not favor new
taxes and wishes to restore normalcy to Connecticut education by reopening schools.
We shall see in the very near future whether his assertions can survive the
polar progressive winds now blowing through the state. As concerns the
reopening of schools, “science” is on Lamont’s side; very likely, elementary
schools never should have been closed. Progressives in Connecticut, a force to
be reckoned with, want what progressives have always wanted – MORE, more taxes and
more spending. More importantly, they do not want to cut costs.
The representatives of state employee unions, relying on contracts
fashioned by Lamont’s predecessor, Dannel Malloy, have on numerous occasions
rejected overtures from Lamont and others to trim some of Connecticut’s contractual
“fixed costs,” which prevents both governors and legislators from utilizing the
full range of their constitutional obligations, the most important of which is
to set a course in which state government lives within affordable means.
The correlation of forces in Connecticut – Democrat dominance
in the legislature, a supine response by the tribunes of the people to destructive
progressive reforms, the flight from the state of people loosely attached to
conservative or libertarian solutions, many of which are simply practical –
does not favor serious restorative solutions to serious problems, both economic
and social.
The opposite of democratic or republican rule is, George
Washington knew, force. The superior numbers of progressives in Connecticut, and
the historic drift of the state from
liberalism to progressivism, means that the governing power may, if it chooses,
govern by force alone, abandoning the foundational notion that governments
receive their authority to govern from the governed, which is to say from the
whole polis and NOT from eccentric intersectional special interests cobbled
together by status and power hungry politicians who have told us, explicitly
and implicitly, they intend to govern athwart the public good of the whole
polis.
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