Emerson, anticipating Darwin, said that to become perfect is
to have changed often. But there are, in human affairs, two kinds of change,
one leading to perfection and the other to social perdition.
To take one example at random, the revolutionary changes
introduced in the late 19th century by Karl Marx and other
socialist/communists did not lead to social perfection. They led to enforced
conformity and the totalitarian menace both in Germany and Russia, and the
principal beneficiaries of the revolutionary changes was the totalist state.
The vanguard of the proletariat in Russia made out like
bandits because they were bandits. The communist party
vanguard had their dachas, the proletariat their cramped living spaces, food
stores with empty shelves, low paying jobs, and the vast gulag described in
painful detail by Alexander Solzhenitsyn which, with open ragged jaws, awaited
anyone who presumed to question the undemocratic, plenary powers of a Stalinist,
socialist-communist state.
Stalin died in his bed. Upwards of 8 million victims of
Stalin’s Four Year Plan, the precursor to Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward,
died in Ukraine and the Caucasus of starvation imposed upon them by the
principal atheistic savior of the proletariat.
At a minimum, these reversals of socialist-communist
optimism mean that progress sometimes progresses backwards – c.f. the dark ages
that followed the sack of Rome in 410 AD -- and historic change is a sometimes
strumpet, disappointing us in its methods and morals.
Sara Bronin, the wife of Hartford mayor Luke Bronin, once
former Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief council, is none of these things. She is
not a socialist, nor a Stalinist , nor a strumpet. She is, in fact, an
energetic lawyer and change-agent who has invested a great deal of personal energy
thinking about cities, suburbs, poverty and forced, as opposed to organic,
change.
A recent story in a Hartford paper that covers numerous
State House bills underwritten by Sara Bronin and nameless university students is
ponderously titled “Connecticut is divided into largely white
suburbs and cities where more people of color live. Here’s how advocates want
to rewrite local zoning rules to change that.”
The reader needn’t bother to click on the above link, hoping
he or she will be transported to the paper’s story. These days, newspaper links
carry us to advertisements that tell us we may have access to press stories if
we open a subscription to the paper. It’s all about money, not messaging, we all
understand. Like many of the urban poor in Hartford, papers are now destitute.
And really, the owners of papers know, to quote libertarian economist Milton
Freedman, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” If papers offer “free”
content on the web, how will they pay their ever dwindling staffs?
Mayor Luke Bronin of Hartford, Sara’s husband, needs money.
Hartford, we are invited to believe, is revenue poor and rich in very costly
poor people. Rarely does anyone venture to think that Connecticut’s cities are
underfinanced because their politicians are addicted to overspending. The city may reduce the cost it expends
servicing both the poor and suburbanites who make use of its untaxable property
– hospitals, schools, state welfare facilities and the like – by facilitating
the transference of poor urban dwellers to comparatively richer suburbs, were
it not for zoning regulations written apparently by devilishly rich
suburbanites to keep the urban poor locked in gold-gilded dependent cages.
If the state, rather than municipalities, were able to shape
zoning policy, many urban problems would be solved, and Connecticut could
congratulate itself for having reduced “social inequities,” along with the widest
rich-poor gap in the nation; such is the thinking among progressive redistributists and social reformers.
The resulting urban cost savings would then render it
unnecessary for Sara Brodin’s husband to pass his tin cup to a Democrat
Governor of Connecticut in order to balance Hartford’s budget. Before former
Governor Dannel Malloy shook the dirt of Connecticut from his feet and headed north
to accept a job as Maine’s chancellor of higher education, Malloy gifted his
former chief council with about half a billion dollars, the bulk of it coming
from suburbanites, which was used by Bronin to balance his budget and, it goes
without saying, to win reelection as Hartford’s Mayor.
So, municipal zoning must be wrested from the hands of
democratically elected town officials and placed temporarily into the
redistributist hands of progressive Democrats in Connecticut’s General
Assembly, who may, as frequently happens in Connecticut, wash their hands of specific
and future zoning demands by renting out their legislative authority to some
unelected, administrative commission overseeing sanctions. Legislative demands
cannot be enforced without sanctions. What such sanctions may be imposed on municipalities
that resist Sara Brodin’s zoning reforms are not evident in any reporting
concerning Sara Bronin’s “Absurd Effort To Make The World Over”, the title of
an essay written by William Graham Sumner, no friend of utopianists , who noted
ominously in the mid 1800s, “The first instinct of the modern man is to get a
law passed to forbid or prevent what, in
his wisdom, he disapproves.”
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