Connecticut’s General Assembly biennial session has ended. Conservatives and right of center moderates in the state will be put in mind of Gideon Tucker’s quip: “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.”
Connecticut voters, too many of whom have left the state for
greener pastures elsewhere, have long understood the inverse connection between
taxes, state regulations and a vibrant economy. Just as wide awake voters know
that a tariff is a hidden tax on consumption, so the same voters know that a
regulation is a tax and a drag on productivity. Profits and creative business
development are casually linked. When business profits are drained off by taxes
and regulations, creativity, the lifeblood of successful business enterprise,
is curtailed.
Voters also know that whatever you tax tends to disappear.
If you raise the tax on millionaires – the so called “idle rich” progressive
politicians intend to plunder to pay for their improvident and reckless
spending -- millionaires will disappear. And the same is true of business
opportunities.
Legislative bills are called bills for a good reason.
Someone, most often middle class taxpayers, must eventually pay the bills. The federal
income tax, it may be recalled, was first introduced as a means by which
“millionaires” of the post-Civil War period might discharge the nation’s war
debt. The millionaires’ tax quickly was extended to non-millionaires. Today,
federal and state taxes, rising costs, inflation and stagnant wages have
considerably decreased the marginal assets of Connecticut’s working class. Over
the years, private budgets have increasingly been reduced by all four culprits
mentioned above.
Deficit spending kills both productivity and marketplace
creativity. Taxes and regulations do the same.
We’ve known for decades that the predictable consequences of
a one-party state present disruptive cultural and economic problems.
The one party state historically has been the oppressive anti-democratic
state: the monarchical state of French King Louis XVI before he lost his head to
the guillotine; the anti-republican Roman state of Julius Caesar before he was
assassinated; and the failed socialist/communist/fascist states of Joseph
Stalin in Russia, Adolf Hitler in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy and Mao
Zedong in China. Asked to define fascism, Mussolini summed up the fascist
doctrine this way: Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
above the state, hardly a conservative or libertarian rubric. And an autocratic
state needs a single party to effectuate its rule.
The difficulty with the single party state is not that it
cannot do certain things. Just the opposite is true. The chief difficulty of
the one party state is that, in the absence of practical opposition, it may do everything
it pleases.
"If God does not exist, anything is permissible"
Ivan tells us in Feodor Dostoyevsky novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” In a
unitary state, anything is permissible.
This was not regarded as a difficulty by the most powerful
autocrats of the 20th century, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Mao.
They were content to dispense with republican political forms that limited the
scope of state power, such as an independent congress, a politically
disinterested judiciary and a working constitution. Along with the Sun King,
all four 20th century autocrats could truly say “L'État, c'est moi (I
am the state),” and the single party, of course, is the administrative arm of the
unitary state, ultimately serving at the will of a single party leader – or,
perhaps worse, at the behest of a single party caucus.
The real danger of the single party state is that its leader
or leaders become, in the absence of an active and corrective opposition, the
political equivalent of secular gods, the ultimate anti-democratic arbiters of
the public good.
For all practical purposes, Connecticut has been a one part
state for the past three decades. Democrats now control the governorship, the
General Assembly, and the judiciary, all or nearly all the state Supreme Court
justices having been selected by Democrat Party leaders and the governor. In
addition, Democrats control all the state’s constitutional offices, such as the
office of Attorney General. Before moving into the U.S. Congress, Dick
Blumenthal had held the office for two decades. His predecessor, U.S. Senator
Joe Lieberman was Attorney General for six years. Some believe current occupant
William Tong is readying himself for a U.S. senatorial bid should one of the
two U.S. senatorial offices fall vacant, whether through accident or design.
For the past fifty years, Democrats have controlled
Connecticut’s larger cities, and the cities have become political welfare
dependents of the dominant party. While complaining volubly for the last few
decades that state Republicans have turned a cold eye to the constitutional
separation of powers, state Democrats presently are hotly pursuing a municipal
power grab that would make cities and towns more not less dependent upon
Connecticut’s single party state. The attack on a historical separation of
state and municipal powers is a project of the single party state nearing
completion.
State Republicans have objected vociferously to the
centralization of political power as offensive to both democratic and
republican principles, but objections, it should be plain to everyone by now –
even to co-opted news people – can have
no practical effect in a one party state.
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