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High Energy Costs, the Law of Supply and Demand, Endless Campaigns, And the Unitary State

Those of us who are economically literate already know how to solve the problem of high energy costs in Connecticut.

 

The cost of any product or service is high when supply is low. Energy prices in Connecticut could instantly be reduced if the largely Democrat General Assembly, in the grip for the last few decades of neo-progressive economic nostrums, were to align public policy with the laws of supply and demand.

 

The law of supply and demand, incidentally, is centuries older than state Senator Martin Looney, 77 years young and considered a neo-progressive fantasist. It is older even than the U.S. Constitution, sometimes referred to as “the law of the land,” a document considered sacrosanct by the U.S. Supreme Court and most political practitioners in Connecticut. It is, in fact, centuries older than Zohran Kwame Mamdani, (born October 18, 1991), the future Democrat governor of New York City, according to recent polls. For the past few weeks, Mamdani has been gyrating between Marxist-socialism and socialism-socialism of a kind practiced in wealth destroying countries like Venezuela, once considered the pearl of Latin America, now a basket case under the socialist administration of Nicolás Maduro Moros, a member of the United Socialist Party (PSUV).

 

In politics, age generally has nothing to do with prudence and wisdom, and socialism is the art of governance by force, which by force displaces both prudence and wisdom in favor of bullets and gulags. Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini were all socialists before they discovered the political utility of force.

 

Like God, the law of supply and demand will not be mocked. In the United States as elsewhere, the law eventually punishes lawbreakers and their largely innocent victims. Once rich, both Cuba under the Castros and Venezuela under Maduro and former President Hugo Chávez, are now welfare clients of socialism, while the masters of both counties are, relatively speaking, rich as Croesus. That is the way of the socialist world, which is the political disease it purports to cure.

 

For decades, socialist Democrats, both nationally and in states where neo-progressivism holds sway, the northeast and California, have hawked “change” from campaign soapboxes without producing much real change in governing coalitions. The enemy of democratic change may well be our endless and seamless political campaigns. Endless political campaigns, we know, give a political edge to incumbents and encourage unnecessary opposition.

 

How so?

 

There are two reasons for advancing legislative bills: 1) to attract votes and aid in campaign financing, and 2) to benefit the whole populace. Number 1) invariably distorts number 2), a distortion that may be remedied by shortening campaigns.

 

The campaign season in Europe, while varying significantly according to types of election and cultural propensities, is circumscribed. In European Parliament elections, the campaign period can range from 12 days in Portugal to 120 days in Latvia and 4 months in Belgium. In the United Kingdom, the campaign period is typically around 25 working days. For the remaining days of the year, politicians focus upon policies that may benefit the public interest rather than divisive party interests.  And the mercifully shortened campaigns actually strengthen political parties over and against individual long-term ambitious politicians who, here in the United States, are valued more for their campaign money generating prowess than their political and intellectual gifts.

 

Here in Connecticut, the one-party state, a political monopoly of Democrats, presents the same difficulties that have long been apparent in all one-party states, such as Russia under the Czars and Stalin’s successors. The Czar sent Dostoyevsky to a Siberian gulag, and Stalin’s successors sent Solzhenitsyn to a reimagined Czarist Gulag. Prison and bullets are the endpoint – indeed, the whole point -- of a politics of force and fear.

 

Of course, there are varying degrees of force and fear arising from the one-party state, but the differences are matters of degree only. The object of the one-party state is to draw all political power to itself and then govern by fear and force. When Mussolini was asked to define his fascist state, he said – “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state,” certainly not William Buckley’s working definition of conservatism. The only thing we have to fear from Buckley’s conservativism are socialists with knives in their brains who wish to destroy every form of independence from a fascist unitary state. Socialists, here and elsewhere, have been working feverishly to establish a unitary state, which is and always will be incompatible with small “r” republican governance.

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