Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Marxism as an economic theory failed most as soon as the mewling babe was out of the crib. In a piece    reprinted in the Epoch Times by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation – “The  Coup in Search of a Philosophy” -- Surse Pierpoint tells us: “In 1925, John Maynard Keynes dismissed Marx’s ‘Capital’ as an obsolete economic textbook that no serious economist would still assign. He was not being contrarian. By the time he wrote that, the marginal revolution of the 1870s had already done the intellectual work: Jevons, Menger, Walras, and later Wicksteed, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled the labor theory of value that Marx’s entire economic system rested on. Among economists, the argument was over, and Marx had lost it.”   Henry Ford is reported to have said about history, “History is bunk.” Shortly after Das Capital had been loosed on the world, economic “experts” pronounced Marx’s theory of value -- bunk. In years...

Lamont Governor Ned Lamont’s Democrat Party has been listing left for, some say, 30+ years. Connecticut’s still massive accumulative deficit — the total of all past budget shortfalls as reflected in  Connecticut’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, now topping $49  billion -- began in the 1930s when the General Assembly, now dominated for decades by Democrats, collectively decided the state could live with deficits.   In a brief story on pension debt published in 2023, CTMirror noted, “Connecticut amassed debt between the 1930s and 2010 by failing to save adequately for retirement benefits and by liberal use of its bonding credit card for capital projects… Overall debt across all areas tops $88 billion. Connecticut remains one of the most indebted states, per capita, in the nation, and required annual payments are expected to put extra pressure on state finances well into the 2030s or later.”   The state’s overall debt was reduced during the Lamont admin...

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror notes in a recent story -- Larson lost to a younger challenger. Could Blumenthal face a similar test? – that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is getting on in years. The seventh oldest U.S. Senator, Blumenthal is now 80 and, Pazniokas reminds us, other Democrat political anchorites have recently lost elections in primaries to a new generation of politicians weary of patiently waiting their turn in the political queue.   “Blumenthal is up for reelection in 2028 when he will be 82,” Pazniokas tells us. “He hasn’t confirmed what he’ll do in two years, but he said he’s taking the steps to prepare for another campaign — in the event he runs again.”   “Taking the steps” involves taking in political contributions for an, as yet, unannounced senatorial campaign. This may be politically expedient, and it is perfectly legal, but some political pecksniffs tell us that the practice is immoral, little more than a clever deception. Democrats in politic...

  Roger Sherman Roger Sherman, students of American History will know, was a Connecticut patriot, the only Founding Father of the United States to have signed all four major U.S. founding documents.   Sherman served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. He was a justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and a treasurer of Yale College. An early supporter of American independence, he represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence and helped draft the Articles of Confederation.   Sherman is best known, even among journalists who have not cracked a book on the American founding since their college years, as the author of “The Connecticut Compromise.” The Constitutional Convention was hopelessly deadlocked on a question that had bedeviled patriots since the Roman Republic had been crushed first by Caesar and later by barbarian hoards from the north: In a true Republic, who should decide what should be d...

Not everyone in Connecticut is content with a new bill -- HB 5001, signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last May -- that prohibits, according to Livi Stanford of the Hartford Courant , “law enforcement from being within 250 feet of an election site without permission from state election officials, except in specific narrow exceptions.”   The new law, we are told, “is causing frustration among some police chiefs and lawmakers. Non-compliance with the law is now classified as a Class C felony.” The bill was approved, according to Stanford, “in a straight party line vote with no Republicans voting for the bill.”   Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican who opposed the bill said, “This is a direct shot at law enforcement officers. It’s a direct effect on the municipality because it creates a real problem for police officers to do their job in these locations. Departments across Connecticut can’t fill their ranks, and   some police officials strenuously objected t...

L'État, c'est moi (English:"I am the state") – attributed to King Louis XIV   Some Democrats are beginning to pin the Socialist tail on the donkey. Democrat Party fixture James Carville has threatened to leave the party if it does not soon begin to organize an effective resistance to a rampant socialism. “ Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party,” Carville fumed recently. “One of us is going to leave. It might even be me. If he becomes a voice in the Democratic Party, I’m out. I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.” Democrat U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who appears increasingly to be a party of one, has publicaly protested the American Democratic Socialists (ADA) as a threat to democracy. The party’s official manifesto warmly embraces such eventualities as open borders, the abolition of the US Senate, the popular election of US Supreme Court Justices. One hopes, perhaps in vain, that...