Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” – Anatole France. Connecticut must reduce business costs in the next decade. A failure to do so will reinforce the status quo : business flight from Connecticut to more business-friendly states, resulting in fewer jobs and less revenue pouring into the state treasury -- which, as we know from bitter experience, produces budget deficits. The deficits, in their turn, lead inescapably to higher taxes or cuts in services to the state’s most needy recipients of state aid. We live in a state in which politicians captured by special interests are less concerned with the poor who live under bridges than they are with securing the votes of far richer political activists who can turn them in and out of office.

When the convention that gave birth to the U.S. Constitution had finished its work, the great charter of liberties was left on a table so that the founders of the Republic might, if they wished, sign their names to it. Ben Franklin had earlier warned his band of revolutionary brothers that if they did not hang together they would of a certainty “hang separately.” And he was not playing with metaphors. Had the agents of King George captured George Washington or any of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence, the father of our country most certainly would have been hanged, even as Nathan Hale, Connecticut’s Hero and one of Mr. Washington’s spies in New York, was hanged without benefit of trial. Mr. Hale, a school teacher, repented that he had but one life to give for his country. John Hancock’s large and audacious signature, a defy that resounds through the years like a great shout of joy, leaps out of the Declaration of Independence five years before Lord Cornwallis sur...