Don Pesci: The coronavirus, King Ned and the Conn. economy
VERNON, Conn.
While Connecticut’s Democratic-dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures that it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover.
According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, as of Sept. 4, commercial air traffic was down about 45 percent globally. To save costs, airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which hurts Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick.
Two questions present themselves: 1) Are the airline restrictions that Gov. Ned Lamont deployed in Connecticut at least partly responsible for the job losses related to a reduction of airline traffic? And 2) Will politicians such as Larson suffer because of these policies?
The answer to 1) is: A policy that discouraged air travel through the imposition of unusual restrictions – passengers coming from restricted states were required to self-quarantine for 14 days if they had not submitted to a Coronavirus test – certainly does not help. And the answer to 2) is: Nothing short of a nuclear winter in gerrymandered districts such as Larson’s 1st District and Rosa DeLauro’s 3rd District may interrupt their political careers, although this year DeLauro, a fashion maven who has spent nearly 40 years in Congress, has a worthy opponent in Republican Margaret Streicker.
The Lamont directives are not only unusual; they interrupt normal business activity, do not provide uniform continuity of political action, may be unconstitutional, and are whimsical and palliative rather than curative.
The real cure for political action that hurts entrepreneurial activity in Connecticut – how is any restaurant to survive when it is being ordered to reduce its seating by half? – is to put a halter on runaway gubernatorial directives. And this cannot be done in the absence of a General Assembly that has been put in “park” for the last half year. There are some faint indications that, at some point down the road -- possibly after the 2020 elections, during which all the seats in the General Assembly will once again be secure in Democratic hands -- the state may return to some sort of normalcy. The real threat facing Democrats is not that the Coronavirus will mutate into the Red Death, but rather that Democrats, who have refashioned Connecticut into a quasi-socialist wonderland, may lose their majority status in both houses of Connecticut's recumbent General Assembly.
The signs of the times, at least in Connecticut – no longer the pearl in New England’s crown -- suggest a continuation of ruinous business policies. Connecticut’s General Assembly – more properly a fistful of Democratic legislators, a rump legislature – has just extended Lamont’s extraordinary powers by five months. Those powers allow Lamont to open and shut Connecticut’s entrepreneurial valves at will, and businesses, we know, react with horror at uncertainty.
We may well ask for whom is this a problem? Qui bono? Who profits by it -- certainly not representative government? Among Connecticut journalists, only Chris Powell, for many years the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, seems to be troubled by Connecticut’s highly unorthodox political arrangement. Powell suspects that Democratic-run government, rather than democratic government, is the principal beneficiary of the new, now nearly year-long constitutional re-configuration.
The extension of arbitrary gubernatorial directives allow Democrats to claim hero status at both ends of the politically caused pandemic. Through the imposition of fickle gubernatorial powers, the governor saves us from a fate worse than death; and, by calibrating the business closures, he appears to be saving us from the economic pandemic he and his Democrat do-nothing compatriots in the General Assembly have caused. The German critic Karl Krauss once described Freudian psychology as “the disease it purports to cure.” Similarly, the inscrutable and lawless Lamont business shutdown is the disease he and other heroic Democrat legislators are now purporting to cure – by partly opening the businesses they have closed through dubious constitutional means.
Lamont is not up for re-election in 2020, but all the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly will be on the political chopping block next month.. So Lamont is content to take the political thwacks for the time being; the memories of average Connecticut voters are short-lived, and any autocratic directive issued by Lamont, both in the recent past and for the un-foreseeable future, will not bear the fingerprints of Democrat legislators, many of whom will be left unpunished in the coming elections.
It is doubtful that any directive issued by “King Ned” will benefit anyone but autocratic politicians. All such directives destroy creative solutions by restricting normal business decisions to a governor who cannot be corrected by either the legislative or judicial branches of government. A deliberative legislature may produce far superior solutions than those forcibly imposed by Lamont and his close advisers on the entire state, no corner of which is now represented by members of the General Assembly pretending that they are doing their jobs.
Most recently, the Hartford Symphony has furloughed all of its musicians; restaurants are closing; the workforce at Pratt & Whitney will be reduced; principals and superintendents of public schools lack uniform direction from a government that appears to be operating on the throw of dice; and at some point down the line an exhausted public, frustrated and powerless, will turn against its self-appointed benefactors.
There are two incalculable benefits in hitting bottom: 1) the bottom marks the end of the downward fall, and 2) those who hit bottom know that the way up lies in an opposite direction.