Chris Powell: A clearer view of Aetna's travel plans
Aetna's current headquarters, in Hartford.
Aetna's supposed departure from Hartford may be recorded as the signature humiliation of Gov. Dannel Malloy's administration, the capstone of the last decade of Connecticut's decline. At least the governor's political opponents will portray it that way.
But they will be wrong, for several reasons. First, the company really doesn't plan to leave Hartford but rather to relocate its top executives. Most of the company's nearly 6,000 employees in Hartford are expected to remain.
Second, the move seems mainly a matter of the personal preference of Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, who has no particular affection for Connecticut.
Third, the assertion by some "experts" that Aetna wants to attract young workers by being based in a livelier city is nonsense. For the top executives Aetna will be relocating will not be hipsters. Young workers don't start at the top.
More likely Aetna's top executives would like to be big fish in a big pond rather than in a small one.
Fourth, even those who deplore the corporate welfare of the Malloy administration can't deny that the governor was ready to do nearly anything to induce Aetna to stay, starting with his promise to match any financial incentives offered to Aetna by any other state.
That the company declined to pursue the governor's offer suggests that its decision has little to do with business climate, taxes, workforce skills, or anything else under state government's control. Commenting on Aetna's plans, the governor said, "Hartford is not ever going to be New York or Boston. And that's fine." Fine? He might have said, "Thank God!"
Of course those cities have their virtues, but congestion, noise, pollution and being prime targets for terrorism aren't among them. Connecticut is close enough to those cities to use them any time but conveniently set apart enough so that there is space for the reflection and privacy without which life provides little comfort and sense.
"The Connecticut countryside," the historian and sometime politician Odell Shepard wrote in 1939, "seldom obviously picturesque, has been made by long collaboration between earth and man. It is saturated with humanity. Vermont has far more landscape to the square mile but we mix more people with the view.
"This little place of ours is homely, used, and worn, like a weather-beaten homespun coat that has often been patched and turned. Or it is like some wise old face written with character and wrinkled deep in time.
"Jonathan Edwards it was, I think, who defined a certain sort of beauty as ‘the visible fitness of a thing to its use,' like the exact adjustment of a mortise to its tenon.
"That is what we have here -- a beauty homemade and blood-warm, moderate, honest, and utterly our own. There is no glozing and seductive glamour about it, no mirage of a fairer land than earth affords. It renders the sober truth of things, no more."
The sober truth of things today is that Connecticut indeed is in danger but not particularly because of Aetna's departure or anyone else's. Instead the state's decline is a consequence of the corruption brought about by its former prosperity, which caused elected officials to think that they could not just appease every selfish or unproductive special interest but also lock that appeasement into perpetuity by contract, nullifying democracy for all time. That's not a natural disaster but a political one, and it has a remedy: a revival of civic virtue.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer ,in Manchester, Conn.