By Chris Powell
Connecticut state government is about to spend another $30 million pursuing another mistaken premise. The money will go for “hero pay,” grants of as much as $1,000 to people in “essential” occupations in the private sector who stayed on the job during the worst of the recent virus epidemic when much of the state’s economy was closed by government order or a decline in business.
People who are eligible for “hero pay” were indeed essential, and many were unsung — especially supermarket employees, none of whom are close to as well-compensated as the many government employees who worked (or didn’t work much) from home and never lost a cent from their paychecks.
But these essential workers needed their jobs just as much as the people who were thrown out of work by the epidemic. So the essential workers were already fortunate to be allowed to stay at work — already rewarded by government policy when so many others suffered from it. There is no special justice in paying people bonuses because they were able to stay at work. They would have suffered more if, like many others, they had lost work.
The “hero pay” program is mainly another mechanism of political patronage in an election year, facilitated by the billions of dollars in emergency federal aid given to state government. Indeed, “hero pay” is a part of where the country’s catastrophic inflation is coming from.
But as the Babylon Bee jokes, the government will keep sending money to everyone until inflation is beaten.
* * *
VINDICATION FROM KANSAS: Advocates of abortion rights are jubilant over the result of the recent referendum in Kansas, where voters handily defeated a state constitutional amendment that might have led to prohibiting abortion in the state. The amendment would have nullified a Kansas Supreme Court decision that construed the state constitution to contain a right to abortion.
Since Kansas is a conservative Republican state, the result of the referendum surprised many. But it should have heartened not only supporters of abortion rights but also supporters of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade and returning abortion policy to the states. For the results of the referendum refute the claim that the Supreme Court was abrogating abortion rights.
If Kansas wants to construe its constitution to allow abortion, it is free to do so, even as its legislature now may try to regulate abortion much along the policy lines set forth in the Roe decision back in 1973 — unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability, and state regulation and restriction afterward.
What most critics of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe fail to acknowledge is that abortion policy long has been and remains largely in the hands of women themselves. States have anti-abortion laws only because many if not most of their own women support or consent to them. When most women want their state to recognize abortion rights and when they mobilize politically for that purpose, their legislature will act accordingly.
That’s democracy, not rule by the courts — and exactly what the Supreme Court just prescribed.
* * *
POVERTY ISN’T ‘AFFORDABLE’: Opponents of “affordable” housing are “sinking” Connecticut,according to Hearst Connecticut Media columnist Hugh Bailey. But as much as Connecticut needs much more low-cost housing, Bailey is not quite right.
What’s sinking Connecticut is what causes many people to oppose “affordable” housing. That is, people fear that more such housing will give them impoverished neighbors and make pleasant and peaceful suburbs more like the state’s dysfunctional and chaotic cities with schools full of neglected, incorrigible, and expensive children.
Of course Connecticut’s restrictive zoning regulations shrink housing supply and thereby drive up housing costs and impoverish still more people. But restrictive zoning is part of Connecticut’s longstanding social contract.
That is, people will let the Democratic Party keep operating the cities as factories of poverty, dependence, and political patronage as long as suburbs can use exclusive zoning to provide an escape for people who don’t want to live in the middle of poverty, dependence, and political patronage.
Solving urban poverty would solve suburban exclusivity. But solving urban poverty also would undermine Democratic rule, so it can’t be permitted.
—–
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
-END-
Chris Powell column 