By Chris Powell
Connecticut was very happy with Jodi Rell when she was governor. Her ascension upon John Rowland’s resignation under threat of impeachment for corruption brought relief from months of scandal and dissembling. Rell, who died the other day after eight years of retirement in Florida, was calm, cordial, reasonable, honest, and not partisan, though inclined toward Republican restraint instead of the big and dubious projects that the Democratic majority in the General Assembly would have loved to see and that Rowland, while also a Republican, was easily seduced by.
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Rell served the remainder of her predecessor’s term and with a job-approval rating of 70% was easily elected in her own right in 2006, winning 63% of the vote. But her full term was unimpressive as state government borrowed for current expenses, diverted pension fund contributions, ignored the continuing disintegration of the cities, and did nothing to control the exploding “fixed costs” of government, primarily the cost of government employees. She proposed but soon abandoned a big increase in education spending. It was embarrassing.
Having amassed more political capital than any Connecticut governor in decades, Rell declined to spend it lest she put her pleasant image at risk in controversy. To her credit she signed legislation for public financing of campaigns for state elective office, but it hasn’t changed much. The same special interests, led by the government employee unions, still rule.
Despite state government’s worsening financial position, Rell probably could have been elected to a second full term in 2010. But since an economic recession was getting worse, there would have been no more avoiding controversy, and she already had served 25 years in elective office. So she retired instead, leaving state government’s finances in disorder, and the Democrats swept back into power and have stayed there ever since. At least she might have counted on them to make people miss her.
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Lefties from Connecticut to California have a tiresome rhetorical routine for rationalizing more spending on social programs — the “choose” routine. Why, they ask, should people have to choose between prescription drugs they need and putting food on their table? Why should people have to choose between going to work or staying home with a sick child? And so forth.
To some extent these are fair questions about the adequacy of the social programs, but not entirely so. For life itself is always a matter of choosing, and not all choices are good ones. When people make bad choices, how much of the expense should government cover? That is a fair question too.
Having children may be the biggest choice in life. Some people are very careful about it, having children only when sure they are prepared to support them.
But many people aren’t careful at all. They have children, sometimes many, they can’t support, and when a child gets sick and needs care at home and work has to be missed, it’s a financial disaster.
So now Connecticut pays people to miss work to care for sick children or relatives. Meanwhile the state has no program extracting any responsibility from people who have children they are unprepared to support. To the contrary, the state has been subsidizing the irresponsibility. Run by the political left, state government seems to think that this irresponsibility is OK.
For some reason the left hasn’t noticed that the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is also a choice — a choice against more socially useful things. Indeed, now that the federal government finances itself and much of state government through inflation rather than taxes, elected officials are giving people the same impression the welfare system has been giving them: that choices are no longer necessary, that everything can be afforded and no one in particular has to pay.
A leading leftist of a century ago, Leon Blum, the Popular Front premier of France, eventually knew better. “Life does not give itself to one who tries to keep all its advantages at once,” he reflected. “I have often thought that morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.”
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net.)
Chris Powell column 
“Life does not give itself to one who tries to keep all its advantages at once,” he reflected. “I have often thought that morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.”
Apt.
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