Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

While it’s good that former President Donald Trump now has some official competition for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 — former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the United Nation — the problem is likely to be that Trump will have [ITALICS] too much [END ITALICS] competition for the nomination, as he did when he first ran in 2016.

Back then 16 candidates of some standing ran against Trump for the Republican nomination, and they split the anti-Trump vote in the party so badly that he had a surprisingly easy path through the primaries to the Republican National Convention.

Trump retains much support among Republicans, though he is probably the weakest candidate they could choose to challenge President Biden or any other Democrat. Recent polls have suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is acting like a potential presidential candidate, might defeat Trump in one-on-one Republican primaries but that Trump would win if he faced more than one challenger.

Despite the incompetence of the Biden administration, there is little chance that Trump could ever carry Connecticut. Maybe no Republican candidate for president could. But surely there are potential Republican candidates for president who might do better in Connecticut than Trump and thus harm other Republican candidates here less and help restore political competition to the state.

The prospect of Trump’s renomination is an urgent reason for Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting, which encourages candidates to try to win by becoming more acceptable to majorities instead of by carving out the biggest and most extreme minority.

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MUST MISTAKES BE FOREVER?: In a newspaper letter the other day defending the monopoly enjoyed by Connecticut’s liquor stores on sale of wine, former Enfield state Rep. William Kiner inadvertently showed not only what is wrong with the state’s liquor law but also what long has been wrong with state politics generally.

Liquor store operators, Kiner wrote, “purchased their stores with the knowledge that they alone could sell wine.” So, he continued, for state government to let supermarkets sell wine would be “changing the rules in the middle of the game when people’s livelihoods are at stake.”

That is, mistakes in policy must be preserved [ITALICS] forever, [END ITALICS] no matter how unfair and contrary to the public interest — especially if an influential special interest draws its livelihood from the mistake. Even the basic rules of a market economy, like free competition, must be suspended if they threaten someone’s profitability — the public interest be damned. That’s the Kiner Rule.

But preventing supermarkets from selling wine isn’t the only anti-competitive aspect of Connecticut law on alcoholic beverages. State law also establishes a system of minimum pricing for those beverages, a system that inflates prices, insuring the profitability of beverage distributors and retailers.

If policy is to make alcohol expensive for health reasons, state government should receive the extra revenue as a tax. Instead in Connecticut the extra revenue from the law inflating prices goes to the distributors and retailers themselves. It’s a racket that, according to Kiner, must never end.

Of course state law does not guarantee such privileges for any other business. All other businesses in Connecticut are always subject to changes in state law that may and often do diminish their profitability.

If, as many liquor store operators now admit, they can’t compete in a free market with lower prices, they should leave the business to people who can.

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ONLY HUNTING MIGHT WORK: Another lobby at the state Capitol, the bear lobby, argues that Connecticut should continue to prohibit hunting of the animals because their infiltration of the state is caused by people failing to secure food and garbage outside.

But if bear food was really so plentiful outside, bears would not increasingly be breaking into Connecticut homes in search of something to eat. No, the bear population has been increasing in the state mainly because hunting them was outlawed long ago.

Yes, getting people to secure their garbage might sometimes induce bears to move along faster. But the state will never eliminate people’s negligence, and the bears are already here and causing more trouble. They won’t be leaving voluntarily.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Assuming the accuracy of a recent opinion poll commissioned by various social-justice groups, Connecticut should have no trouble solving its housing shortage.

The poll claims that most state residents agree that state government should override municipal zoning that restricts housing construction, penalize towns that fail to allow a full range of housing, and even limit housing rent increases to 2½% per year.

But as many polls do, this one says exactly what its sponsors wanted it to say. So it’s not to be trusted.

For if the poll results were really so accurate, residents of Avon and Woodbridge, suburbs whose exclusive zoning protects them against poverty and its pathologies, would be clamoring for construction of tenements to house the thousands of single-parent families the mayors of Hartford and New Haven long have wanted to export.

The mayors know only too well that many people in Connecticut don’t pull their own weight and so are financial and social burdens wherever they live. And as Hearst Connecticut Media columnist Hugh Bailey noted the other day, the “not in my back yard” attitude toward new housing is prevalent even in the cities. For more housing [ITALICS] anywhere [END ITALICS] means more crowding, traffic, and the risk of fatherless kids living nearby and dragging down school performance while raising school costs.

That is, while most people may acknowledge that more housing is great in principle, practice may mean something else to them. If the housing poll had asked people to specify a location in their towns that would be good for new housing, most probably would [ITALICS] not [END ITALICS] have answered “next door.”

Zoning in Connecticut is too exclusive, city populations are far too impoverished, and racial and economic class segregation are much too severe. But even many poor people who aspire to become middle class strive to get away from the pathologies of their poor neighbors. Exclusive zoning is the predictable response to those pathologies. Reduce the risk that those pathologies will come into a neighborhood and the housing shortage will become much easier to solve politically.

First of all, ending poverty in Connecticut requires state government to stop manufacturing it, as state government does with its disastrous welfare and education policies.

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LOONEY THE BODY SNATCHER: Connecticut Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, is a strange sort of civil libertarian.

Fearing that the U.S. Supreme Court, lately leaning conservative, will reverse certain precedents as it recently reversed its abortion precedent, Roe v. Wade, Looney has introduced legislation to put certain civil rights into state law, including the rights to contraception and same-sex and interracial marriage; the rights to be informed of one’s constitutional rights upon one’s arrest and to be given legal counsel; and the right of illegal immigrant children to attend public school. (Connecticut abortion law already incorporates the principles of the Roe decision.)

While no one in Connecticut seems to be proposing to undo those rights, and while the state Constitution almost surely would be construed to protect them, it’s remotely possible that the U.S. Supreme Court could retreat from one of them, so there’s no harm in putting them into state law as well.

But meanwhile Looney also has proposed legislation to have state government claim the corpses of motorcyclists killed in crashes while not wearing a helmet. State government would use the corpses for organ donations, on Looney’s presumption that any motorcyclist who rides without a helmet doesn’t care about what happens to his health or his corpse.

That presumption is terribly arrogant, and while motorcyclists may be foolish for riding without helmets, even then their next-of-kin have a claim to their remains that is far superior to government’s. After all, the Fourth Amendment declares a right that Looney’s corpse-confiscation bill overlooks: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

To the next-of-kin of a fatally injured motorcyclist, that Fourth Amendment right might be dearer than the rights Looney proposes to add to state law — and don’t even the politically incorrect, like motorcyclists and their families, have rights too?

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

For what seems like the first time in living memory, a governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, has pushed back a little against the arrogance of the University of Connecticut.

Maybe the pushback won’t last long, especially if one of the university’s basketball teams wins the national tournament in a few weeks and state residents revert to thinking that UConn can do no wrong and should retain priority over everything else in state and municipal government. But prompted by the governor’s resentment of what he called the “misinformation” spread by the university’s new president, Radenka Maric, the state has a serious controversy over UConn’s budget and management.

The university claims that the governor’s budget proposal cuts UConn’s appropriations by more than $100 million. The governor says his budget, like all his previous budgets, continues to increase the university’s basic appropriation and that the money that will be missing from UConn is only emergency aid received from the federal government that is expiring with the virus epidemic, money that was to be used to cover epidemic-related losses, money UConn knew or should have known would not be recurring.

Leaders in the General Assembly, which has many members who seem incapable of asking critical questions, especially about UConn, suggest that they’ll work out the problem — that is, the legislature again will give the university whatever it wants. Yet the situation is full of critical questions that should be asked.

The university’s capacity for basic management was most notably called into question recently by its being required to pay $14 million last year to former men’s basketball coach Kevin Ollie for firing him in 2018 without giving him the balance due on his multi-million-dollar contract. UConn lost the case in large part because it had permitted Ollie to join the professors union despite a contract that raised him far above working-class status.

But far more costly has been UConn’s long failure to close the huge operating deficits at its Health Center in Farmington, deficits attributed to excessive staff compensation. The legislature grouses about the deficits but always covers them and never does anything to close them.

Now UConn is complaining about the big costs it will incur from the master state employee union contract that the governor’s office negotiated, securing the support of the unions in the recent election by raising state employee pay dramatically. It’s a fair complaint that also is being made by the administration of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system — a complaint that rising staff compensation is cannibalizing higher education.

But it’s a dishonest complaint because it is being made so late. It should have been made last year before the legislature ratified the contract. Anyone could have seen that higher staff costs were certain but not necessarily higher appropriations for them.

It is also a dishonest complaint because UConn long has paid spectacular salaries. According to the Hartford Courant, which last week cited data from the state comptroller’s office, the 15 highest-paid state government employees work at UConn, as do 66 of the 90 highest paid, and the university has the largest payroll of any state agency, including big ones like the correction, transportation, and judicial departments.

Some salaries in the regional colleges and universities system are spectacular too.

Meanwhile the UConn Foundation’s most recent report showed $745 million in assets — not Harvard- or Yale-level endowments but large enough to help the university through an unexpectedly difficult budget year.

Besides, Connecticut is foolish to worry so much about higher education, which is overrated and overpriced, when the state’s elementary education is collapsing, with most students never mastering high school math and English before being awarded a diploma anyway, with nearly all students being advanced from grade to grade without necessarily learning anything — a policy of social promotion — and with a quarter of those students now classified as chronically absent.

At least money may not be the problem at the elementary level but rather policy. How does social promotion persuade any student or parent of the necessity of taking school seriously?

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Public education in Connecticut — education that is accountable to the public — would be diminished by legislation introduced by four Democratic members of the state House of Representatives.

Bill 6192 would exempt from disclosure under the state’s right-to-know law “any communication between a teacher and a student regarding sensitive subjects, such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and race, that occurs during school-sponsored activities.”

But federal law already requires confidentiality for student records in school, even as it also requires that such records be available to a student’s parents. The proposed state legislation is about concealing something else: what teachers tell students about “sensitive subjects.” That is, job performance. Is a teacher encouraging a student to change genders? Is a teacher propagandizing students? Is a teacher berating students about their politics, as two teachers in Idaho recently got caught doing?

The public has a right to know about a teacher’s job performance, [ITALICS] especially [END ITALICS] when it involves “sensitive subjects.”

Students often turn to a trusted teacher for counseling, and teachers often provide sympathy and good advice. But such advice may not always be good or appropriate.

Since anything can be construed as “sensitive,” the legislation would deny the public access to records of [ITALICS] anything [END ITALICS] a teacher might say to a student, including improper things. Of course teachers would use the proposed law not to protect students but to protect themselves against accountability.

Indeed, some school systems in Connecticut are already concealing from parents how the schools are dealing with the sexual dysphoria of their child. This is a sort of kidnapping.

The proposed legislation would license unaccountability and worse.

* * *

Not long ago racial and economic class integration was the country’s objective in education and commerce. Progress was made. But lately segregation in schools is making a comeback, being portrayed as politically correct, especially in New Haven, the capital of political correctness.

The city again is being urged to start a public middle school for Black and Hispanic boys, partly on the silly premise that having whites and girls around impedes the boys’ education, though researchers say integrated schools cause minority students to do better.

Of course the biggest impediment to any child’s education is not racial and gender integration but parental neglect, which is chronic in New Haven and other cities.

A middle school based on another form of segregation is already scheduled to open in New Haven this year — a school for students of unusual sexual orientations. The school will be based on the premise that regular schools will never act decisively against bullying of such students and that they can never be safe in regular schools.

In approving these schools, the state Board of Education, a playpen of the far left, will be proclaiming that children will learn better if they never run into anyone different. So much for integration, and education itself.

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WHO LET HIM LOOSE?: At last Connecticut knows the identity of one of the two juveniles who, operating a stolen car, ran down and killed Henryk Gudelski, 53, as he jogged along a street in New Britain two years ago.

The known perpetrator is Luis Pagan-Gonzalez, now 19, then 17, who the other day pleaded guilty in New Britain Superior Court to first-degree assault and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Because of Connecticut’s juvenile court secrecy law, Pagan-Gonzalez’s identity was withheld until he recently began to be prosecuted as an adult.

But Connecticut still doesn’t know what is most important about the case: How, when he killed Gudelski, had Pagan-Gonzalez managed to remain free despite having been arrested 13 times in the previous 2½ years on charges including assault, drugs, reckless driving, evading responsibility, car theft, robbery, and violation of probation?

Which court officials handled his cases? Which of them kept letting him loose despite his chronic criminality?

Sentencing Pagan-Gonzalez, the court offered no explanation, and the governor and General Assembly have not inquired.

No, Connecticut is supposed to be content that its prison population is down even as repeat offenders rampage through the state.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Lincoln wrote that government should do what the people can’t do for themselves at all or very well. By that standard Connecticut state government’s program to provide paid leave for private-sector workers should be eliminated, doubly so because, as Connecticut Public reported the other day, a third of program applicants are being denied what is really only the return of their own money.

The program is financed by a special half-percent tax on income. Successful applicants can receive as much as 12 weeks of paid leave for parenting newborns, recovering from illness, and taking care of loved ones. But of course those are hardly all of life’s emergencies. Indeed, if your home burns down or your car is wrecked, you may have a financial problem bigger than your uncle’s back injury, but the money you have sunk into the paid leave program won’t help you.

Why are a third of applicants being rejected?

Paperwork and confusing rules are blamed, and the Connecticut Paid Leave Authority is said to be working on that. But even if those problems are fixed, people in financial distress will be denied because of the law’s mistaken premises — that only care-giving emergencies should be covered and that only government can adjudicate and administer coverage.

Discarding those mistaken premises would allow coverage to be vastly increased. State government could put worker contributions to the paid leave fund in individual escrow accounts, or require workers to make monthly contributions to special savings accounts in their own names at banks, and then be allowed access to the money, [ITALICS] for any reason, [END ITALICS] during a short period at the start of each year.

People always would be saving a half percent of their income, people with non-caregiving emergencies would not be exploited for the benefit of people with caregiving emergencies, all emergencies would be covered, government would not be interfering so much in personal lives, and all people would get all their money back eventually.

Even if the Paid Leave Authority reduces its rejection rate, it still will be turning its back on countless emergencies it is not even registering. The objective should be not just to make the program more efficient but to transform it to serve [ITALICS] everyone. [END ITALICS]

* * *

School administrators, the state Education Department, state legislators, and others are trying to figure out why the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut’s public elementary and high schools has been rising even though the virus epidemic is long over.

The chronic absenteeism rate for the state as a whole stands at 25%. That is, a quarter of Connecticut students are missing 10% or more of instruction time. For the schools in the most impoverished municipalities the rate is as much as twice that.

Some school systems are surveying the parents of the often-missing kids to ask what the problem is. Financial stress? Lack of transportation? Family illness, conflict, or dysfunction? Language barriers? Bullying? Something else?

Those things may explain some cases. But there is probably a bigger reason, a reason parents and students don’t want to divulge and educators and legislators don’t want to know about.

That is, some parents and students well may see no [ITALICS] necessity [END ITALICS] in attending school. After all, if chronic absenteeism carried a prison sentence for parents and students alike, the chronic absenteeism rate would fall sharply. But many parents and students easily may figure that education isn’t that important — that people can get by in Connecticut without an education.

Surely by now these kids and their parents have perceived Connecticut’s main educational policy — social promotion — and have seen that no student in the state needs to learn anything to advance from grade to grade and be given a high school diploma. Meanwhile many if not most chronically absent students live in households receiving all sorts of welfare benefits and subsidies — for housing, food, medical care, electricity, and so forth — all awarded without regard to school attendance and educational achievement.

Do social promotion and comprehensive and unconditional welfare benefits strengthen or destroy education’s appeal? The evidence is out in the open but educators have yet to tabulate it.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly to diminish the use of police in Connecticut’s schools, and some of its supporters suggested the other day at the state Capitol that the presence of police in schools actually [ITALICS] causes [END ITALICS] crime — that if the police weren’t there, students wouldn’t be arrested. Of course that’s not quite to say that bad stuff wouldn’t happen anyway.

“The story is simple,” said Robert Goodrich, executive director of Waterbury-based Radical Advocates for Cross-Cultural Education. “The moment police started being implemented in our schools, arrests rose dramatically, and they continue to rise. The more police we have in schools, the more likely it is that any student is going to be arrested,” especially Black and Hispanic students.

The far-left child welfare organization Connecticut Voices for Children made a similar claim a year ago.

So did boards of education request the permanent stationing of “school resource officers” to get more minority kids in trouble with the law?

Or were police requested — especially for schools in impoverished and crime-ridden cities — because schools increasingly were having trouble maintaining order with teachers and administrators alone?

Of course it was the latter. Indeed, in the days just preceding the recent clamor at the Capitol for expelling cops from schools, students were arrested for bringing guns or knives to school or brawling at school in Waterbury, Hamden, Meriden, and Manchester.

The racial disproportions in arrests in school are no more remarkable than the racial disproportions in crime and arrests everywhere, nor more remarkable than the racial disproportions in poverty, child neglect, and mental illness, which all correlate with crime.

The people complaining about police in schools don’t seem to have noticed the long rise in misbehavior by students, nor the special schools that have been established in recent years to try to educate the kids who can’t behave, nor the recent calls to put mental health clinics in schools because so many more students these days are disturbed.

The kids aren’t disturbed because of “school resource officers.” No, they [ITALICS] come to school [END ITALICS] disturbed — that is, when they come to school at all, the chronic absenteeism rate in Connecticut’s schools now being up to 25%. Most of these kids get little parenting and especially little from fathers.

Nor is it remarkable that students who behave, and their parents, favor having police in schools for protection against the kids who don’t behave.

Connecticut and the country are awash in social disintegration — from the schools to the streets and highways, where reckless driving now abounds; to crude behavior in markets and at public meetings; to shootings, including shootings at schools. Government claims misleadingly that crime is declining even as murders and shootings increase and much of the worst crime involves repeat offenders who should have been jailed for life a dozen convictions ago.

The people who blame this disintegration on cops in schools think social workers and therapists can handle it. But it already is straining the capacity of the police, as indicated by the high unsolved murder rates in the cities.

The people who blame cops in school scorn what they call the “school-to-prison pipeline.” But that pipeline is a lot longer than they acknowledge. Crucially, it starts at home.

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PRETEND PROTECTION: Another of Connecticut’s “protective orders” proved its worthlessness Jan. 31 as Traci-Marie Jones was shot to death at home in Bethel by her estranged husband, Lester Jones, who then killed himself. Traci-Marie had gotten the order from a court a week earlier.

It prohibited her killer from any contact with her and required him to stay at least 100 yards away and to give up any guns and ammunition. He didn’t, and of course nothing was done to enforce the order. Nothing is ever done to enforce such orders.

The only solutions in such circumstances are to provide the endangered person with round-the-clock police protection, move her permanently to a secret location, or arm her.

Every time a woman with a protective order is murdered, state legislators say they’ll do something about the problem. But they will do nothing. For two of the solutions are expensive and the third is too politically incorrect.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Reducing state income tax rates a year from now, raising state spending by only 5.3% over two years, and preventing state government from spending all the money it can get its hands on, thereby forcing state government to save during good years, Governor Lamont’s state budget proposal is far more conservative than might be expected from a Democrat.

As a result it seems likely to be faulted if not assailed by the leftist majority of the party’s members in the General Assembly, particularly for not giving the teacher unions as much more money as they would like.

“I want a sustainable tax cut that we can support in good times and not-so-good times,” the governor said in his budget address Wednesday. “We’ve had a number of false starts — on-again-off-again tax cuts. Not this time.”

But the left wing of Lamont’s party doesn’t want tax cuts to be “sustainable.” It wants to enlarge government’s claim on the economy and to shrink the private sector, and though the governor criticized “on-again-off-again” tax cuts, his budget would again postpone repeal of the 10% surcharge on the corporation tax, which was to happen this year.

The proposed income tax cuts give the impression of prosperity for Connecticut. But if the state can afford them, it is mainly because of the billions of dollars in emergency financial aid lately received from the federal government — a major cause of inflation nationally — and because of the increase in state tax revenue that has been produced by rising prices and asset values.

That is, the proposed income tax cuts are not the result of more efficient management of state government but a small apology to state residents for inflation, which is essentially a tax.

The governor tried to conjure an image of prosperity in Connecticut. “For the first time in over a generation,” he said, “Connecticut has enjoyed strong economic and population growth.”

No, it hasn’t. Connecticut has had little economic growth compared to other states and the second worst population growth, after only Vermont.

The governor went on to undermine his image of prosperity.

“The income and wealth disparity in our country has gotten worse over the last generation,” he admitted. “Increasing the minimum wage, debt-free community college, and no-cost workforce training that allows you to get a higher-paying job in less time will all help address income disparities.”

Indeed, the governor’s many proposals for new or increased state subsidies for groups considered needy and deserving suggested a state where fewer people are able to support themselves.

There will be a big increase in the state’s earned income tax credit, money for people who have more children than they can properly support. There will be more subsidies for day care, including reimbursements to businesses that offer day care to the children of employees.

There will be more subsidies for medical insurance for the poor and for businesses that help their employees repay student loan debt — the latter subsidies constituting another confession that higher education is overrated and overpriced and that government will do nothing about having driven up the cost.

With 25% of Connecticut’s students chronically absent from school, state government will spend another $7 million trying to lure them back.

And with tens of thousands of Connecticut children not being adequately fed at home, free school lunches will become universal.

The governor also proposes a program by which state government would pay a nonprofit organization to purchase, at huge discounts, as much $2 billion in seemingly uncollectable debt owed to hospitals by former patients, and then cancel the debt. The governor did not specify who will really take the loss here. But hospital losses for what is called uncompensated care tend to be recovered through higher charges to those who do pay for the care they get — other patients and their insurers.

Polls this week reported that, despite the prosperity preached in President Biden’s State of the Union address and the governor’s budget address, most Americans believe they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. More subsidies may be urgent in certain circumstances but they won’t produce lasting prosperity.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Nothing this year is likely to illustrate the enduring corruption of politics and government in Connecticut as well as last week’s crowded six-hour hearing of the General Assembly’s General Law Committee about whether supermarkets should be allowed to sell wine, in addition to the beer they already sell.

The hearing’s focus was rather misplaced — as a conflict between two special interests, liquor stores defending their monopoly on wine against competition from the supermarkets.

While the supermarkets have the far superior case, they feel obliged to pretend that the additional competition won’t work against the liquor stores, as if competition doesn’t always work against those who oppose it instead of rising to meet it.

Lost in the battle of the special interests is the far bigger question: Why, even as Connecticut plunges into the marijuana business, does the state need so much regulation of the sale of alcoholic beverages?

Of course there is a public interest in preventing alcohol sales to minors and sales at times when drunken driving may be especially facilitated. But pursuing that public interest does not require restricting sales to particular retailers. [ITALICS] Any [END ITALICS] retailer is perfectly able to comply with the age and hour rules, as supermarkets already do with beer. So why not let them sell wine and liquor as well? Other states allow that and have survived.

Indeed, why not let liquor stores sell everything supermarkets sell? Why not let [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] retailers sell [ITALICS] everything? [END ITALICS] What is the need for liquor licenses at all, or the need to limit licenses?

Liquor store operators used to claim that forbidding competition, including price competition, was needed for public health — to make an intoxicating substance more expensive. But of course the extra money was taken not by the government but by the store operators themselves.

The “need” for anti-competitive regulation is only to create and sustain a special interest that feeds on government patronage. For this regulation long has given the state high prices for beer, wine, and liquor and an absurd number of small stores with lousy product selection. Classical economics calls them rent seekers — an industry that survives only through government favoritism.

At least some of the liquor store operators and their tools in the legislature now acknowledge that the real issue here is whether the price of alcoholic beverages in Connecticut should continue to be propped up by government, and consumer choice diminished, to maintain the profitability of a small and uniquely privileged class of people.

That is, the small liquor stores can’t compete, so competition should be forbidden and its benefits forfeited.

Almost 50 years ago state Sen. Robert D. Houley, D-Vernon, not only saw how contrary to the public interest this was but also realized the issue’s political potential. Houley waged a campaign to repeal minimum prices for alcoholic beverages and to inject competition into the liquor industry generally, and he faced down a legislative hearing bigger than the one held last week — a hearing so packed with angry “mom and pop” liquor store operators that it had to be moved from the state Capitol to the Bushnell Memorial Hall across the street.

Houley had been a Marine and few legislators had his courage. Most legislators found his pursuit of the public interest quaint and sided with the special interest, figuring that pandering to the dozen or so store operators who reside in every legislative district would be better for them politically. So Houley’s legislation failed. But many people were watching, and though his district had been politically competitive, Houley became unbeatable.

That’s why the liquor issue is so distressing.

There is no good reason for letting the special interest continue to determine public policy at such expense, and the public remains largely persuaded in favor of change, as it was when Houley pressed the issue long ago. But today as then, if some special interest stands in the way, most legislators lack the courage to pursue the public interest even when they can perceive it.

So “rent seeking” prevails in Connecticut under a political rationale as old as Charles Dickens, who mocked it in one of his novels. If you make man-eating illegal, Dickens warned, you’ll starve the cannibals.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

For a long time Connecticut has been spending billions of dollars each year on elementary and high school education, and now that the annual cost exceeds $9 billion, the leaders of the Democratic majority in the state Senate announced last week that their top priority of the new legislative session will be to discover just how all this school money is being spent.

Better late than never, but the outlines of spending on elementary and high school education in Connecticut are not and have never been so mysterious. Most of the money goes for compensation of school personnel. So does most of the extra money that is appropriated by state government each year in the name of aid to local education.

This may be why Connecticut’s airwaves are frequently full, as they are now, of television and radio commercials sponsored by the state’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, implicitly urging their audience to make sure that state government keeps giving teachers whatever they want.

In addition to their legislation seeking to confirm the obvious about the destination of education spending, the Democratic senators last week indicated a desire to rewrite for the umpteenth time the formula for allocating state aid to local schools.

At least this latest impulse to rewrite the formula seemed to arise from a growing suspicion among even the Democrats themselves that the previous formulas have failed to make any difference in student performance, especially the performance of minority students in poor cities and towns. That performance is what the frequent rewriting of the aid formulas supposedly has been targeting since the state Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Connecticut’s first big school financing lawsuit, Horton v. Meskill.

Yes, 46 years have passed since Connecticut officially noticed that poor minority students in poor municipalities were not performing well in school, 46 years since the state attributed their poor performance to inadequate school funding, and 46 years since that funding began to be steadily increased. And yet, speaking of those students last week, the Senate chairman of the legislature’s Education Committee, Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Windsor, declared, “We’re not properly educating them.”

Even 46 years after Horton v. Meskill such an acknowledgment also may be better late than never. But after the failure of nearly a half century of public policy’s concentration on school financing formulas, could it be time for legislators to question whether the education problem has ever been about money at all, no matter how much the teachers clamor for more?

After all, despite the lack of sophisticated school aid formulas, a half century ago most children in Connecticut at least got to school every day. Today, according to the state Education Department, a quarter of Connecticut’s students are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of instruction time, even though the virus epidemic is over.

If children miss so much school, the problem isn’t at school but at home. So where is the investigation or the legislation targeting what has happened at home? How will paying teachers more get the kids to show up?

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WHERE’S THE PROTECTION?: But state government continues to pose as the great protector of children. Legislation has been proposed to outlaw flavored tobacco products, especially because such products are attractive to young people and risk getting them addicted to a carcinogen.

Meanwhile in the name of “equity” state government is creating a marijuana retailing business as if marijuana can’t be as harmful as tobacco, if in different ways. While state law promoting marijuana forbids its sale to people under 21, of course young people were obtaining it illegally before the state got into the business and will obtain it even more easily now that their older friends can purchase it for them.

The tobacco legislation may create another contraband trade targeting adults and minors alike, and smuggling cigarettes into the state is already easy.

People already know that these substances are bad for them. Better to let them live their own lives without contraband law than for state government to make itself so hypocritical, pushing one harmful substance on them while deploring and impeding another.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut is losing population and business again but its elected officials are as busy as ever deploring the awful things happening elsewhere in the country, and they may be thankful for the distraction. In recent days mass shootings in California and murderous misconduct by police in Tennessee have prompted Connecticut’s leaders to issue proclamation after proclamation deploring the incidents, as if their constituents had any doubt about their feelings, or thought that those feelings might make any difference.

Connecticut’s leaders seemed to feel the need to strike a pose — to gain publicity for their self-righteousness.

The people who do the hiring for the Memphis Police Department may have a lot to answer for, but then Connecticut has enough of its own police misconduct to answer for, misconduct captured on body-camera video just as it was captured the other day in Memphis.

A Connecticut state trooper is facing a charge of manslaughter for repeatedly shooting a young man, Mubarek Soulemane, three years ago as he sat quietly in a car that had been stopped on a highway in West Haven after a wild chase.

Five New Haven officers are facing charges of reckless endangerment and cruelty for dragging and dumping Randy Cox, whose neck had been broken during an abrupt stop in a police van last June.

The execution in West Haven and the rough treatment of the man in police custody in New Haven evoked from Connecticut’s leaders only a fraction of the indignation they have mustered for the police misconduct a thousand miles away in Tennessee.

And while elected officials should avoid prejudicing proceedings in criminal justice, Connecticut’s elected officials might do well to show more awareness of the social disintegration that police officers confront every day — social disintegration that has made recruiting officers critically difficult, especially in the cities, which have the worst crime.

As Connecticut’s elected officials were fulminating about the mass shootings in California and the police riot in Memphis, two 16-year-olds were shot on the streets of Hartford. The incident passed without official comment and nearly without any notice at all by news organizations, this kind of thing long having become typical of Connecticut’s cities, too common to deplore. Besides, any elected official who deplored what has become so common might be obliged to fix responsibility for it, a search that would lead him to some of his own constituents.

Better to deplore California and Tennessee, since nobody there votes here.

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OPPRESSION IS DESERVED: Afghanistan and especially its women are getting sympathy around the world as the theocratic fascists again ruling the benighted place, the Taliban, are banning women from education and service with the international charitable organizations that are trying to prevent starvation and disease in the country.

But disgraceful as the Taliban regime is, sympathy for the Afghans is misplaced. For Afghanistan’s men and women alike had their chance during the Western world’s 20-year attempt at nation building there.

While some Afghans showed courage in pursuit of a more democratic society, most Afghans, including most Afghan women, were indifferent. Many Afghan women now realize that they won’t have much of a future without education, but they can do nothing about it — unless, of course, they want to pick up a gun, learn how to use it, and fight a revolution.

Few want to do that. Instead many will try to leave the country. Some will head for the United States, and a few may deserve consideration.

But most Afghans now deserve to live under the oppression they refused to fight, and the United States should not make that oppression any easier for the oppressors with financial or material assistance of any kind. Neither should the United States intervene to help overthrow the Taliban. No, Afghanistan should be left in peace to evolve gradually in its misery.

If Afghan women want a better life, they will have to contend for it themselves over the long term, just as women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other women-oppressing theocracies will have to.

No one will be liberating them but themselves.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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