Chris Powell: 'Bring out your dead'? Nullification hypocrisy

Secobarbital is one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for physician-assisted suicide in the United States.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

What should the legislation now making another appearance in the Connecticut General Assembly be called: "aid in dying" or "assisted suicide"? It depends which side you're on.

"Aid in dying" makes it sound a lot nicer, just as "pro-choice" has become the euphemism for "pro-abortion" or, more fairly, "pro-abortion rights." Meanwhile there is no getting around it: "Suicide" signifies desperation and despair.

The bill would authorize doctors to prescribe fatal doses of medicine to terminally ill people who want to end their lives. They might have various motives -- chronic pain, invalidism, reluctance to become a burden on their families, or severe depression.

The bill's opponents contend that pain almost always can be controlled medically now and that there would be great risk of hustling the afflicted into dying for the convenience of others. The bill's advocates say it contains regulations against that.

This trust in regulations may be a bit naive since government can't always be around when it is needed. Who can forget the "bring out your dead" scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail? That's where the wheelbarrow master collecting corpses amid a plague declines to accept a frail old man who is being carried out by a young relative while still alive. The wheelbarrow master says, "I can't take him like that. It's against regulations." But a little cajoling by the young relative produces the "aid in dying" necessary to get the old man loaded aboard -- a quick and surreptitious clubbing to the head.

On the other hand, can government be trusted to tell people what they can do with their own lives? Who else's business is it really? How is the "war on drugs" working out?

In his play Julius Caesar Shakespeare inclines to the libertarian side of the issue as the conspirators discuss the risk of failure of their plot to assassinate the emperor and restore the Roman republic.

CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, you gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, you gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.

CASCA: So can I.
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.

Good for the Catholic Church in Connecticut for citing the sanctity of life in opposing "aid in dying." But far more lives -- mostly young ones -- are lost or jeopardized every day because of practices and policies that neither the government nor the church bothers to get upset about or even examine.

After all, in the long run we're all terminally ill even as the short run is often one blind spot after another.

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NULLIFICATION CATCHES ON: Republican-leaning states that support an expansive view of Second Amendment rights are considering legislation to nullify federal gun laws, especially now that background-check legislation has a good chance of passing Congress. But somehow this nullification movement seems to have escaped the denunciation it deserves from Connecticut's congressional delegation, all of whose members support stronger federal gun controls.

Could such denunciation be lacking because no one in authority in government in Connecticut has any business criticizing nullification elsewhere? For Democratic-leaning Connecticut long has been engaging in more nullification than any state since the civil rights era of the 1950s and '60s. Connecticut's nullification is aimed against federal immigration law, as the state obstructs federal immigration agents from doing their jobs and issues driver's licenses and other forms of identification to immigration lawbreakers.

The Republican-leaning states are only contemplating nullification. In Connecticut it is aggressive policy.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Another golden age coming for 'earmarks'

Huey P. Long (1893-1935), Louisiana governor and U.S. senator and famed demagogue. He died in an assassination. He would have liked “earmarks”.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Congratulations to one of Connecticut's forever members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of New Haven, for teaching the country a wonderful political-science lesson.

Having ascended to the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee, DeLauro has just revived the infamous practice of putting "earmarks" in the federal budget -- requirements that funds that ordinarily would be appropriated for general purposes be reserved for patronage projects desired by congressmen. Now DeLauro is forwarding her chief of staff, Leticia Mederos, to a national law and government relations firm, Clark Hill, whose office on Pennsylvania Avenue is within walking distance of the Capitol and the White House. Mederos will become a lobbyist, and her close connection to the House appropriations chairwoman will be a swell advantage to her clients.

This stuff is sometimes euphemized as public service. Where candor is permitted, it is called influence- peddling or even plunder.

The political-science lesson taught here by DeLauro and her outgoing chief of staff is like the one taught by Huey Long when he was governor of Louisiana in the 1930s. Gathering his closest supporters just after his election, Long is said to have told them:

“You guys who supported me before the primary will get commissionerships. You guys who supported me after the primary and before the election will get no-show jobs. You guys who donated at least $10,000 to my campaign will get road contracts. Everybody else will get goood gummint.”

Thanks to DeLauro and the rest of the new Democratic administration in Washington, $1.9 trillion in “goood gummint ‘‘ is on its way to the country in the name of virus epidemic relief.

DeLauro estimates that more than $4 billion of that money will be given to state and municipal government in Connecticut for purposes leaving wide discretion in its allocation. That $4 billion is equivalent to almost 20 percent of state government's annual spending and is $2 billion more than what state government estimates it has spent responding to the epidemic. That extra $2 billion will be a grand slush fund.

Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly will decide just where to spend the money, and spending it carefully will be a huge challenge that is not likely to be met well.

Of course, much of the federal largesse will be spent in the name of education, but how exactly, and more importantly, why? After all, Connecticut has been increasing education spending for more than 40 years without improving student performance, just school-staff compensation. Even now half the state's high school graduates never master high school math or English and many take remedial high-school courses in public "colleges."

So the most promising educational use of the federal money might be to finance remedial summer school for Connecticut's many under-performing students over the next several years, since so many have missed most of their schooling during the last 12 months and were already far behind in education when the epidemic began. Using the education money for remedial summer school would minimize the problem school administrators fear. That is, if the emergency federal money is incorporated in recurring school operations, it will leave a disruptive gap when it runs out in a year or two.

xxx

As "earmarks" return to Congress, Connecticut's bonanza from Washington is sure to induce more earmark fever at the state Capitol, where it long has infected bonding legislation. Already Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin imagines spending billions for high-speed railroad service from the city to New York and Boston and development of the city's riverfront, as if the lack of those things is Hartford's big problem. At least the mayor is no longer boasting about defunding the city's police. In the 48-hour period that included his "State of the City" address this week, six people were shot in separate incidents in the city, one fatally. Maybe Hartford's most pressing need is for more police officers.

But if the governor can persuade the Democratic majority in the General Assembly not to spend the federal money too fast, enough will remain in the slush fund to get them past the 2022 state election without raising taxes, if also without making state government any more efficient and effective.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Abolish government pensions

New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes is “retiring” at age 49 with a $117,000-a-year pension to move to nearby Quinnipiac University, where he’ll run the campus police at a salary that will probably be around $170,000.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut should prohibit pensions for state and municipal government employees, not because they are bad people or especially undeserving but for several solid policy reasons.

First, most of the taxpayers who pay for those pensions don't enjoy anything like them.

Second, state and municipal government can't be trusted to fund the pensions adequately.

And third, the pension system for state and municipal employees separates a huge and politically influential group from Social Security, the federal pension system on which nearly everyone else relies, and thus weakens political and financial support for it.

Connecticut state government has an estimated $60 billion in unfunded liabilities in its state-employee and municipal-teacher pension funds. But after attending the recent meeting of the state General Assembly's finance committee, Yankee Institute investigative reporter Marc Fitch wrote that another $900 million in unfunded liabilities are sitting in New Haven's pension funds.

According to Fitch, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker testified about the city's pension-fund disaster, noting that city government faces a projected $66 million deficit in its next budget and that pension obligations are a major cause of it.

Of course the mayor attended the hearing to beg more money from state government for the city. Unfortunately no legislator seems to have asked Elicker about the $117,000 annual pension that the city is about to start paying its police chief, Otoniel Reyes, so that he can "retire" at age 49 to take a job with Quinnipiac University, in nearby Hamden, Conn., probably at a salary around $170,000, and begin earning credit toward a second luxurious pension. Indeed, no news organization in New Haven seems to have even reported the chief's premature pension yet.

Maybe legislators didn't ask about the "retiring" chief's pension because state government has been just as incompetent and corrupt with pensions as New Haven city government. These enormous and incapacitating unfunded liabilities are proof of political corruption and incompetence at both the state and city levels -- the promising of unaffordable benefits to a politically influential special interest.

Connecticut's tax system may be unfair, but it's not why New Haven is insolvent. Like state government, the city is insolvent because it has given too much away.

Government in Connecticut is good at clearing snow from the streets and highways because failure there is immediately visible. But beyond snowplowing government, in Connecticut is not much more than a pension and benefit society whose operation powerfully distracts from serving the public.

This distraction should be eliminated, phased out as soon as government recognizes that it has higher purposes than the contentment of its own employees.

xxx

Proposing his new state budget this month, Governor Lamont announced plans to close three of Connecticut's 14 prisons in response to the decline of nearly 50 percent in the state's prison population over the last decade.

A few days later New Haven's Board of Alders asked Assistant Police Chief Karl Jacobson to explain the recent explosion of violent crime in the city.

According to the New Haven Register, the assistant chief said there were 73 gang-related shootings in the city in 2020 against only 41 in 2019 and 32 in 2018. Murders in the city so far this year total seven, against none in the same period last year. So far this year there have been 12 shootings in the city, up from five at this time last year, and 36 shooting incidents this year compared to 20 at this time last year.

As usual, the assistant chief said, a big part of the violence in the city involves men recently released from prison who resume feuds and otherwise are prone to get into trouble. The police plan to hold preventive meetings with such men, and the city has just opened a "re-entry center" for new parolees.

The explosion of crime in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport and other cities does not sound like cause to close prisons. It sounds like cause to investigate prison releases and the failure of criminal rehabilitation.

Maybe the General Assembly would undertake such investigation if the former and likely future offenders were delivered to suburbs instead of cities. Then saving money by closing prisons might not be considered such a boast.

xxx

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

In Vermont, artists responding to COVID-19

“Journey” (oil), by Irene Cole in the group show “Unmasked: Artful Responses to the Pandemic’,’ at Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, Vt., through March 28. The show features the work of dozens of artists showing the struggles, breakthroughs and perspectives of the artists throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

“View of Manchester, Vermont,’’ by DeWitt Clinton Boutelle (1870). For many years, Manchester has been an affluent vacation and weekend spot, and with many fancy outlet and other shops.

Chris Powell: Conn. schools fail with the basics but add sex

A 220-foot- long "condom" on the Obelisk of Buenos Aires, part of an awareness campaign for the 2005 World AIDS Day

MANCHESTER, Conn.

From the legislation they have placed before the Connecticut General Assembly's Education Committee, you might think that state Reps. Jeffrey A. Currey, D-East Hartford, Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, and Nicole Klarides-Ditria, R-Seymour, just awoke from long comas.

Their bill would require schools to teach about "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual orientations and gender identities." Currey, Gilchrest and Klarides-Ditria seem not to have noticed that for many years now most Connecticut high school students never master high school English and math, nor that school attendance in Connecticut has been erratic for 10 months because of the virus epidemic and that tens of thousands of students, especially those from the poorest households, have largely disappeared from school even as they already were years behind when they arrived in kindergarten.

As a practical matter, there is little education now and even if the epidemic ended tomorrow schools would need two years to catch up on what students have missed. So do these legislators really need to get their political correctness tickets punched with their posturing obliviousness?

xxx

In the name of protecting the health of young people, many Democratic state legislators are proposing to outlaw flavored tobacco and flavorings for electronic cigarettes. Meanwhile, these legislators also are maneuvering to legalize marijuana and internet gambling, which may mess up not only children but their parents as well.

Of course the difference is that there's little tax revenue to be lost by outlawing flavored tobacco and e-cigarette flavorings and much tax revenue to be gained by legalizing marijuana and Internet gambling. So proposing to outlaw flavored tobacco and e-cigarette flavorings is another empty pose.

Advocates of the legislation don't seem to have noticed that alcoholic beverages recently have added flavorings likely to appeal especially to underage drinkers. Connecticut's roadsides are now littered with "nip" bottles of such flavored liquor, thrown out of car windows during joyrides by juveniles who can't bring home regular bottles of the stuff. Alcohol is just as dangerous to juveniles as tobacco and e-cigarettes, more so when juveniles are driving around and drinking, but nobody is proposing to outlaw flavored liquor. Apparently that also would risk too much tax revenue.

The movement to legalize marijuana, now close to irresistible, signifies recognition that contraband laws don't work and that people can protect themselves against victimless crime. Meanwhile tobacco smoking is in a long decline because of the public health publicity campaign against it, and tobacco smokers are using e-cigarettes to kick the more dangerous tobacco habit.

Connecticut already prohibits sale of tobacco and electronic cigarettes to people under 21. Adults are trusted to decide for themselves about those and other risky products. Besides, a legislature that was really concerned about the health of children would be insisting on the resumption of in-person schooling before worrying about tobacco and e-cigarettes. But Connecticut's teacher unions are far more fearsome than its liquor and tobacco merchants.

xxx

Even so, Connecticut's liquor retailers are fearsome enough, numbering about 1,300 and distributed in every legislator's district. They long have defeated attempts to repeal the state's liquor price-support system, which imposes just about the highest alcoholic-beverage prices in the country. Now the liquor stores are mobilizing against legislation to let Connecticut-made wines be sold in supermarkets.

There is no good reason to forbid supermarkets from selling wine and liquor along with the beer they already sell. For convenience to shoppers, other states allow supermarkets to sell all three alcoholic products. Liquor stores could be allowed to sell groceries too, and indeed Connecticut lately has let them sell some non-beverage items.

The only restriction needed here is to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors, and supermarkets can do that. They already "card" even the oldest folks buying beer.

The liquor store lobby perceives the request of the wineries as the camel's nose under the tent of the whole corrupt liquor retailing system. People who don't own liquor stores may cheer for the camel.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: New Haven police chief retires at 49 to pension bonanza; vaping vs. marijuana

Tony Reyes to go from the mean streets of New Haven to the relatively bucolic precincts of Hamden, Conn. Here we see Quinnipiac University’s Arnold Bernhard Library and clock tower, focus of main campus quadrangle.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Everyone agrees that Tony Reyes has been a great police chief in New Haven, having been appointed in March 2019 after nearly two decades of rising through the ranks of the police department. But the city will lose him in a few weeks as he becomes police chief at Quinnipiac University next door, in Hamden. This is being called a retirement, but it is that only technically. In fact it is part of an old racket in Connecticut's government employee pension system, an abuse of taxpayers.

Typically police personnel qualify to collect full state government and municipal pensions after 20 years, no matter their age. Reyes is only 49, so he easily has another 15 years of working life ahead of him even as he collects a hefty pension from New Haven.

The chief's salary is $170,000 and so his city pension well may be half of that each year. After a week of requests City Hall was unable to provide an estimate of the pension, but then maybe city officials were too busy helping their Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force figure out how to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In the meantime maybe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can handle New Haven's pensions.

Nor would Quinnipiac disclose what it will pay Reyes, though the university is a nonprofit institution of higher education whose tax exemption comes at the expense of federal, state and Hamden property taxpayers. But since a Quinnipiac vice president is paid nearly $600,000 a year, Reyes probably won't starve there.

In the absence of accountability from city government or the university, here's a guess: Reyes will draw an annual pension from New Haven of $80,000 a year while Quinnipiac pays him $150,000 a year. After 15 years at Quinnipiac, Reyes may get another annual pension of $80,000, plus $30,000 a year in ordinary Social Security, for total retirement income at age 65 of close to $200,000 annually -- as if half that wouldn't be lovely.

Pensions are ordinarily understood to be to support people whose working capacity is ended or substantially diminished. But pensions in state and municipal government in Connecticut often provide luxury lifestyles during second careers and after. Meanwhile mere private-sector workers are lucky to conclude their careers with enough Social Security and savings to scrape by on their way to the hereafter.

This scandal could be remedied easily, with enormous savings and greater retention of the best personnel. State and municipal legislation and contracts could restrict government pension eligibility to the customary retirement age of 65 or to the onset of disability before that. But that would require elected officials who had the wit to alert the public to how it is being exploited and the courage to stand up to the government employee unions.

It also would require news organizations to report the scandal in the first place. But it seems that not even New Haven's own news organizations have inquired about the police chief's pension bonanza.

xxx

The new session of the General Assembly will be intriguing for many reasons, maybe most of all for plans to legalize and tax marijuana while outlawing flavored "vaping" products and prohibiting the sale of tobacco products in stores within five miles of schools, which might limit tobacco sales to kiosks in the middle of a few state forests.

Both campaigns seem to be originating with liberal Democratic legislators. The House chairman of the Public Health Committee, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D.-Westport, an advocate of outlawing flavored vaping products, says, "There's plenty of documentation about how exposure to addictive products at a young age makes it hard for people to extricate themselves."

Of course, marijuana also can lead to addiction to other drugs. Some people deal with and outgrow dope smoking, but some don't.

Drug criminalization long has failed and probably has done more damage than illegal drugs themselves. But it is silly to pretend that outlawing "vaping" products will protect kids any more than outlawing marijuana has done.

Contraband laws just create black markets that make the law futile. If Connecticut opts for legal marijuana while prohibiting "vaping" products, it will be only because legislators believe that there's much more tax revenue in the former than the latter.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Close down the ‘doctor’ racket; when beggars die

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Legions of the politically correct are insisting that President-elect Joe Biden's wife, Jill, be given the honorific title "Doctor" because she holds a doctoral degree in education, which she received largely on the basis of a mediocre term paper. Objections to her honorific are being denounced as sexist and anti-intellectual, an insult to all women with doctoral degrees, as if men haven't gotten such degrees and claimed the title too, and as if all doctorates signify learning and service commanding special respect.

But journalistic style long has been to confer "doctor" only on those holding degrees in medicine and dentistry, and the reason for this was hilariously demonstrated last March, when television show hostess Whoopi Goldberg remarked on The View that she hoped that if Joe Biden were elected president he would appoint his wife surgeon general.

“She's a hell of a doctor," Goldberg said. "She's an amazing doctor.”

Of course, Mrs. Biden has no more qualifications to practice medicine than Goldberg has to pontificate on TV while advertising her ignorance.

The problem is that people generally associate "doctor" with medical authority, so conferring the title on those with other degrees causes misunderstanding.

But with the explosion of what likes to call itself higher education there are now millions of people around the world with non-medical doctorates who like to style themselves "Doctor" to pose or intimidate, though their usefulness may be less than that of elevator operators and lamplighters.

The higher-education industry long has thrived on this pretension, though elements of the working class quickly caught on to it, as was indicated by an episode of the Dobie Gillis television show in the early 1960s.

Having advanced from high school to junior college, Dobie tells his skeptical father, a grocer, why a certain professor is so great: because he has a doctorate, a Ph.D.

Dobie's father asks: "What kind of doctor is that?"

Dobie explains: "You know, Dad -- a doctor of philosophy."

Dobie's father knowingly replies: "Oh, yeah -- the kind that don't do nobody no good."

Back in the days of Dobie Gillis a Connecticut educator of working-class origin, an Army veteran of combat in World War II who never would have gotten to college without the GI Bill, became a Ph.D himself and sought to democratize higher education for the working class. He had seen the "doctor" racket up close and he was not too pompous to acknowledge it. He said that the title was most useful for getting restaurant reservations. He was my father, Theodore Powell.

(Editor’s note: Here’s Theodore Powell’s obit.)

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When beggars die there are no comets seen.

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

As it was in Julius Caesar's time and Shakespeare's, it remains today in Connecticut.

Last week Devon Dalio -- eldest son of Connecticut's richest resident, investment-fund manager, Ray Dalio -- was killed in a car crash in Greenwich and it became international news. Gov. Ned Lamont issued a statement mourning the loss, since Ray Dalio and his wife, Barbara, are prominent philanthropists and his neighbors in Greenwich.

Three days later the Connecticut Post reported that four young men had been shot at a bar in Bridgeport, two of them fatally. In Waterbury the Republican-American reported that shootings in that city have more than tripled this year and people in some neighborhoods are afraid to go outside. And The Hartford Courant and (Manchester) Journal Inquirer examined the great increase in drug-overdose deaths in the state this year.

Neither the governor nor anyone else in authority issued any special lament for these losses. After all, such stuff is all normal now. Its casualties are nobodies, practically beggars, not princes.

Of course, some of this social disintegration can be attributed to the virus epidemic and the closing orders that disproportionately impoverish the working class, people less able to work from home. But this disintegration was under way in Connecticut long before the epidemic and state government has undertaken no inquiry into its causes -- and isn't likely to do so as long as the people who suffer most from it keep providing the huge pluralities that sustain the power of the oblivious, indifferent, ineffectual and self-serving.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: America’s vacuous higher-ed credentialism steams on as we neglect lower ed

The main quad on the flagship campus of the University of Connecticut, in Storrs

MANCHESTER, Conn.

As was inscribed on the pedestal of the statue of college founder Emil Faber in the movie Animal House, "Knowledge is good." But knowledge can be overpriced, as the growing clamor about college student loan forgiveness soon may demonstrate.

President-elect Joe Biden and Democrats in the new Congress will propose various forms of forgiveness, and this will have the support of Connecticut's congressional delegation, all of whose members are Democrats.

Student-loan debt is huge, estimated at $1.6 trillion, and five Connecticut colleges were cited last week by the U.S. Education Department for leaving the parents of their students with especially high debt. There are many horror stories about borrowers who will never be able to pay what they owe.

But those horror stories are not typical. Most student-loan debt is owed by people who can afford to pay and are from families with higher incomes. Relief for certain debtors may be in order, but then what of the students who sacrificed along with their parents to pay their own way through college? What will they get for their conscientiousness? Only higher taxes and a devaluing currency.

Student-loan debt relief should not be resolved without an investigation of what the country has gotten for its explosion of spending on higher education. Has all the expense been worthwhile?

Probably not even close. A 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that many college graduates end up in jobs that don't require college education. A similar study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46 percent more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than there were jobs requiring a college degree and that degrees were held by 25 percent of sales clerks, 22 percent of customer-service representatives, 16 percent of telemarketers, 15 percent of taxi drivers and 14 percent of mail carriers.

Of course, that doesn't mean that college grads who went into less sophisticated jobs didn't enjoy college, learn useful things and increase their appreciation of life. But those who accrued burdensome debt only to find themselves in jobs that can't easily carry it may feel cheated.

Some consolation is that college grads tend to earn more over their lifetimes than other people. But is this because of increased knowledge and skills, or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with? If it is mere credentialism, college is a heavy tax on society.

Public education in Connecticut may be more credentialism than learning, since, on account of social promotion, one can get a high-school diploma here without having learned anything since kindergarten and can earn a degree from a public college without having learned much more, public college being to a great extent just remedial high school.

Some people in Connecticut advocate making public-college attendance free, at least for students from poor families. But even for those students would free public college be an incentive to perform well in high school once they discover that they need no academic qualification to get into a public college and that they can take remedial high-school courses there?

Even the student loans and government grants to higher education that underwrite important research and learning are largely subsidies to college educators and administrators, whose salary growth correlates closely with those loans and grants. Many college educators show their appreciation by resenting having to teach mere undergraduates instead of being left alone to do obscure research that has no relevance to curing cancer or averting the next asteroid strike. They prefer to strut around calling each other "Doctor" and "Professor" until the cows come home reciting Shakespeare.

Connecticut's critical neglect, and the country's, is lower education, not higher education, especially now that government is abdicating to the ever-grasping teacher unions by closing schools, where the threat of the virus epidemic is small. This suspends education, socialization, exercise and general growth for the young without protecting those most vulnerable to the virus, the frail elderly. Forgiving college loans won't be much more relevant to education than that crazy policy.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Running empty trains won't increase production; some people seem to be enjoying their pandemic lockdowns

— Photo by Chianti

MANCHESTER, Conn.

While Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont remarked the other day that state government doesn't have enough money to rescue every business suffering from COVID-19 pandemic, most people think that the federal government has infinite money and can and should make everyone whole.

Sharing that view, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal this week went to the railroad station in West Haven to join Catherine Rinaldi, president of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, in calling for an emergency $12 billion federal appropriation for the MTA, which runs the Metro-North commuter railroad line from New Haven to New York City. Metro-North has lost 80 percent of its passengers and fares because of business curtailments and the shift to working from home.

There are two problems with the appeal from Blumenthal and Rinaldi.

First, there is no need to keep Metro-North operating on a normal schedule when most passengers are missing. Except for railroad employees, no one is served by running empty trains.

Indeed, curtailment of commuter-rail service might make time to renovate the tracks and other facilities. Rather than furloughing railroad employees, hundreds of them might be reassigned temporarily to collect the trash that litters the tracks between New Haven and New York. The savings on electric power from running fewer trains still would be huge.

The second problem is that the federal government's power of money creation is infinite only technically. While nothing in law forbids the federal government from spending any amount, money is no good by itself. It has value only insofar as it has purchasing power -- only insofar as there are things to be purchased, only insofar as there is production and with so many people out of work or working less during the epidemic, production has fallen measurably. Operating empty trains won't increase production, but spending $12 billion to operate them may worsen the devaluation of the dollar, whose international value recently has fallen substantially amid so much money creation.

So it might be far better to add that $12 billion to public-health purposes.

The $12 billion desired by the MTA is only a tiny part of the largess imagined by the incoming national administration and many members of Congress who will be returning to Washington next month. They are contemplating another trillion dollars in bailouts, and that's just for starters. Such is the damage done to the national economy by the epidemic and government's often clumsy responses to it.

“Scene in club lounge,’’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827)

Amid all the seemingly free money, some people are starting to enjoy lockdowns or at least finding them tolerable, especially those who, like many government employees, get paid as usual whether they work or not.

This week two Hartford City Council members, Wildaliz Bermudez and Josh Mitchtom, called on the governor to use the state's $3 billion emergency reserve to pay everybody to stay home for a month and to stop most commercial operations in the name of slowing the spread of the virus. Bermudez and Mitchtom seemed unaware that the emergency reserve is already expected to be consumed by the huge deficits pending in next year's state budget. The reserve won't come close to covering all the shortfalls.

But then getting paid for doing or accomplishing nothing is a way of life in Hartford, encouraged by state government's steady subsidy of so many failures in the city.

Last week a group of 35 doctors went almost as far as those Hartford council members, urging the governor to close gyms and restaurants and to prohibit all “unnecessary” gatherings so as to stop the virus and prevent medical personnel from being overwhelmed. It didn't seem to bother the doctors that those businesses and their employees already have been overwhelmed by commerce-curtailment orders, suffering enormous losses, including business capital and life savings. The doctors are inconvenienced now and may be more so but they won't be losing their life savings and livelihoods.

The governor is trying to strike a balance among all these interests. Every day presents him with another difficult judgment call that upsets someone. He may be realizing that Connecticut is just going to have to tough it out and accept some casualties all around.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Deconstructing COVID-19 hysteria

“Hysteria Patient,’’ by Andre Brouillet (1857-1914)

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Amid the growing panic fanned by news organizations about the rebound in the virus epidemic, last week's telling details were largely overlooked.

First, most of the recent "virus-associated" deaths in Connecticut again have been those of frail elderly people in nursing homes.

Second, while dozens of students at the University of Connecticut at Storrs recently were been found infected, most showed no symptoms and none died or was even hospitalized. Instead all were waiting it out or recovering in their rooms or apartments.

And third, the serious-case rate -- new virus deaths and hospitalizations as a percentage of new cases -- was running at about 2 percent, a mere third of the recent typical "positivity" rate of new virus tests, the almost meaningless detail that still gets most publicity.

Recognizing that deaths, hospitalizations, and hospital capacity should be the greatest concerns, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont last week recalled that at the outset of the epidemic he had the Connecticut National Guard erect field hospitals around the state and that 1,700 additional beds quickly became available but were never used. This option remains available.

The governor's insight should compel reflection about state government's policy on hospitals -- policy that for nearly 50 years has been, like the policy of most other states, to prevent their increase and expansion.

The premise has been the fear that, as was said in the old movie, "if you build it, they will come" -- more patients, that is. The demand for medical services, the policy presumes, is infinite, and since government pays most medical costs directly or indirectly, services must be discreetly rationed -- that is, without public understanding -- even if this prevents economic competition among medical providers.

So in Connecticut and most other states you can't just build and open a hospital; state government must approve and confer a "certificate of need." Who determines need? State government, not people seeking care.

Of course, this policy was not adopted with epidemics in mind. Indeed, in adopting this policy government seems to have thought that epidemics were vanquished forever by the polio vaccines in the 1960s.

Now it may be realized that, while epidemics can be exaggerated, as the current one is, they have not been vanquished and the current epidemic -- or, rather, government's response to it -- has crippled the economy, probably in the amount of billions of dollars in Connecticut alone.

That cost should be weighed against the cost of hospitals that were never built. Maybe they could have been built and maintained only for emergency use, and an auxiliary medical staff maintained too, just as the National Guard is an all-purpose auxiliary.

Also worth questioning is the growing clamor for virus testing. The heightened desire for testing in advance of holiday travel is natural, but testing is not so reliable, full of false positives and negatives. Someone can test negative on Monday and on Tuesday can start manifesting the virus or contract it and be without symptoms.

Testing may be of limited use for alerting people that they might well isolate themselves for a time even if they are without symptoms. But people without symptoms are far less likely to spread the virus than infected people who don't feel well.

Only daily testing of everyone might be reliable enough to be very effective, but government and medicine are not equipped for that and it would be impractical anyway. Weekly testing of all students and teachers in school might be practical and worthwhile but terribly expensive, and only a few wealthy private schools are attempting it.

Contact tracing policy needs revision. Nothing has been more damaging and ridiculous than the closing of whole schools for a week or more because one student or teacher got sick or tested positive. As the governor notes, because of their low susceptibility to the virus, children may be safer in school than anywhere else.

Risk for teachers is higher but they also are more likely to become infected outside of school. They might accept the risk in school out of duty to their students, whose interrupted education is the catastrophe of the epidemic.

Meanwhile the country needs two vaccines -- one against the virus itself and one against virus hysteria.=

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Beware 'regulatory capture' of appointees to Cabinet

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Many teachers around the country are cheering the forthcoming change in national administration  because Betsy DeVos will be replaced as secretary of education. DeVos, an heiress and philanthropist, has been a fan of charter schools and a foe of political correctness. While not really expert in pedagogy, at least she has not been the usual tool of teacher unions.

But President-elect Joe Biden is encouraging teachers to expect Nirvana. Addressing them the other week, Biden noted that his wife, Jill, is a community college teacher, and so "you're going to have one of your own in the White House." Presumably that means that teachers will have "one of their own" at the Education Department as well.

Among those mentioned is U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Waterbury teacher and 2016 national teacher of the year, a Democrat who was just elected to her second term in Connecticut's 5th Congressional District.

Apart from her classroom work, Hayes has no managerial experience and her first term in Congress was unremarkable. Her recent campaign's television commercials celebrated her merely for listening to her constituents. While she won comfortably enough in a competitive district in a Democratic year, her departure for the Cabinet would prompt a special election that the Democrats might lose even as they already are distressed by the unexpected shrinkage of their majority in the U.S. House.

But then the U.S. Education Department does little to improve education. Mainly it distributes federal money to state and municipal governments, which do the actual educating. No matter who becomes education secretary, money will still get distributed and education won't improve much if at all.

Quite apart from the personalities, the big issue about the appointment of an education secretary is the big issue with other federal department heads. Why should the public cheer the appointment of an education secretary who is part of the interest group he would be regulating, any more than the public should cheer another Treasury secretary coming from a Wall Street investment bank, another labor secretary coming from a labor union, another defense secretary coming from the military or a military contractor, another agriculture secretary coming from agribusiness, and so yforth?

This kind of thing is called "regulatory capture" and it operates under both parties, though some special interests do better under one party than the other, as the cheering from the teacher unions indicates.

xxx

The virus epidemic has invited a comprehensive reconsideration of education but no one in authority has noticed.

Every day brings a change of plan and schedule in Connecticut schools. One day they're open and the next day they are abruptly converted to "remote learning" for a few days, a week or two, or a whole semester because somebody came down with the flu.

Amid all this many students have simply disappeared. Additionally, since education includes not just book learning but the socialization of children, their learning how to behave with others, the education of all children is being badly compromised.

Gov. Ned Lamont wants to leave school scheduling to schools themselves. This lets him avoid responsibility for any school's policy. But local option isn't producing much education.

The hard choice everyone is trying to avoid is between keeping schools open as normal, taking the risk of more virus infections because children are less susceptible to serious cases, or converting entirely to internet schooling and thereby forfeiting education for the missing students and socialization for everyone else.

If social contact can be forfeited, the expense of education can be drastically reduced. The curriculum for each grade can be standardized, recorded, and placed on the internet, with students connecting from home at any time, not just during regular school hours. Tests to evaluate their learning can be standardized too and administered and graded by computer. A corps of teachers can operate a help desk via internet, telephone, or email.

Much would be lost but then much already had been lost even before the epidemic, since social promotion was already the state's main education policy. Maybe the results of completely remote schooling would not be so different from those of social promotion.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Serious cases, not tests, should measure pandemic

— Photo by Raimond Spekking

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Everybody is tired of the COVID-19 epidemic, and no one is more entitled to be tired of it than Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont. It has devastated the finances of state government, commandeered its management, crippled education at all levels, and worsened many social problems.

While people admire the governor's calm and conscientious manner, they may lose patience as his plan for returning Connecticut to normal starts reversing. Of course the epidemic is not the governor's fault and he deserves sympathy, but his reversal amid fears that the epidemic is surging again should prompt reconsideration of the measures being used to set policy.

Are the governor's premises correct?

The primary measure of the epidemic, in Connecticut and other states, is the "positivity rate," the percentage of daily virus tests reported as positive. One day about week ago the rate exceeded 6 percent, setting off hysteria among news organizations, before falling the next day to a more typical 3 percent. But these figures don't mean that 6 or 3 percent of the state's population is infected. These figures mean only that infection has reached those levels among people who chose to be tested in the previous several days.

Infection levels among the entire population of the state may be lower or higher than the daily "positivity rate." Paradoxically, a higher rate might be much better. That's because most people who contract the virus suffer no symptoms or only mild symptoms and do not require special treatment even as they gain antibodies conferring some immunity. Indeed, if the governor's data is analyzed in another way, so as to calculate what might be called the serious case rate, the positivity rate loses relevance, the virus looks less dangerous, and the epidemic looks less serious.

For the eight days from Oct. 26 through Nov. 2, the governor reported 7,806 new virus cases, 50 new "virus-associated" deaths, and 107 new hospitalizations. If deaths and new hospitalizations are totaled and categorized as serious cases, the serious case rate for those eight days was only 2 percent of all new cases, substantially below the positivity rate for those days -- 3.4 percent -- and way below the one-day positivity rate that caused alarm.

The mortality rate for the week was only six-tenths of 1 percent of all new cases -- and that is measured only against known new cases. If the mortality rate could be calculated from all new cases, including the week's unreported cases -- asymptomatic people -- it likely would be much smaller.

After all, it seems that 7,649 of the 7,806 people who figured in the virus reports for those eight days -- 98 percent of them -- were simply sent home to recover, perhaps with some over-the-counter or prescription medicine.

At the governor's Oct. 26 briefing Dr. John Murphy, chief executive of the Nuvance Health hospital network, tamped down the fright. Murphy noted that treatments for the virus have gotten much more effective since the epidemic began in March -- that while there is as yet no cure, there are medicines that slow the virus and aid recovery, and that as younger people with fewer underlying health problems have become infected, the virus fatality rate and the average length of hospitalization have fallen by half.

The great concern at the start of the epidemic -- hospital capacity -- remains valid, but it deserves reconsideration too. Back then the Connecticut National Guard set up field hospitals with nearly 1,700 beds, including more than 600 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. They weren't used before they were taken down, and with fewer than 400 virus patients hospitalized in the state last week, presumably the state, if pressed, could handle at least a quadrupling of patients.

None of this argues for carelessness, like that of college students partying in close quarters without masks, nor for reopening bars, where the virus may spread most easily. But it does argue for continuing the gradual reopening that was underway before a bad positivity rate scared everybody.

Of course, news organizations delight in scaring people with the positivity rate, but they are enabled in this by the governor's stressing it instead of the serious case rate.

If the infirm elderly and the chronically ill are better protected, fear may subside and relatively normal life may be possible again.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: Weakening police immunity needs review

Poster against "detested" Police at the town of Aberystwyth, Wales, in April 1850.

MANCHESTER, Conn

Sailing against a heavy political wind, Republican candidates for the Connecticut General Assembly were heartened by the vigorous endorsements they got from police unions for the Nov. 3 election. The police this year broke away from the government employee union apparatus in the Democratic Party.

The endorsements encouraged Republicans not because police officers are so numerous but because the public fears increasing disorder and crime amid the virus epidemic and political hatefulness and violence, and the police are the public's main defense.

Since some of the recent disorder and crime arises from protests against both the real and imagined use of excessive force by police against racial minorities, some people suspect that the Republican eagerness for police endorsements is anti-minority. After all, the unions are mad at Democratic legislators and Gov. Ned Lamont for enacting the recent police-reform legislation that was advocated by minority legislators. The new law purports to diminish the "qualified immunity" officers enjoy against personal lawsuits for their conduct on the job.

Police unions do have a lot to answer for. Like all government employee unions, they strive for more than due process of law for their members. They strive to defeat accountability altogether, as with the current state police union contract, which supersedes Connecticut's freedom-of-information law by forbidding disclosure of misconduct complaints that have been dismissed by police management. Of course without disclosure of all complaints, management itself cannot be evaluated and cover-ups can always prevail.

But critics of the police have a lot to answer for as well, like their silly calls to "defund" police precisely when disorder is worsening, as if any mistake or misconduct in police work eliminates the need for all police work.

Connecticut's new police law has several excellent provisions, like its requirement for regular recertification of state troopers and its nullification of the state police contract's secrecy clause. But the law's provision on immunity is questionable because its meaning and likely effect are not clear.

The Democratic legislators from minority groups who advocated the provision called it revolutionary. But white Democratic legislators supporting the provision insisted that it wouldn't change much at all.

It's no wonder police officers are resentful, and everyone should be concerned that once again the General Assembly didn't know what it was doing except rushing to oblige the special-interest politics of the moment -- just as the legislature did with the now-infamous law requiring Eversource Energy to buy the expensive electricity of the Millstone nuclear power station, causing a spike in electric rates.

There is misconduct in all occupations. It is most important to expose and stop it in police work. But police officers are far more sinned against than sinning. If it condemns all for the mistakes or misconduct of a few, society will only imperil itself.

While the "qualified immunity" provision is demoralizing officers, it won't take effect until July next year. It should be reconsidered authoritatively as soon as the legislature reconvenes.

xxx

COLLEGE SOLUTION: Students and teachers in the Connecticut State Universities and Colleges system are complaining about spending cuts to reduce the system's huge deficit. Some say there is too much administration, but eliminating all administration won't close the deficit, which has been caused largely by declining enrollment. With personal contact sharply curtailed during the virus epidemic, college on the internet is not much fun.

Fortunately there is a solution. Connecticut could handle higher education just as it handles lower education -- with social promotion. Everyone in high school can graduate just by showing up, without having to learn anything, and while most students never master high school work, everyone gets a diploma and is happy. So why not give bachelor's degrees to every high school graduate who wants one -- waiting, of course, for a few years to elapse so the degrees look more real?

Some specialized courses still could be offered for students who really want to learn something in college, but most students probably would settle for the degree alone. The savings would be enormous, and education's main objective would continue to be achieved: mere credentialism.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: How much can Connecticut bear?

A black bear, of the only bear species found in New England

Connecticut's bear population, estimated at 800, is growing "exponentially," a newspaper reported the other day. This was a bit hyperbolic, since after 800 the next level in an exponential series is 800 times 800 -- 640,000 -- and the bear population will not be increasing that quickly.

But 640,000 bears in Connecticut will be the inevitable outcome unless the state's largely indifferent policy toward them is radically changed. That policy is simply to advise the public not to feed the animals -- to secure trash cans, outdoor grills and bird feeders and to hope the bears stop breaking into houses and attacking domestic animals. If that policy was accomplishing anything, there wouldn't be 800 bears in the state already and their population wouldn't be growing, "exponentially”"or just fast. So in another 10 years or so this policy is bound to leave most towns with many bears bumping into each other as they are shooed away from one neighborhood to the next.

State government's animal-control people are tiring of anesthetizing tagging and relocating troublesome bears, increasingly inclined to tell frantic callers just to let the animals move along and frighten someone else. But as the bear population grows, the animal-control people may be compelled to do a lot more relocations, even as the remote forests to which the bears are taken fill up with them and make them even more eager to return to less competitive neighborhoods.

The alternative to having bears everywhere is for state government to authorize a bear-hunting season, maybe even paying bounties to hunters. But just musing about hunting bears makes certain wildlife lovers hysterical.

Bears are cute -- at a safe distance anyway. A few may contribute some excitement to Connecticut's ordinarily placid suburban atmosphere. But a dozen or more in every town will not be cute. They will cause perpetual panic and frequent damage and injury.

Connecticut already is full of deer, which are cute too and often a delight to see with their fawns. Bucks, while rarely seen, can be majestic.

But deer are not a delight when they dart in front of cars and get hit, damaging vehicles and injuring their occupants, or when they munch on plantings, gardens, orchards, and farm fields.

So Connecticut has some deer-hunting seasons, and there is little clamor to repeal them. Don't try telling farmers how cute deer are. Having worked so hard to get the earth to produce, farmers can obtain state permits to shoot deer on their property year-round to protect the fruit of their labor.

Enacting a bear-hunting season would eliminate the need for much more hunting in the future and thus be far kinder to the animals in the long run. But does Connecticut have any elected officials with the courage to admit that you can't always be friends equally with people and animals?

It's not just bears. How many coyotes, bobcats, weasels and such does Connecticut really want to endure? Nature is not always warm and cuddly. It often has sharp claws and teeth.

But since Connecticut is not very good at facing up to policy failures and the special interests behind them, dozens of bears in every town may be necessary before the General Assembly and the governor enact something more in the public interest than laissez-bear.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Phony outrage against utilities; legislators: do some work

A Connecticut law requires Eversource to buy electricity from the Millstone nuclear-power plant, above, on the site of an old quarry in Waterford, on Long Island Sound, to keep the facility going.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Last week's hearings of the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority and the General Assembly gave many elected officials their chance to denounce the state’s two major electric companies, Eversource Energy and United Illuminating, over rising electric bills and the long and widespread outages caused by Tropical Storm Isaias.

But the hearings didn't vindicate the piling on done by the politicians.

For it turned out that power had been restored well within the time requirements already set by the utility authority. Additionally, news reports tended to support Eversource's contention that most of the recent increase in electric bills has resulted, first, from greatly increased customer use of electricity as people stay home because of the virus epidemic and run much more air-conditioning during hot weather, and, second, from the state law that recently took effect requiring Eversource to buy power from the Millstone nuclear plant, in Waterford, to keep the plant going.

In effect that law hid another tax in electricity bills, and as usual and as anticipated, the people, uninformed, blamed the electric company instead of their state legislators and the governor.

On top of that, the Connecticut Mirror's Mark Pazniokas reported that only 34 percent of charges on Eversource electric bills is attributable to the utility itself. The remaining two-thirds of charges come from the cost of electricity, which Eversource does not produce but buys from generators chosen by its customers; from state and federal government assessments on electricity transmission; and from state government-required subsidies for renewable energy, energy-efficiency programs and the poor.

Eversource representatives at the hearings had the political sense to take their beating calmly and not challenge elected officials over their responsibility for the high cost of electricity in the state. Of course the elected officials did not volunteer to accept their responsibility. They just wanted to strike indignant poses for the television cameras.

But at least Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, urged the utility authority to declare "force majeure" and nullify Eversource's power-purchase arrangement with Millstone, in effect canceling the new law.

Given the disproportion in responsibility here -- two-thirds for government and non-utility electricity costs and only one third for the utility stuck with collecting the money for others -- the electricity issue may fade quickly since the elected officials have already achieved so much television time for chest thumping.

xxx

END RULE BY DECREE: With the six-month term of his emergency powers to govern by decree expiring on Sept. 9, Gov. Ned Lamont is likely to ask the leaders of the General Assembly to extend them for another few months. While the virus epidemic has sharply subsided in Connecticut, recent flare-ups like the ones in Danbury and at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut could lead to a second wave, especially since many people have begun partying as if there is no longer any risk.

But the governor and legislative leaders should let the emergency powers lapse. The epidemic never was severe enough to justify suspending democratic government, and now that the epidemic has largely lifted, it is time for the General Assembly to get back to work, which it abandoned in cowardly panic in March midway through its regular session.

Legislators are far too content to leave potentially controversial policy decisions to the governor as their campaigns for re-election begin. Though the governor has ruled benignly, these decisions have been made without ordinary public discussion and without putting legislators on the record. Important issues having nothing to do with the epidemic have been neglected entirely. Even if legislators face up to their responsibility for Connecticut's high electricity costs, which is unlikely, another few months of gubernatorial rule will delay action until next year.

Ordinary legislative operations can resume safely with mask wearing and Internet proceedings. After all, isn't it ridiculous to classify supermarket employees, trash collectors and mail carriers as essential workers but not the people chosen to make the laws and evaluate government operations? Their salaries are not large but legislators should start earning them again.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Abortion and ancient vs. modern rights; racism in public health?

Interior of the U.S. Supreme Court

MANCHESTER, Conn.

For years the political left has argued that medical insurance should be disconnected from employment. The national medical insurance law known as Obamacare began the disconnection, establishing government-subsidized insurance for private-sector workers and granting employers religious exemptions from providing insurance for contraception and abortion.

Nevertheless, last week the left exploded in rage when the U.S. Supreme Court, with two of its four liberal justices joining the five conservatives, upheld exemptions granted by the Trump administration to religious employers, thereby disconnecting contraceptive and abortion insurance from certain forms of employment.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal declared indignantly: "To the women of America, the message of today should be: You have a right to control your future. You have a right to control your body and your family and your health care, and we are going to fight as long and hard as necessary to make sure that right is protected."

But neither the Supreme Court nor the Trump administration has taken those rights away from anyone. The issue of the case was only who should have to pay for the insurance coverage in question -- and cost here isn't such a big deal, since most people can obtain contraceptives and even abortions for little or no cost from Planned Parenthood or similar organizations. Meanwhile government Medicaid pays for contraception and abortion for the poorest.

Besides, as Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch wrote, if insurance for contraceptives and abortion is such an important right, the government itself could provide the insurance to everyone, not just the poorest.

The political left isn't pressing this issue out of medical necessity but rather to bludgeon people whose religious convictions the left considers backward. But the right to religious convictions, however backward they seem, is ancient and was placed in the Constitution more than two centuries ago, while the right to make someone else pay for your contraception and abortion is a very recent concept.

xxx

Now that local governments in New Haven, Windsor and Manchester, Conn., and other places have declared racism to be a "public-health crisis," what exactly is to be done about it -- and not just the supposed crisis but also the supposed racism?

Where exactly is the racism in public health? Who are the racists?

The examples offered are few and weak. Yes, the poor tend to live closer to pollution sources than the rich do, and poverty correlates with race, but housing always will be cheaper near pollution and someone always will be living closer to it than someone else.

Besides, pollution is not why the recent virus epidemic has afflicted people of color more than whites. The disparity in affliction also correlates heavily with poverty, and perhaps with biology as well, since medical authorities increasingly believe that darker skin pigment weakens immune systems by reducing the body's ability to produce Vitamin D from sunlight. (Maybe government should distribute Vitamin D pills without charge. At least that would be something.)

No, these public-health crises are being declared because cries of "Racism!" are more magical than "Open sesame!" Nobody in authority dares to talk back to such cries and attempt rational discussion, and why bother when they can be deflected with empty gestures? These days if racism is invoked as the cause of a problem, any local government might be glad to declare a crisis in flat tires, paper cuts or burnt toast.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Some colleges must reopen by the fall or die

The former Southern Vermont College, in Bennington, closed last year. It’s one of several small New England colleges put out of business by changing student demographics. COVID-19 is likely to kill more of them in the coming months.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Kudos to Brown University and some other schools that are making  dorm rooms available to house front-line workers in the pandemic emergency. With large parts of these institutions effectively closed, they have plenty of space to offer.

But what happens next September? Many colleges and universities are now agonizing over whether COVID-19 will let them safely physically reopen. If not, how many students and their parents will be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars  to take classes via the likes of Zoom? The  claims that online learning is almost as good as in-person classes are laughable.   Zoom, Skype, et al., are technically impressive but frankly as a teaching vehicle they suck (to coin a phrase) compared to in-person instruction.

So I’d guess that many students will decide to take a “gap year,” with the idea of entering, or returning to, college in the fall of 2021. The trouble is that there won’t be many jobs available for them in the interim and that some of their colleges will die as the pandemic dries up their tuition and fees revenue.

It’s not clear how Trump’s latest immigration/foreign visitor orders might affect, at least indirectly,  many foreign students at American colleges and universities, most paying full freight. The American Council on Education says that more than 1 million foreign students attend U.S. colleges and universities, contributing more than $39 billion to the economy and subsidizing American students.

In any case, a lot of these colleges must physically reopen by the fall or die.

Chris Powell: Could Feds buy fewer junk bonds and more food for the needy?

Scene in 1933 in Sioux City, Iowa, during The Great Depression

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut's crazy political left hasn't been completely sidelined by the epidemic-caused suspension of this year's session of the General Assembly. The crazy left was out in force again the other week on Prospect Street in Hartford, driving a caravan of cars past the Executive Residence, honking horns and waving signs calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to release all inmates in the state's prisons to diminish their risk of contracting the virus, the prison environment being crowded.

Yes, the demand was for the release of all prisoners, including those convicted of murder, rape, robbery, and the like -- even the murderers of the Petit family in Cheshire, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.

Almost simultaneously with that protest, Florida announced the arrest for murder of a prisoner who had been released early to protect him against contagion. He had been deemed low-risk but now he is accused of killing someone the very day after his release.

Meanwhile the left in Connecticut is silent about the plutocratic nature of the federal "stimulus" legislation, which was supported by the state's members of Congress, all liberal Democrats. Most of the trillions of dollars in relief is not devoted to sustaining the suddenly unemployed and their families or treating the sick but to restoring the value of financial assets, which are owned almost entirely by the rich. The Federal Reserve will even be buying "junk" bonds, the debt obligations of less solvent corporations, thereby protecting them against bankruptcy -- that is, protecting stockholders against losing their equity to the corporation's lenders.

The political right in Connecticut is also silent about the plutocratic nature of the "stimulus" legislation though just a couple of years ago the political right was complaining about the "corporate welfare" that was being portrayed as economic development by the previous state administration.

Meanwhile, what is happening in the country is starting to evoke The Great Depression. With restaurants closed to regular dining, farmers who have been growing food for the restaurant trade can't sell their produce and are dumping it, just as, with schools closed, dairy farmers are dumping milk because that market has disappeared too.

But as this food is being dumped, the newly unemployed are queuing at food banks, as they did last week at one in Danbury, where supplies were exhausted long before everyone in a long line of cars got something. Police had to tell people to turn around.

Could the federal government buy fewer junk bonds and more vegetables and milk and pay trucking companies to deliver it to food banks? While the extra unemployment insurance promised by the "stimulus" legislation -- $600 a week per beneficiary for four months -- should start arriving soon and reduce food insecurity, sending to food banks the food that otherwise would be discarded would make the unemployment insurance money go farther.

From the unemployed to the merely homebound, nearly everybody would like to blame someone or something in government for the country's appalling predicament. The federal government wasn't prepared and neither were state governments, and now they are dealing with it on the fly. But then the people themselves long have tolerated all sorts of nonsense from their government and hardly anyone demanded that it be prepared for an epidemic.

In any case government will never be able to do everything well. It's great at creating and distributing money and pretty good at waging war, if not winning it, but not as good at public health. So when this epidemic ends, don't throw your face masks away.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: In the COVID-19 crisis, both sides threaten liberty; block those raises!

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Fortunately it was just another brief bout of MAGA-lomania the other day when President Trump declared that he would decide when states lift the health and safety restrictions they have imposed because of the virus epidemic. Several governors, including Connecticut's Ned Lamont, quickly protested that the Constitution reserves such power to the states. New York's Andrew Cuomo protested most colorfully, noting that the president is not a king.

But amid the epidemic constitutional rights are under assault by many elected officials throughout the country, Democratic as well as Republican. Several states are imposing or threatening to impose penalties on religious services that exceed recommended attendance levels, in spite of the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of religion and assembly.

Connecticut isn't immune to such assaults. Lamont skirted the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms by telling gun shops they could remain open only by appointment. State Attorney General William Tong has joined other state attorneys general in a lawsuit to suppress publication of plans for guns that can be made by 3D printers, and this week Tong urged the federal government to criminalize such publication -- that is, to criminalize mere information, as if the First Amendment doesn't also guarantee speech and press rights.

The objection to making guns with 3D printers is that they can be manufactured without legally required serial numbers. But any gun can be, and the designs for many weapons have been published. If mere information can be criminalized in regard to gun designs, it can be criminalized for whatever government doesn't want people to know. Of course there would be no end to that.

Trump can't tell states when to lift their health and safety restrictions. But neither can Tong tell people what they can publish and read, no matter how politically incorrect it may be.

xxx

Yankee Institute investigative journalist Marc Fitch this week reminded Connecticut that as of July 1 state government employees are due to start receiving raises costing at least $353 million a year. Fitch noted that Democratic governors in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia are suspending state employee raises until the immense financial cost of the epidemic can be calculated.

So the Yankee Institute urged Governor Lamont to suspend the raises as well, but it's not clear that he can. For the raises are part of state government's current contract with the state employee union coalition, one of the many lamentable legacies of Connecticut's previous administration, and the federal Constitution forbids states from making any law impairing the obligation of contracts.

It's bad enough that the wages and benefits of state and municipal government employees have been completely protected even as the governor's own orders have thrown tens of thousands of people out of work in the private sector. For state government to pay raises while unemployment explodes in the private sector and state tax collections collapse would be crazy, more proof that nothing matters more to state government than the contentment of its own employees, whose unions long have controlled the majority political party.

But the governor is not helpless here. Using his emergency powers he could suspend collective bargaining for state employees and binding arbitration of their contracts for six months at a time or "modify" those laws to strengthen public administration during the emergency. He should do so, for as the treacle on television says, we're all supposed to be in this together.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Chris Powell: In Conn. (and elsewhere), the vast unfairness of responses to COVID-19

The last lifeboat launched from the Titanic

With all the patronizing piety they can muster, newscasters and commercials on television keep telling viewers, "We're all in this together," as if this will provide consolation and build national unity. It might if it were true.

A better service would show how, because of government policy, some people are surviving the COVID-19 epidemic comfortably while others, even though not infected, are being ruined.

Many government employees in Connecticut -- police and correctional officers, firefighters, child-protection social workers, and doctors and nurses -- are not just still working but risking their lives. Other government employees are not working as much as usual if at all but still being paid and insured though they are no more essential than many of the private-sector workers who have been furloughed or laid off because their employers have had to reduce or suspend operations.

Those private-sector workers who have lost their jobs and now face losing their housing and insurance still incur their usual tax obligations. While they will have less state income tax to pay, nobody is waiving property, sales, and gas taxes for them, and even renters pay property taxes indirectly, through their rent.

Of course, government's response to the epidemic was not calculated to penalize the private sector. But the consequences of its response are a reminder that most of the time government takes far better care of itself than it takes care of the public.

The huge if yet-uncounted cost of the epidemic requires confronting this unfairness.

While it may be hoped that the federal government will reimburse state government for most of its extraordinary expenses in the epidemic, by one estimate the epidemic still may cost state government $1.5 billion in tax revenue. That's almost 15 percent of the state budget, about half of which is spent on state and municipal government employees. How can such a deficit be closed without economizing with government employee compensation? Maintaining government employee compensation at current levels will be achieved only by reducing public services or raising taxes again, though Connecticut's high taxation already has cost it much population and business.

Since the General Assembly has been unable to convene and conduct normal business amid the epidemic, legislators should start contemplating this challenge on their own. The emergency powers claimed by Gov. Ned Lamont under Section 28-9 of the Connecticut General Statutes would enable him to suspend collective bargaining and binding arbitration for government employees, and thereby enable state and municipal government to begin to regain control of personnel expenses. But any such suspension could last for no more than six months at a time. Only regular legislation can regain that control for the long term.

Connecticut and the country won't be getting back to normal for many months. The epidemic soon may be slowed but the virus will linger into the summer and threaten to flare again when cold weather drives people back indoors.

Many smaller businesses are not likely to survive this -- not just restaurants and entertainment-oriented businesses but retailers and professional offices as well. The capital of those businesses will have been wiped out, along with the jobs they provided, and society may need years to regain income before it can support them again.

Temporarily bigger government likely will save Connecticut from the worst of the epidemic. But what remains of the state won't be able to afford as much of the government it had.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

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