Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Governor Ned Lamont, we are told by Christine Stewart of CTNewsJunkie , is about to bump heads with SEBAC union heads authorized to form contracts with Connecticut’s executive department. No need to wonder whose head will break first. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt solved the problem of the union organization of federal workers in 1937 when, approached by Luther Stewart, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, to allow collective bargaining, Roosevelt nixed the idea for the best of reasons. Roosevelt wrote to Stewart , “… the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people,...

During the Abe Lincoln canvass, candidates for the presidency were much interested in bonding emotionally with the working class. They were even more interested in displaying their military badges and ribbons. At one point, Lincoln became so put-off by the imposture that he openly ridiculed, as only Lincoln could do, the grand military hustle of the Democrats. Lincoln’s own military service in the Black Hawk War, three enlistments of about 30 days each, was refreshingly free of heroism. Following the hostilities, Lincoln’s horse was stolen. He and his companion, George Harrison, were compelled to walk and canoe back to New Salem. Lincoln, of course, was born in a log cabin, though he managed to ease his way into a comfortable middle class berth as a fairly prosperous lawyer. George Washington -- net worth: $525 million, a cool, half billion in in today’s mostly worthless currency – rates as America’s most wealthy president.   Next in line is President Thomas Jefferson, n...

“For the first time in a 40-plus-year career in politics,” the past Editorial Page Editor of The Day of New London, Morgan McGinley , tells us, “Lowell P. Weicker Jr. won't vote in Connecticut this fall. Weicker, 76, and his wife Claudia have moved from Essex to Charlottesville, Va., where the papers from his career as a United States senator will be housed in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.” When British actor Rex Harrison moved from England to Switzerland (because the taxes were too punishing in England), he was asked by the British Press why he was leaving. “Chocolates,” Harrison said. Switzerland produced better chocolates. The redundantly wealthy Weicker has moved from Essex, Connecticut to Charlottesville, Virginia because the University of Virginia, according to Mr. McGinley, has arranged to house Weicker’s papers without charging him. And they have better chocolates.

My wife and I and Jake, her guide dog, are back from a short vacation in Florida, where we visited with her sister and a friend who moved out of Connecticut several years ago to be near his son. The many Nutmeggers we met in Naples and Vero Beach put me in mind of a story told about Rex Harrison, the famous British actor who moved to Belgium in order, some supposed, to escape Britain’s high taxes. Why did he move to Belgium, Harrison was asked by an aggrieved BBC reporter. Harrison smiled broadly and said he liked the chocolates. Florida is not known for its chocolates, but it has become a haven for the tired, wretched and increasingly poor Nutmeggers who like its Homestead Act. The Homestead Act is a bar to the kinds of increases in Connecticut property taxes that now threaten to impoverish all classes in the state but the very wealthy, whose fixed incomes are generous. They may not be so for long; our ever voracious legislature has been diddling for some time with a millionaire's...