About as close as Connecticut tends to get to embracing the notion of “smaller government” is to elect short politicians.
While the theoretical “marketplace of ideas” shakes, rattles and rolls with all manner of “limited government” rhetoric and reality, Connecticut toddles along in its union-laden, regulation-crazed way, comforted by a “progressive” understanding that we are all clueless victims in need of a vast array of social service agencies populated by union-represented state employees.
There is a small Libertarian Party presence in Connecticut that makes creative noises about whacking; there is a tiny “Tea Party” representation sufficient to sponsor a tea party.
The Republicans, who only come out at night and do most of their plotting in underground caverns, occasionally offer up some government-shrinking ideas.
All in all, Connecticut does not suggest itself as the national laboratory for shrinking government.
Is there a credible strategy to achieve modest government whacking in Connecticut? Is there at least a theory, if not a practice, that could produce a comfort level sufficient to shrink the size and cost of a government that grows larger and more expensive, in the face of stagnant population growth?
The best approach might be privatization — putting government services out to bid. In its most benign form, privatization doesn’t theoretically reduce government services. It reduces somewhat government responsibilities, from the obligation to actually deliver services, to a somewhat more limited job of being the purchasing agent for goods and services.
Privatization is more common in states and counties and cities less in love with public-sector labor unions than in a place such as Connecticut — and, to be sure, one of the subtexts of privatization is that you are freed of the obligation to use a labor force whose salaries and benefits are artificially inflated.
In some clever, hostile-to-privatization jurisdictions, public-sector employees and their unions have been invited to bid on the very work that is being opened to competition.
Privatization cheerleaders are all atwitter at the recent appointment of Steve Goldsmith as a senior staffer to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Goldsmith, most recently at Harvard’s Kennedy School, is a former mayor of Indianapolis and one of the early pioneers of privatizing almost every government service he could get his hands around.
It was Goldsmith who popularized the idea that if you could find a government service being provided by almost anyone in the Yellow Pages, put the contract out to bid.
The most murky of recent privatization efforts in Connecticut was the farming out of highway rest stops in a 35-year deal with a private vendor who will pretty up the sites, manage them, and keep the money.
As is her way, Gov. Rell did not champion this effort as a “smaller government” initiative, but as a financial solution to a maintenance nightmare. Even the Democrats have not gone publicly anti-privatization on this particular project, instead pretending to be concerned that on a financial basis, the long-term deal is not good for the state.
The more dramatic experiments floating around the State Capitol involve either the shuffling off of Bradley International Airport to a semi-autonomous transportation authority — or, more dramatically, putting the creature up for sale.
Neither approach will gain much traction, at least in the short term. There are jobs and contracts and state employees and all manner of back scratching involved with publicly owned airports that are not easily dispensed with.
But, even the idea of such a transfer of responsibility can be viewed as “progress” of a sort, in a state that remains unfriendly to market solutions to much of anything at all.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.