🔒Staying great will require state to change policies

While Connecticut recently has been ranked poorly in surveys of business conditions throughout the country, the state still ranks high in many measures of quality of life, including per-capita income, education, health, productivity and social mobility.

There doesn't seem to be any ranking for natural beauty of states, but as summer continues Connecticut would have to rank near the top in that respect as well, with much of the rest of the country either too hot or, as in California, tormented by wildfires and drought. No one in Connecticut is ever far from lush green woods, walking and biking trails, playgrounds and ballfields, clean rivers and streams, the ocean, and almost entirely benign wildlife. (While Florida has its good points, they don't include the alligators.)

But according to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, the public mood in Connecticut is the most sour it has been since anyone can remember, with 72 percent of respondents claiming to be somewhat or very dissatisfied with living conditions here and 80 percent describing the state's economy as mediocre or worse.

The problem is not that things are really so bad in Connecticut. Indeed, most of the rest of the world probably would be thrilled to have the chance to live here. Rather, the problem is that the state used to be even better but in recent years has been declining in important respects, as the nation itself has been.

In essence the cause is probably the old corruption of prosperity. Societies and jurisdictions become prosperous through industriousness, ingenuity, and morality or religion that makes a virtue of restraint. But having become prosperous, people start thinking that their prosperity is the natural order of things rather than the product of work and restraint, and so they begin to squander it.

In Connecticut that squandering has been done largely through government: The removal of government employee compensation from the ordinary democratic process, welfare policy that perpetuates dependence and discourages self-sufficiency, education policy that mistakes mere attendance for learning, and wealth redistribution that punishes productivity and rewards anti-social behavior.

These policies erode wealth production, and so prosperity diminishes even as the share of the population relying for its income on wealth redistribution by government grows and gains control of the political system, making nearly impossible the correction of the most expensive and counterproductive policies.

Having twice imposed big tax increases in the last six years only to see state tax revenue and living conditions decline, Gov. Malloy and the General Assembly realized this year that the tax-more-and-spend-more approach to public policy has failed. Instead they enacted a budget that more or less froze spending and taxes. But tax revenue is still falling. If Connecticut's decline is to be reversed, such restraint on spending and taxes can be only a first step.

The next steps for restoring Connecticut must be to audit the expensive mistaken policies, to question state government's priorities in budgeting, some of which are grotesque, and to begin exacting sacrifices from the government and welfare classes rather than from the classes that have been doing most of the sacrificing lately, the taxpayers and the helpless needy.

For come November, Connecticut will lose its weather advantage to Southern states, and the state's advantages in all the other quality-of-life categories will not sustain themselves; they must be nurtured by policy. If prosperity was the natural order of things, Hartford, considered the richest city in the country a century ago, would not now be among the poorest.

It was policy change, which created and concentrated poverty and social disintegration, that caused that to happen.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.