Terrified Republicans; Malloy intent on secrecy

Alcoholic beverage price competition, proposed by Gov. Malloy, is dead in the current session of the General Assembly. Since Sunday openings of liquor stores were legalized last year, most legislators are said to feel that liquor retailers have sacrificed enough already. The sacrifice of Connecticut’s public, which pays the highest beer, wine and liquor prices in the country on account of the state’s minimum-pricing law, is, as usual, taken for granted. The policy here is that government should drive up alcohol prices to subsidize small stores in the name of preserving jobs there, a sort of tax whose proceeds go not to the government itself but to a special interest. Of course no one would dare apply this principle anywhere else in the state’s economy. Just think of the jobs that could be created if Connecticut outlawed price competition in everything — food, gasoline, clothing — jobs created, that is, in other states.Maybe the small liquor stores can’t be blamed for defending their historic privilege; most would be out of business otherwise. And maybe Democratic legislators can’t be blamed too much either, their party being the parasitic party, the party of the government and welfare classes and everyone else with his hand out, the party determined to turn every aspect of life into political patronage. But strangely the most ardent defenders of forbidding liquor price competition seem to be Republican legislators, making a mockery of their party’s supposed belief in free markets. Here is an issue where 10,000 people are exploited for every person who benefits and still most Republican legislators are terrified of articulating the public interest.Connecticut is full of issues like that — and full of silent Republicans or Republicans whose contribution to debate is only to complain that state government spends too much before they go silent about exactly where to reduce spending and about identifying the policies that drive up costs to taxpayers only to subsidize special interests that support Democratic campaigns.This lack of intelligent opposition doesn’t just leave the Republicans as an irrelevant minority in Connecticut. It leaves Connecticut with the impression that there is no alternative to its decline — and thus it makes the Republicans most responsible for that decline.• • •While Gov. Malloy is the first Connecticut governor to champion competition in alcohol pricing, he has become the biggest opponent of the public’s right to know since the state adopted its Freedom of Information Act in 1975. The governor has weakened state government’s three watchdog agencies — the freedom of information, ethics, and elections commissions — reducing their staffs and putting them under direct control by his office. He has withheld the identities of state employees caught misappropriating food stamps. He seeks to exempt the parole board from disclosure requirements even as two prisoners given parole during his administration have been charged with murder. He opposes state Comptroller Kevin Lembo’s legislation to disclose most information relating to state financial grants and loans to corporations, grants and loans that under the Malloy administration have become a vast program of corporate welfare.The governor says reducing the staffs of the watchdog agencies is a matter of efficiency. But the financial savings here are tiny — and laughable amid the wild abandon with the corporate welfare the governor wants to conceal.Besides, the best efficiency is completely open government. It diminishes fraud and costly mistakes, and with completely open government Connecticut would not need its Freedom of Information Commission at all, since most of the commission’s work is just adjudicating complaints about information withheld in the name of the many exemptions from disclosure that have been put into the law by special interests and their tools in government.Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.