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Below are a few questions from various people I had not had time to answer.

You complain in print a great deal about the state of the state. If you are uncomfortable in Connecticut, why don’t you move?

That would be an abject surrender to the people who, in my opinion, have ruined my state. Then too, I’m too old to move. As you get older, your future shrinks. Your use of the word “uncomfortable” discomforts me. Some people – contrarians for instance – are uncomfortable with comfort. The oyster that produces the pearl is uncomfortable with the grain of sand around which the pearl is formed. People outside the news business find it difficult to imagine the joy struggle may bring in its train.

But what’s wrong with Connecticut?

Oh dear… too many lawyers in the General Assembly, too few electricians and plumbers; too many politicians, too few statesmen; too many pedagogical “facilitators” in schools, too few teachers; too many news analysts, too few reporters; too many utopian visionaries, too few hardboiled realists; too much tolerance, too little soul-cleaning contrarian rationalization; too many taxes, too few long-term spending cuts … Shall I go on?

If you had to choose among all such things one failing in particular, what might it be?

A perverse insensibility to reality brought on by political commitments, as George Orwell put it, the inability to see the horror dancing right under your nose. Some people are extremely comfortable, others less so. Orwell, a superb journalist, made himself uncomfortable by confronting the world on his own terms and refusing to substitute comforting unexamined commitments for his own less comfortable but more realistic perceptions. He went to Spain during the struggle between communist Stalinists and Franco fascists to confront the modern world and got a bullet in the throat for his pains. That bullet was his Socrates. I have always wished that journalists in Connecticut were as fearless, but only a few of them seem willing to offend a monolithic Democrat superstructure by telling the truth.

Does the past matter?

Not if you are a divorce lawyer or a political visionary, a 21^st century Pangloss. William Faulkner was asked why he wrote such long and winding sentences. He said he was attempting to capture the flow of time and the essence of memory. The past is like that. It is the enchanted dark forest of every fairytale.  And the past matters, Faulkner said, because it is not even past and never over.

Why is inflation important?

Properly understood, inflation is a devaluation of the purchasing power of the dollar. This happens when too many dollars are in the marketplace chasing too few goods, the classic definition of inflation. When the purchasing power of the dollar is lowered through excessive spending and the excessive printing of dollars by the national government, the cost of producing goods increases, and that cost is widely distributed throughout the marketing chain – leading to inevitable price increases. If it takes more dollars to purchase a dozen eggs in 2024 than it did in 2020, the producer of eggs must raise the price of his goods to recover the cost incurred. This is the way the market works, and politicians who pretend that large corporations are increasing prices because they are greedy are willfully misleading the public. Prices in a free market – that is, a market undistorted by excessive tax burdens and regulations – are fixed by the laws of supply and demand. When demand rises, largely because the public is buying the product, and supply is restricted, limiting the availability of the product, prices rise. Every school child who has operated a lemonade stand is intimately familiar with the law of supply and demand. Politicians feign ignorance of such realities in order to fool most of the public most of the time. Mass deception in the era of neo-progressivism is a political necessity, a survival technique that shifts political responsibilities to fanciful targets such as greedy grocers, whose profit margin is… what... 2.2 percent?

So then, in less than a hundred words, what’s to be done?

People have to learn all over again how to think for themselves, always a liberating experience. Not to think, to drift forward on a mechanical tide of inevitability, is to give oneself over to the force of others who do not care to preserve our liberties of mind and spirit, the guardians of freedom. It is easy – indeed effortless – to float with the stream, G.K. Chesterton reminds us: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” To understand that “the moment” belongs to the living is a revolutionary act.

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