G.E.: HEY, WE DIDN’T THINK OUR INCESSANT CRIES FOR BIGGER GOVERNMENT AND MORE REGULATION WOULD EVER IMPACT US! Will Connecticut’s High-Tax, Union-Friendly Policies Turn Out GE’s Lights?

You may remember a 2014 Gallup poll that had Connecticut as the new Dodge City, the place that half the residents wanted to get out of. Well, many are leaving, eroding the tax base. And the next may be Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric.

Headquartered in Connecticut since 1974, GE is evaluating whether to stay or leave after being hit with a big tax increase. A decision is expected next month.

Companies and people are leaving the state because taxes have been jacked up steeply in recent years under the one-party rule of Democrats. Further hikes are inevitable, given looming budget deficits, driven primarily by escalating annual contributions to the state’s overgenerous and seriously underfunded public-sector employee pension fund and unfunded health care obligations.

The Yankee Institute, a policy think tank in Hartford, just published “$60 a Second,” a study documenting a $3.8 billion erosion in the individual income tax base from 2011 to 2013 as emigrants took more out of the state than immigrants brought in.

Throughout its history, GE has been tireless champion of bigger and bigger government. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2008’s Liberal Fascism:

A year before FDR took office, [Gerard Swope, then-president of GE] published his modestly titled The Swope Plan. His idea was that the government would agree to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could collude in order to adjust “production to consumption.” Industry would “no longer operate in independent units, but as a whole, according to rules laid out by a trade association…the whole supervised by some federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission.” Under Swopism, as many in and out of government called it, the state would remove the uncertainty for the big-business man so that he could “go forward decisively instead of fearsomely.”

The aforementioned Jeffrey Immelt served as Obama’s “Jobs” “Czar” during his first term. Until GE divested itself of NBC in 2013, it owned MSNBC, which served as a megaphone to espouse this corporatist worldview every day; in recent years, CNBC has also championed the Gleichschaltung, hence the surprise by some when the seemingly pro-business channel attacked small-government-espousing GOP presidential candidates with hammer and tongs during its infamous recent Republican primary debate.

Funny though, when it’s time to pay for bigger and bigger government, GE takes Conquest’s First Law of Politics — “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” — rather seriously.

As for GE being surprised at having to pay more taxes and suffer more business-unfriendly regulation, well, that’s usually how it works out, as GE is discovering the hard way. Or as the Libertarian Party noted at the height of MSNBC-approved Occupy Wall Street:

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