Thank God, he left liquor stores in the "essential business" category

“Churches are right up there with basketball games and car racing: non-essential. Not like vodka, anyway,”

Lamont orders shut down of all but “essential” commercial activity.

Financial institutions, liquor stores, super-markets, pharmacies, vehicle repair shops, large construction projects and others can remain open, but with reduced staffs.

Got a roof under repair and still open to the weather? Better hope that qualifies as a “large construction project”. Refrigerator fail and your stored food spoiling? You can probably find ice at that same liquor store, so just hang on til, say, June. Or December, whatever.

UPDATE: Reader Dichotomy comments: “What about food manufacturing, packaging (for said food), warehousing, farming, fertilizing, intra-state trucking and related industries? The article is silent on these. How's Connecticut going to eat?”

Indeed. Already,nation-wide, truckers are discovering that highway rest stops are closed, so no restaurants, bathrooms or places to sleep. Are cannery workers “essential”? Cardboard box factories? Amazon warehouse workers? Until now, all these micro-decisions have been decided by the miracle of pricing, which signals demand and supply. Now, some small cabal in each state capital will do it for us, no doubt adding new permitted activities, one by one, as their critical importance is revealed by yet another shortage. It’s no accident that central planning produces shortages; it’s an inevitable outcome because no group of socialists can effectively make the billions of decisions that must be made every day in a working economy.

We’ll survive two weeks of this, probably, but not much more.