Hartford is coming to resemble the boy who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy because he had become an orphan.

First Hartford stole New Britain’s minor-league baseball team by promising to build the team a stadium for $50 million, borrowing the money though the city was already broke. Then the city botched the stadium’s construction, causing huge cost overruns and forcing the team to play without a home field and to consider leaving Hartford entirely.

And now, with his city having dug itself into a deeper hole of incompetence and corruption, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin is touring the state advocating more “regionalism” — more taxes on people outside Hartford to underwrite the poverty factory’s worsening losses. (The next stop on the mayor’s tour should be New Britain to see how many ripe tomatoes he can catch.)

The mayor and other Hartford officials are confident that there never will be a penalty for anything stupid or corrupt the city does, that the city can get away with anything without ever risking its huge yearly subsidy from state government — half the city’s budget — because in state elections the city always provides a great plurality for the state’s majority party, the Democratic Party. This long has been a one-sided form of public financing of political campaigns.

But for the sake of Hartford itself and the whole state, the objective of state government should not be to keep subsidizing the city in its incompetent and corrupt operations, the worst of them required by state law, but rather to shut down the poverty factory by changing the welfare, educational, and labor policies that sustain it. For decades these policies have produced only decline in the city.

Unfortunately the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities will be no help. To the contrary, the group seems to have fallen for Mayor Bronin’s pitch. The group has appointed a committee to study “property tax and local revenue diversification and regional service delivery” and make proposals to the General Assembly next year. That means tax increases, though Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the legislature concluded this year that state taxpayers were tapped out and that spending had to be cut, especially since next year’s financial projections for state government are worse.

In any case, no new study is necessary to discover why state government and municipal governments in Connecticut are always short of money. The governor’s budget director has acknowledged that about half the state budget — first, personnel compensation controlled by government employee labor law, a system of collective bargaining and binding arbitration, and second, welfare entitlements — has been placed by statute outside ordinary democratic control and made a “fixed cost.” The “fixed cost” component of municipal budgets, personnel costs, is about two-thirds.

So financial reform for Connecticut generally must begin not with more taxes but with unfixing and reducing the “fixed costs.”

“Regionalism” is only a device for maintaining the status quo and evading the failure of poverty, educational, and labor policies.

The fastest way toward unfixing the “fixed costs” for Hartford would be reorganizational bankruptcy. This would liberate the city from its unsustainable personnel and debt obligations. It would compel city employee unions and creditors to accept a long-term stake in the city’s financial sustainability. It would caution Connecticut’s other cities that there are limits to parasitism. And it would spare the rest of the state from financing more social disintegration.

As long as it continues to subsidize Hartford and other cities in failure under current policies, state government will be only the blind enabler of that disintegration, the sort of government scorned a century and a half ago by the French classical economist Frederic Bastiat. “Government,” Bastiat wrote, “is the great fiction through which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.”