Where Has All the Money Gone?

Tourist: "When I come to Hawaii each year, it seems to me like there are more and more homeless people than previously, and I was wondering if we could contribute $1 a day to solve the problem?"

Christi, it is awfully nice of you to offer to contribute $1 a day for the homeless, but the problem in Hawaii (as most places in the US), is that that money will be diverted to pay higher compensation to the stronger organized (union) government workers -- who have deemed themselves to be the truly underprivileged, deserving and needy, despite all being compensated in the upper half of incomes.

That is the "homeless" problem -- that those who are better off, take all they can, because they are in an advantageous (stronger) position to do so, and so the homeless (and everybody else), fall further behind. That is the essential problem of societies in failure vulnerable to the ensuing chaos and anomie from the Big One.

Where do you think the money for the homeless, water, sewers, roadways, young and elderly is going?

Government workers no longer work to serve the greater public good but now see it as the vehicle to serve themselves primarily -- and as was revealed in the furloughs of previous years, think that their compensation should not even have to be related to actually showing up and performing that job -- it is now just their entitlement, because that is what their labor monopoly and lawyers, can secure for them above the law, fairness and any other principles that governs healthy societies.

So even, and maybe especially the rich, realize that you can't be the One with all the money when everybody else has none -- because that is the ultimate precarious position in which everyone is one's enemy. But it is not so easy to see when a large class of people (association), obtains a position of trust (to serve the public, greater good), and then betrays that trust in only serving themselves, as though that was the only good, and rationalizing that if it weren't themselves, everybody else would do it too -- if they had the position and status to do so.

And thus the public is betrayed by the very people who should be serving them -- but have merely learned to play the game and milk the system better than everybody else. Not surprisingly, their jobs now consist primarily of lobbying for even more -- at the legislature, media and public forums, with the disadvantaged as the pretext -- but only for their own job security and increased benefits.

That has become the great problem of these times in contemporary USA -- of which Hawaii is unfortunately at the forefront -- justifying it as "the price of paradise," which of course is nonsense for the greed, corruption and lack of choices that is the topic of every conservation in Hawaii.

That society has already failed -- and is just treading water until the Big One in whatever form it comes, to reveal that there is no infrastructure -- and certainly, none of moral sensibilities, besides "getting more than their fair share," as the principle that guides all conduct, until the Big One changes the rules of the game -- and then the predator become the prey.