What's Going On Elsewhere (Oregon)

You people are starting to believe your own lies, deceptions, manipulations and propaganda.

It was the public employee unions that were well-financed and used the fears of gutting education, public safety, and the human services safety net to instill the fears in the public, while the largest contributor to the resistance of the taxes against the "rich," were logically the grocers who have a high volume business but earn less than 5 cents on the dollar -- but now are taxed on the gross receipts.

The only other state that taxes all business activity at the gross instead of just at the retail (sales tax) is the Hawaii General Excise Tax, which largely accounts for the cost of everything being 4 times what it is everywhere else -- because every business tacks it on at every level as a multiplier effect.

Already there is talk among the public employee unions in every state that that is the "successful" tactic to use in promoting their own salary and benefit increases -- that the people won't mind if it is perceived as only a tax against the rich (a few), rather than in fact, the most entrepreneurial, and not necessarily the rich. In fact, in poor economies, they are even likely to be operating at a loss -- and then being taxed at the gross to exacerbate their woes.

Such is the case with the farmers who have to be big time players or they can't be players at all because they also have to do things on massive scale or it's not worth doing at all. That's very different from the wage earners who don't have to take a loss ever -- because they get paid upfront, before any profit is made. So there is this huge distinction, in being an enterprise (corporation), and just being a wage earner -- guaranteed their income regardless of whether they're highly productive or not.

That is particularly true of the public employee unions where the median of government workers is significantly greater (double) than the median for the population at large, and thus composing the ranks of the upper half of the socio-economic makeup, yet claiming they are the poor and underprivileged because they are not making as much as the top 2% -- as though everybody is entitled to be in that top 2%, of anything, much less income and wealth.

We don't expect that of athletic competitions, or talent contests, but somehow, a few self-designated elitists, think that their worth is comparable to Bill Gates -- if they weren't sacrificing themselves to work for practically free in a government sinecure.

And while the government does perform many essential services, it should be eliminating many problems rather than overseeing them growing out of control -- and requiring even more experts at higher guaranteed salaries while these problems become perpetual.

Good solutions invariably eliminate the problems, rather than perpetuating them, and increasing the need for more of the solution, which then becomes the problem. Education is a big one -- in which the solution shouldn't be the need for evermore education -- endlessly. At some point, the student needs to know how to be their own teacher, rather more dependent on evermore costly education to tell them the political correctness of what to do -- providing job security and wealth for a new entitled class.

When Robin Hood used to steal from the "rich" to give to the "poor," what modern liberals like to ignore, is that he was addressing the entitlement and injustice of "government" (authority) to take whatever they wanted from the people, which is also the revolt against a "taxation without representation" -- which is one group deciding that another should provide for them, which is something different from people deciding to tax themselves equally for their mutual benefit.

In such a plan, some will do better than others. But then to change the rules so that those who do, now have to pay more because they do because others will gang up on them otherwise, is very troubling.

Terminator 2010: Revolt Against the Machine

You might not read about it in your newspapers, or hear about it on the broadcasts, but a funny thing happened on the way to the Senate, for a candidate that in any other time and circumstances, would have been coronated by the mainstream mass media, weeks before the election -- as they did in last year's presidential election.

What has happened since then that the lock the status quo politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats had thought they had consolidated, dissipated into Napolean's army retreating out of Russia?

It was a revolt against the party machine -- and that socioeconomic hierarchy they thought they had cemented with the election of the Ultimate Organization Man -- who owed his success not to his own merits, but the power of the old status quo machinery to determine what people thought and did. In that sense, it was the first election of the second decade of the new millennium -- when humankind fought back against the ever-increasing domination of life by the social organizational machinery designed by the technocrats to keep themselves perenially at the top -- which includes the university professors, school teachers, government bureaucrats in every walk and reach of life., when the question was asked, "How can you people get along without us (the politically correct) telling you what to do and think?"

It really signals a great awakening that maybe people don't need increasing government to run and live their lives -- and that is something, most people can better do for themselves -- if they simply are given all the information -- and not just the information determined by the public information officers and ministries lobbying for their own greater job security.

That is a direct consequence of the Information Revolution and the Age of Information -- that people come to feel confident they can make those decisions for themselves, instead of always being told what to think and do, by those who self-proclaim and designate themselves to know what is best for everyone else.

That was the Revolt Against the Machine as the year unfolded in 2010.

The Problem of the Unions and Their Domination of Hawaii

As one of the first labor organizers of caregivers, I developed some rare insight into the present labor arguments -- and that is that the unions are almost wholly responsible for these injustices, and not management and business.

A writer points out the injustice of her teaching many classes and working hard, while her own mother does virtually nothing, at a high pay. That's not what any business wants -- but what union rules produce.

Many people will be surprised to know, the great inequalities produced in rewarding seniority over merit, is not at the insistence of business -- which would rightly want to reward merit.

Instead, this injustice is institutionalized so that the labor organization can exploit those at the lowest end of the hierarchy, who especially in Hawaii, will end up doing all the work, while ten others with greater seniority will do almost nothing for two to five times more.

So instead of paying all the workers for that job the same, each exploits every other according to their seniority -- so that the people most exploited, who will be the ones advocating for greater compensation and justice -- but that inequality and injustice, is the exploitation by their own "brotherhood," and not management or the public.

They would want fair and equitable treatment of all those doing the same work. The same work is actually harder work for those less experienced, so they would rightfully not get paid less, but justifiably more. And those who are more experienced, skilled and suited for that occupation, would reap greater benefits because that job is easier and enjoyable for them -- is the greatest benefit of that job -- all things being equal, why would they want to do anything else?

The problem with any occupation, is recruiting new people into that field to raise the gene pool of talent -- and not keeping those who can only do that job, and would not do another job at equal or even more pay -- because they would be ill-suited for doing so.

But many in Hawaii have observed work projects in Hawaii where nine workers are standing around supervising the one guy with least seniority doing all the work. That is caused by the union and not the preference of management -- or the taxpayers.

And then if all are compensated equally and fairly, those who want more beyond what everybody else is getting because of true collective bargaining, should obtain that in the free market, because their competence is proven in a fair market.

Why You Should Grow Your Own Food

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there wasn't one million people concentrated anywhere -- even New York, Tokyo, London.

Supporting a large population requires advanced technology -- to remove waste, for one thing -- which modern day Hawaii still hasn't figured out.

The major rationale for everybody to raise their own vegetable patch -- including turning their yards into gardens for that purpose, is that people in Hawaii have lost touch with reality and thus make the most absurd BS statements thinking they'll never be called to account -- that there was this marvelous mythical Hawaiian culture thriving in the Pacific -- that has left no traces of any enduring infrastructure -- like the aqueducts of Rome, pyramids of the Aztecs, cathedrals of Paris, Great Walls of China, etc. Their closest cousins, the inhabitants of Easter Island, have vanished from the planet, with no traces of their existence, except for identical large stone images that athropologists are at a loss to determine for what significance and purpose.

The soil in Hawaii is barren in most of the Islands because people don't know how to compost and nurture anything -- and the people think the only thing they can do is sign wave their legislators for more money -- as the only thing they can do -- which is to manipulate other people's thinking.

Thus, they need the actual experience of producing something tangible instead of BS -- which when they are caught at it, humiliates them in the company of thoughtful people.

I doubt that most people will be able to produce their own food for complete self-sufficiency-- but they learn to reconnect with the basics, of caring and nurturing something -- instead of relying on their congresspeople to "Give them more money."

Hawaii has no industry or productivity -- which has even become a bad word to the many bureaucrats and union people who insist that there is no such thing as productivity and merit -- and all that there is, is the ass-kissing and overconsumption without consequences.

It's a tribal, pre-industrial mentality -- that can't support a large population without breeding rats faster than people and homelessness. What do you do with the problems of crowding? Today there are high rises, which is something different from a million in grass shacks -- with no sewage system.

A productive society is what an education system should be producing -- instead of countless drones who think they should demand something for nothing, and are totally reliant on the productivity elsewhere.

People living in sophisticated, urban areas have also gone back to vegetable gardening as a first step to reconnecting with the basics of life. And that's the most important thing to get out of that cultivation and activity -- that relationship with cause and effect, industry and productivity -- and not just simply, who can eat the most plate lunches and get away with the greatest BS.

It is relearning the joy of doing something, and the lessons of productivity and personal responsibility instead of just going to the motions without any consequences, of making a real, tangible difference.

You're not learning the great lessons of life in the schools. You can't get something for nothing -- only demanding, and never supplying -- learning to go through the motions and look busy, as the only jobs they'll know.