It's "1984" All Over Again

Ronald Reagan was famous for saying, "What confounds us is not what we know we don't know, but what we know with absolute certainty -- that isn't true."

That's probably the most profound insight into the workings of the American mind and psyche -- that people who are so certain they know, never bother to find out, never bother to question, but accept what they have been told by some authority what the truth is, and never questioning that authority.

Probably the most egregious examples, are all the pronouncements by the trade associations -- that their word is the authority, and to listen to no other. And so we've come from a free market of ideas, goods, services -- to one in which, self-serving bureaucratic authoritarians, demand that one can listen to no other, consider no other, and most people think there is not the slightest wrong in that.

Thus, "education" must serve the education professionals and ensure that they have top priority for all the money available for the community welfare -- and their salaries, benefits and pensions, should be increased before any services for which they were employed for, can be delivered. In the case of the Hawaii Department of Education, providing raises to its employees and retirees, left no money available for them to actually hold classes -- because there was no money "left over" to do so.

Something is entirely wrong with these priorities -- that the government has been co-opted to serve only its own government workers -- instead of the people at large. They still say they are doing it for the children or the poor -- except that now there is no money left over to do so, after paying themselves first, whether they do any work at all. That is simply their entitlement -- and beyond that, nothing else matters.

Obviously, government as that, no longer serves the people, but has become an oligarchy to serve only a few -- in some high-sounding service of the people, which they are convinced they have "sacrificed" for everyone else. And the media will do propaganda for them -- even have those salaries paid by those trade associations to do so.

And nobody will question that authority and right to do so.