Hillary & Goebbels up a tree ... K - I - S - S - I - N - G

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Richard Dennis

In just 10 seconds that night, Miami-Dade County lost $2,000,000+ of taxpayer money.

I was driving a bus back then, in Miami & Miami Beach. Before I started my own business in 1994, I was a government employee for 16 years. Saw some really weird stuff.

You can extrapolate, over many years, many agencies, many counties, 50 states ... and then exponentialize it with the federal leviathan.

Thru it all, this principle holds true:

A healthy percentage of government employees do not care about our money. At all.

I have seen them do all manner of idiotic things. Lose our money, spend it on Lotto tickets, waste it, gamble it away, buy gold furnishings for their home bathrooms ... because so long as they are not caught by someone who actually cares, it does not matter. When the money is gone, they just take more. That is how government works.

That is not how business works. If you don't shepherd your resources responsibly in business, you go bankrupt.

But the guy who's been thru that, who knows that, who knows that money is a valuable resouce to be protected? He's too "dangerous" to be president.

Instead, we need to elect the proven crook?

Sorry. I got sidetracked. Here is my little story.

In 1982, Dade County was testing its brand-new Metrorail system, before opening it to the public.

And one night, in the wee small hours of the morning, a "testing" driver crashed his train. He drove into a station at maybe 2 am and crashed into an empty train parked at the station.

Each train cost $1 million. Both were totalled. Two million bucks down the drain in 10 seconds.

The police came. MDTA investigators came. The driver was beside himself. They sent him home.

Next morning, someone called him in for a blood test.

Result? Quaaludes, marijuana, LSD, and 2 or 3 others I can't remember.

The County, of course, decided to fire this moron. But he called his union rep, and they put a stop to that.

They argued that he was so distressed by the accident, no doubt caused by some equipment failure, that he went home and took all those drugs to calm his nerves. And since the supervisors had not sent him immediately to have his blood analyzed, what could they say?

So this drug-addled government train driver wasn't fired. Instead, he was given a desk job, at a pay increase, after destroying $2,000,000 worth of trains.

That is how government works.

Which reminds me ... the way Metrorail had been sold to the public was, it would run 9 miles north to downtown Miami, along US1, helping relieve the incredible traffic into and out of town on the south side. And then it would extend about 11 miles on the north side up to the Broward County line, running between Biscayne Boulevard and I-95, helping relieve the incredible traffic into and out of town on the north side.

That is how it was sold to the public. And if that had been what they did, it would have been a financial boondoggle, of course. Never any doubt about that.

But at least it would have made some sense for taxpayers. It would have given some relief to a million+ commuters on the major north-south downtown Miami traffic arteries.

So that was the system the voters approved.

But that is NOT the system the County delivered.

They delivered the south end as promised. But on the north, the politicians (mostly D's, of course, but a couple of idiot R's, too) sent the north section of rail winding here and there thru NW Miami to Hialeah, thru every poor black and hispanic neighborhood they could find, because those elected reps wanted credit with their voters.

Hillary would have loved it. Trump, the biz guy, would have left the rail straight north and south, where it would have served many more people and taken in much more revenue.

When I was training to drive the bus in 1978, one of the trainers very proudly told us something I have never forgotten. He said that of every dollar spent to run the Metro Dade Transit System, 13¢ came from the farebox, from the people who used the system. So 87¢ of every dollar came from people who did NOT use the system.

And most of those people weren't in Miami, or even in Florida. Most people financially supporting our Metro Dade Transit System were thousands of miles away, working their jobs, running their businesses, having the money they earned siphoned off to Miami by the U.S. Federal Transit Administration.

THAT is how government works. As Jimmy Durante used to say about stories, "I got a million of 'em!" But what's the point?

If the US is to survive, we have to control the leviathan sometime. It sure won't be Obama. It sure won't be Hillary.

Trump? Maybe he's a start.

Thanks Richard - I always enjoy reading your writings...

I agree government is inefficient and maybe it being run more like a business could make it more efficient. I ain't no expert in that.

There are probably cases to be made both ways. I think it might not be that simple too.

My late father was an economist, and one thing he talked to us about (when he got into "economics mode") was something called "natural monopolies."

Some services are best run as a monopoly. For example take the water supply. Let's say it is run like any business with competitors. It would mean that any business could run water pipes to your house. You could have 10 different companies running different water pipes to your house. This would not be efficient at all. That's why the water supply is called a "natural monopoly."

Now say that it is run as a private business with no restrictions. What's to stop the water company from charging you an exorbitant rate for your water? Because it's a "natural monopoly," if there were no government controls - you'd probably be paying exorbitant rates for your water. That's one example where running a government can be different from your "usual" business.

Just thought I'd throw that in there... I always enjoy your posts.

Best wishes,

Dien