Games in Government

Your report on partially hidden or disguised remunerations provided senior county employees by a very generous Board of Supervisors trumpets the old saw, “To him who has shall be given; from him who has not will be taken away.”

Writing as one of the peasants without the advantages of a county job, I deplore the creative game playing of the Office of Personnel and the Board of Supervisors. The former spends many highly paid hours dreaming up new forms of benefits for county leaders, and a majority of the board unctuously votes the requests for civil servants and the thank-you bonuses for the supervisors--with John Flynn invariably objecting, it should be noted.

The deterioration of morality in our nation is nowhere more obvious than in the preoccupation of many rulers with getting what they can from the public purse. The fact that private associations within our society tirelessly manipulate their constituents to pressure government to collect goodies for themselves highlights the cancerous greed in our humanity without excusing the various treasury raids by coalitions of senior bureaucrats and elected controllers of public money.

Edward Shuck

Thousand Oaks