Your Views for December 14

For the public good

The purpose of public service is to serve the public. All the money wasted by former Mayor Billy Kenoi should have been spent on dental care for keiki and kupuna.

You old-timers remember when the state sent dental hygienists to all the schools to clean and put fluoride on students’ teeth? We all got healthy teeth.

Nowadays, “bakatare” politicians such as Kenoi act lolo and waste tax dollars getting jollies for himself and his friends. He did not understand that public money is supposed to be spent on public good — such as cleaning and fluoridating teeth.

Yes, all that wasted money could have benefited constituents instead of just him and his pals.

Sheryl Kresnak

Oahu

Will got it wrong

I am a great admirer of George Will and usually agree with him, but his column in the Dec. 8 Tribune-Herald was a serious fall from grace.

Will criticized the incoming Donald Trump administration for seeking to halt the Carrier Corp. from moving “some manufacturing to Mexico” as somehow being “the essence of socialism.”

There is a West African proverb, “Full belly boy say to empty belly boy, be of good cheer.”

Will, a well-paid columnist and TV commentator, surely has no firsthand knowledge of the hardships facing those American workers whose well-paying manufacturing jobs have been replaced by low-paying jobs in retail sales and other “service” jobs, or by no jobs at all.

Trump won the presidency by calling attention to the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs to automation and outsourcing to China, Mexico and other foreign nations. By using his bully pulpit to pressure Carrier and other manufacturers to keep manufacturing here, he is keeping a campaign promise and helping to keep productive economic activity here, as opposed to moving abroad.

It might well be that Trump’s successfully pressuring Carrier to keep these jobs here is an offense against free-market economics. But it is worth it if it will help reverse our loss of good jobs.

David Hudson

Hilo