Every now and again, something that probably makes great business sense just doesn’t feel quite right in your stomach.

The Kansas Department of Revenue plans to hand over to a private bank the tedious and for most purposes dull and simple job of opening up your Kansas income tax filing envelope, sorting out the papers, sending the check you wrote to a bank to channel to the State General Fund, and forwarding the tax filing to other state employees to make sure it is accurate.

It’s called contracting-out, and it operates much the same as building roads. Those folks with the jack hammers and high-visibility vests you see in construction zones aren’t state employees. They work for construction companies that won the contract to build the road.

It’s one thing when it is putting down asphalt, or maybe roofing a state office building.

But it just has a little different feel when those contract workers—who will know your name, where you live and how much money you made last year—don’t work for the state, where there are strict rules we’ve come to expect as a matter of culture. Probably the same rules remain, yet…

The whole issue of contracting out state jobs to private businesses is something that caught fire with the results of a $3 million study for government efficiencies—read cost-savings—by outsourcing state responsibilities, by cutting services, by basically running state government like a lean business.

On a strictly business basis, it probably makes sense to out-source that basic receipt of income tax filings from Kansans…but it has a funny feel to it, doesn’t it?

This is where that wallet-to-stomach debate starts.

Sure, it’s probably cheaper to hire non-state employees, probably a step or two up from the minimum wage, to do work that the state and all Kansans know needs to be done. Everyone talks about efficiencies in government, in lowering the operating costs of the state so your tax bill will be lower.

It’s one thing when to save money state forms for nearly everything are printed on both sides of the piece of paper. But it feels a little different when someone who doesn’t work for the state, a Cabinet secretary, or the governor, or essentially, for us…is opening our income tax forms.

Maybe that feeling is because we’ve come to respect and trust those unknown, unseen state employees.

That trust is probably the biggest asset that state employees as a group bring with them to their jobs. And it is worth something to the employees and to us taxpayers who hire them. It might cost a little more to have state employees handling our tax forms, our checks, but there’s the aspect of trust.

An estimated 40 state jobs would be eliminated and who knows what happens to those state employees after the out-sourcing? Does it matter whether the laid-off workers are civil servants, or whether they are “unclassified” which means they have no basic job protections and due process rights when their jobs are ended? They might find other jobs within state government or with other agencies but essentially those jobs are gone from state employment.

The Kansas Legislature has made a lot of change in the state’s civil service law, and encouraged workers through pay hikes to abandon that job protection and right to due process, which was essentially their guarantee that if they do good work and do it right they won’t be laid off just because of who they know.

And, contracting out those tax jobs? Well, at least you don’t have to report your weight on the tax forms…

Syndicated by Hawver News Company LLC of Topeka; Martin Hawver is publisher of Hawver’s Capitol Report—to learn more about this nonpartisan statewide political news service, visit the website at www.hawvernews.com

It is ironic that the same people who would have our country defined as a Christian nation are also against government programs to help the poor and sick.  Take self-proclaimed Christian columnist Susan Brown, who in a recent HDN op-ed quoted an intellectual agnostic who condemns “social justice” as a threat to the status quo social order.  Let me remind Ms. Brown that social justice was what Jesus was all about, the exact kind of social justice her and her agnostic colleague define.  Merely reading the gospels, we see that the main things Jesus “did” were healing the sick, making sure the poor get their basic needs met and providing assistance to the disadvantaged, of which contemporary efforts by the government Ms. Brown and Mr. Hayek malign as “redistribution of wealth.”   Characterized this way, it naturally brought to Ms. Brown’s mind the story of Robin Hood, whom she accepts as a heroic character, but not for his efforts to take from the greedy aristocrats and give to the needy poor, only his chivalry and green tights. 

Ms. Brown is right about Marx hating religion.  But it wasn’t God that Marx hated, it was elites’ use of religious dogma to justify and perpetuate an immoral economic system that creates massive poverty for the masses, while channeling more and more wealth to the “righteous” few at the top.  Marx would cite Ms. Brown’s arguments as perfect modern-day examples of the “false consciousness” elites try to create, the assumption that they deserve to have thousands of times more than the rest of us and any societal effort to redistribute their precious accumulation of wealth back down to the poor and struggling is morally wrong.  It is the social injustice of this unfair system of rewards that makes redistribution of wealth necessary to have a just society, if not to enable the very poorest to merely survive. 

Marx knew that the greed that fuels runaway economic stratification fosters societal dysfunction and hypothesized that it would eventually incite revolution.  We are seeing an excellent example of this dysfunction in the pharmaceutical CEO’s working to inundate society with their profitable, and highly addictive, opioids, which have created an unprecedented epidemic that will require billions of dollars of public funds to adequately address.  Tobacco CEOs did the same thing in the 1950s and have managed to keep legal and profitable the most addictive and deadly drug of them all.  But don’t tax the very corporations making billions pushing these addictive and deadly drugs on the public in order to help the victims of their gluttonous profiteering, right Ms. Brown?   That would be immoral and bad for the economy.

Gary Brinker, Hays

Quotations are like rare stones in rings of gold. They provide insight that can move, illustrate and entertain. They can do many things like remove the wheat from the chaff, provide a cowardly lion with courage or simply clear away all the cobwebs from a darkened corner.

For a writer, quotations can add zip to a story or help provide credence to your tale. I collect quotations and some still reside in a couple manila envelopes. A few are taped on my kitchen refrigerator. Others lie scattered on the wooden floor of my middle desk drawer.

I often refer to three or four books of quotations in my office book case, and every once in a while I still take out my scissors and cut from magazines, newspapers and any other form of paper when I find one I consider especially good.

Sometimes, I even grab a pen and scrawl them down on a scrap of paper or if that’s not in sight, the palm of my left hand. I must write it down so I won’t forget. Most of these quotations are short on words but still say it quite well.

After rummaging through my collection, I offer these up to for your reading pleasure. Some are written by famous people, some not so famous.

If we take people as we find them, we may make them worse, but if we treat them as though they are what they should be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Of those to whom much is given, much is required. – John F. Kennedy

If you don’t vote, someone else is voting for you on issues that are important in your life. – Voltaire

Too much of a good thing is wonderful. – Mae West

Life is what happens when you are making other plans. – John Lennon

Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest. – Jerrold

What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better. – Wendell Phillips.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning. – Lowell

To live in hearts we leave behind, is not to die. – Campbell

Why should the devil have all the good tunes? – Rowland Hill

Men are what their mothers made them. – Emerson

No man is more cheated than the selfish man. – Henry Ward Beecher

Judge a man, not by his answers, but by his questions. –Voltaire

Tools were made and born were hands, every farmer understands. – William Blake

In youth we learn; in age we understand. – Marie Ebner-Eschenbach

An old connoisseur of wines was run over by a truck and some wine was poured on his lips to revive him. ‘Pauillac, 1973,’ he mumbled and died. – French legend

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. – Victor Hugo

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. – Edith Wharton

The best days are the first to flee. – Virgil

Nothing good is ever lost. It stays a part of a person – becomes part of one’s character. – Rosamunde Pilcher

Too late we know the good from the bad: the knowledge is no pleasure then, being memory’s medicine rather than the wine of hope. – R. D. Blackmore

John Schlageck is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas.