Hong Kong Needs an Army

Hong Kong maintains something called the Employees Retraining Board (ERB) which is sort of a semi-governmental organization that was, I think first set up several years ago to help uneducated former factory workers make the arduous transition into new careers as security guards and convenience store clerks. That mission was achieved, I guess sometime ago to a resounding yawn of applause.

While not officially a part of the government the ERB does receive a huge pile of money from the government from the tax on domestic helper's wages. The weasels who control that money, quite understandably don't want to see their cushy, immorally high paid jobs come to an end. Talk about corruption. The government collects a tax and then hands it over to retired civil servants who then spend most of it on their own salaries while collecting a pension that is already many times the average income and spend the rest on salaries of professional do-gooders with social work degrees from HKU. As far as I know, there is no oversight on how this money is spent or any accountability as to whether the ERB actually accomplishes anything.

Machiavelli said that the major purpose of any government is to perpetuate itself. This organization has just proved him correct because they've just expanded their client pool by announcing that they are going to start retraining 15 year old school dropouts since the out of work factory workers have moved on or died off. Excuse me, how can you "retrain" a 15 year old? I am assuming that the ERB isn't talking about potty training. These little punks don't need retaining. They need to get a life.

These are punks, probably drug users who dropped out of school to play mahjong when they were 14, worked in a dai-pai dong until they were 18 (the ambitious ones anyway the others played video games or sprayed graffiti under bridges) and then complain that they have no career opportunities when they are 20. No fake! And now I am supposed to pay a tax for retraining these little creeps?

I have an idea.

The government should start a military unit and put these little slackers in it. Any brat who drops out of school before form 5 or who gets 6 zeros on the HKCEE and has an IQ over 85 should be required to spend the next 6 years in the HK military. Once they get trained up then the HK government could volunteer them for duty as peace keepers in a UN force, perhaps in East Timor or Darfur. Hey, HK could even join the war on terror and send them to Iraq. Assuming they survive after 6 years of military service they'd be mustered out having learned to read, bathe and gained a job skill of some sort depending upon their assignment. More than that, the percentage of thugs who drop out of school would plummet to nearly zero.

I'd even be willing to have my tax dollars to pay for their unit tattoos.

Until Next Time
Fai Mao
The Blogger who thinks every child should learn to march