The other day I was chatting to a mate of mine who works as a ship doctor on a mega luxury cruise liner. He pointed out many interesting observations from his unusual work environ, one of which peaked my interest. 

Not surprisingly these cruises are frequented by the fabulously wealthy retirees and captains of industry, neither of which are much fodder for my keyboard, but he pointed out a category which I wouldn’t have thought of; people who were loaded, not from a large capital base , but rather who received their monthly fix from family trust accounts. 

I was debating the merit of trust accounts supplying heirs tens of thousands of dollars a month and wondering if the consequences were anything close to the original intentions of “Old Megabucks” who made the mistake of dropping dead.

The logic is simple, Old Mega had pots of cash, he didn’t want to entrust all those gilded pots to his sclerotic offspring, so he created a trust which would doll out monthly pellets to what the Sage/Preacher of Omaha calls the “lucky sperm club”. These flagellum went through a few rounds of mitosis and are now sailing the oceans in search of the effervescent happiness which seems to always depart just as they sail into port. 

Essentially the trust fund imprisons the heirs, they are unable to ever get a job since they have $50k appearing in their bank account every month which is quite burdensome since they have to find ways to spend it, and then those ways generally take the form of bad habits, be they gambling, drugs, or parasitic tag-alongs, all of which chew up cash, hence the title fiscal incontinence, these individuals are simply unable to not bleed cash since they have no concept of the value of money. 

This would all be a wonderful diatribe about lucky wombers but alas when contemplating the subject I realized that this phenomenon extends to government and corporate alike. 

The phenomenon is similar to departments with budgets they simply have to spend, the startling difference being that the individuals could stock pile the cash whereas departments are loath to do this since there next budget will be cut if they fail to spend their current budget. Top brass and shareholders would like to believe that this challenge can be mitigated by employing skilled managers, which it certainly can. So this phenomenon is particularly rife in government where skilled managers are as frequent as melanistic unicorns.<!--break-->

So these underappreciated civil servants and in the same unenviable situation as our flagellum mentioned above, with drugs substituted for black-hole-projects, gambling for daft solutions to misunderstood problems and parasitic tag-alongs for the Common Tsessebe masquerading as unicorns who fill their departments. (Tsessebe are savannah and floodplain antelope notorious for being impregnable by wisdom)

 So what’s the solution?

 For individuals the options are many, best showcased by Omaha’s no.1 citizen who has donated the bulk of his wealth to William of Gates and his superb globe changing foundation, but for governments the options are scarce, paying top dollar will possibly attract unicorns , but bureaucracy will retain the  dodo’s alone, consultants are a good alternative, except when they’re not, and the Buffetean strategy won’t work too well since you can’t expect government to donate their ill-gotten taxes to the Scandinavians in the hope that they will spend it wisely.

So until some bright whipper-snappers create a BPO (business process outsourcing) solution for governments (let’s call it a GPO) don’t expect an IPO from your non-NGO.