David Shapiro is a grandee of political commentary in Hawaiʻi, and he’s a sensible man. His Sunday column in the Star-Advertiser asks the correct question: not whether Sylvia Luke broke the law, but whether what she is accused of doing was right.
On that question he and I agree. The alleged facts are ugly. Ordinary people do not get private steakhouse dinners with the lawmaker who writes the budget. If the indictment is true, something went wrong that no statute fully captures.
Shapiro asked the right question. It’s his answers that went in the water.
One caution first, because all of us forget it: An indictment is an accusation. Mrs. Luke has pleaded not guilty, and neither side has shown its evidence to a jury. Shapiro writes as if the verdict were in. I will try to hold that line even where he didn’t.
His column ends with three reforms, offered in a single closing sentence: ban campaign donations by government contractors, fund elections publicly, and impose term limits on legislators. Each sounds right, but none withstands a close look.
Start with the contractor ban. It sounds like it aims at the man with the paper bag. It lands instead on the construction company owned by its employees — hundreds of working men and women who would lose a right the rest of us keep, for the crime of building the state’s schools. In a state where government touches nearly every trade, the ban would silence a large share of the working public, while the truly determined would route around it in a week.
There is also something the ban would cost us. The people who know which legislators understand government are usually the people doing business with it. Their interest and their knowledge travel together. That is not a scandal. It is how knowledge works.
Public funding of elections has a different flaw. Money in politics behaves like water, and this reform is a dam with no spillway. Campaign donations have one virtue: they are reported. You can look them up. Push the money out of campaigns and it does not disappear; it flows into advocacy groups and foundations that report nothing at all.
We would be trading a visible sin for an invisible one, which is rarely a good trade. It is a curious feature of this debate that some of the loudest calls for transparency come from groups that would find it awkward to publish their own donor rolls.
Then term limits. Here, spare a thought for the freshman legislator. He is handed a budget the size of a phone book, written in a dialect no one speaks at home, and told to oversee it. Some members haven’t found their way through it after eight years. This says less about them than about the scale of the thing they were asked to manage.
Now add term limits, and you guarantee a legislature that is always lost. Across the table sits a lobbyist who has worked in policy for 20 years. Our legislator arrived Tuesday, must leave by Thursday, and wonders privately who will employ him Friday. It is not obvious that this arrangement favors the public. The revolving door does not slow down when you shorten the terms. It spins faster.
Conservatives have a slogan of their own. “Drain the swamp” fits on a bumper sticker, and the swamp is real enough. Vast stretches of government are wasteful, and the coziness of agencies and industry is no fantasy. But a slogan is not a plan, and the swamp is never only other people.
A contractor’s self-interest is rational, but that does not make it innocent. A man can want a contract and want it too much.
Shapiro’s three reforms and the conservative’s slogan share a single mistake: each locates corruption somewhere outside the human heart. But corruption is a market. It has buyers, sellers, and a prize. Reforms that rearrange the buyers and sellers leave the prize sitting on the table.
The self-government Americans still feel wistful about existed before there was a permanent government to speak of. At the founding there was no standing army worth the name and almost no one drawing a federal paycheck. Government was something citizens did, not an establishment they petitioned.
Hawaiʻi sits at the opposite pole. Our permanent government is the biggest industry in the Islands — bigger than tourism, bigger than real estate — so the prize for capturing it is enormous.
This prize takes the form of contracts, grants, and loans. It takes the form of state land leased for a dollar a year. It comes as bond-funded infrastructure projects that cost billions. It means exemption from regulation for my company, and red tape choking yours.
And all this is paid for by taxing the people.
Israel was warned about this. When the people demanded a king, Samuel told them what a king does: “He will take the best of your fields and vineyards... he will take a tenth of your grain... and you shall be his slaves.” They wanted the king anyway. We generally do.
The warning was not against having a government. Government has a real but limited role to play. The warning was against handing the king everything and then expecting him to take nothing.
So here is a reform Shapiro didn’t list. Shrink what the state controls, and watch the bribes shrink alongside. A legislator with little to sell attracts few buyers, no matter how his campaign is financed or how long he serves.
Shapiro will be back in form next week. The good ones always recover.
The harder question is for the rest of us. Do we still want this king?
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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