Israel Matzav

At heart, Israel is a Marxist country

For those of you trying to understand our 'housing protests' (which he cleverly dubs 'Woodstock on the Yarkon), Steven Plaut has some helpful explanations.

Yet those very same Israelis, who demonstrate every day their skills in succeeding in markets, hate markets. The word “socialism” carries enormously romantic and positive implications for Israelis. Especially among educated (non-Russian-born) Israelis. The word capitalism is something of an obscenity for most Israelis. I suspect that someone arrested for assault could get himself off in court if he claimed the victim had called him a capitalist, it being a form of hate speech. The Israeli media invariably use the word “capitalism” in conjunction with the word piggish. (Ironically, the one exception is the business editor of Haaretz, who supports market capitalism, while the rest of the same newspaper yearns for communism.) The only conceivable form of market economy in the minds of the Israeli chattering class is “piggish capitalism.” You would not believe the portion of Israeli professors and intellectuals who use that expression. The head of the Histadrut, Israel’s largest organized crime family, uses it, being a loyal believer in piggish communism.

In normal countries, pointing out that someone is a card-carrying member of the communist party is usually more than enough to discredit that person. Not in Israel. Carriers of communist party membership cards do so with pride. Most of the members of the history department at Tel Aviv University are such communists. So are oodles of other academics.

On the one hand, the operation of markets is what makes Israel a successful viable country, one incidentally that experienced almost no implosion at all during the global financial collapse of the past 4 years. But on the other hand, markets are things Israelis claim they want suppressed. Literate Israelis insist in unison that markets are what is wrong with the world, and suppressing markets is the answer to Israel’s problems. Markets are evil, rewarding selfishness. Benevolent governmental bureaucrats controlling the economy are what is needed.

Not every Israeli, mind you. Russian-Israelis, who today are maybe a fifth of the population, have no patience for those preaching the wonders of communism. And they are notably absent in the current “social justice” rallies and marches, or what I have been calling the Woodstock along the Yarkon Festival. Orthodox Jews rarely mouth the slogans of nostalgia for Bolshevik central planning of markets, although there are exceptions. (The commentator on the Torah portion in Maariv cannot get enough of communism and insists that suppressing piggish-capitalism is the highest form of Jewish ethics.)

Israeli academics are almost universally anti-capitalism. I am on the list of a chat list of Israeli social science faculty members, and for the past few weeks it has carried hundreds of postings yearning for socialist controls and denouncing capitalism. The posteurs universally fantasize about Israel adopting Scandinavian-style “socialism.” Putting aside some doubts as to how pleasant life really is in Scandinavia (witness Norway recently), Scandinavian “socialism” is actually not. It is essentially free markets mixed with very high tax rates and a gargantuan welfare state providing cradle-to-grave welfare services at state expense. In other words, Scandinavia has always been far more capitalistic countries than Israel, certainly of Israel was before the 1980s. In addition, Israel has always provided Scandinavian-style welfare state services, but without the freeing of markets and liberalization of production that characterized Scandinavia.

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The Woodstock on the Yarkon protesters are by and large leftist secularist Israelis demanding a return to the Bolshevik controls of the 1950s. They pine for the shortages and the rationing of that era because they figure that in a shortage THEY will be granted priority. The central demand of the protesters is rent controls. This will end up destroying the Israeli housing stock and pauperizing elderly owners of rental property who purchased those units with the intention of earning rental income in their old age. Like in New York and other cities having rent controls, the controls will create shortages, where the true cost of obtaining rental housing actually goes UP, not down.

The protesters pine for the Soviet steppes. They demand other forms of price controls so that Israel can turn into a Brezhnev-era style of country, where people spend their days waiting in lines for commodities in perpetual and growing shortage. They want markets to be suppressed, where squads of social justice commandos can decide who gets to live in which apartment, who gets to consume those commodities in shortage, and who earns what. They insist that wages be set based on what the protesters think people deserve to earn. Since there is not a single person in Israel who earns what he thinks he deserves to earn, this amounts to a demand for a Soviet-style wage board that fixes wages for all professions, starting with those who are on strike, like the MDs. In other words, wages in the opinion of the protesters do not have to clear markets and signal where shortages and surpluses are. Wages should be arbitrary measures of “fairness.” Try to imagine just what happens when half the jobs in Israel attract no applicants because the fair wages there are insufficient to draw workers, while the other jobs have six applicants for each position because the fair wages there are much too high to clear the market. Try to imagine what life would be like if a Marxist sociologist or a caring social worker were appointed as economic dictator to decide all economic matters and decisions in Zion.

Every society on earth and every society in human history has people living in hardship and in poverty. There are poor people in all countries, including Scandinavia. Mankind has not discovered an innovation that eliminates poverty and hardship.

Yet the caring dreamers about Bolshevism along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv (note the irony of the name) demand an instant magic pill that will eliminate all hardship and inequality. And the failure of the government to provide one is proof that the evil “tycoons” are in charge and preventing the government from serving the people. “People not profits” is the slogan of choice used by those who are too stupid to understand that the only way to make producers serve the people and produce things the people want is for them to make profits doing so. Outlaw profits and you create mass starvation.

The tycoon fetish continues to dominate the protests. I have suggested that Mikey Lerner even change the name of his idiotic magazine from Tikkun to Tycoon. Many Israeli tycoons, at least outside high-tech, were made tycoons because of sweetheart deals with the political establishment, particularly back in the days of MAPAI socialism.

Read the whole thing.

You have to be very politically aware and have spent a number of years here to realize just how right he is.

Labels: Communism, housing crisis, Israeli economy, Israeli taxes, Marxism

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:45 PM