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Belated stock taking
Originally published 9 Nov 2005 in
The Jerusalem Post
In Israel, the notion that government is the citizens’ benevolent parent is deeply rooted. It was therefore remarkable to read recently in Makor Rishon an essay written by one Yaakov Schatz: “It Is For Our Sins That We Were Exiled From Our Land.” Schatz not only claims that “Halacha [Jewish Law] prefers a state with a small bureaucracy that intervenes only minimally in the citizen’s life,” but supports this claim with many halachic references. He accuses the religious camp of ignoring halacha by advocating a strong state.
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Labor’s ‘war on poverty’ rerun
Originally published 26 Oct 2005 in
The Jerusalem Post
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Shimon Peres gives us the finger
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The Peres-Herzog plan does not propose freeing the economy, so that enterprises could flourish and entice more workers into the labor force; or the reduction of taxes so that more workers will find it beneficial to work. Instead it proposes a series of massive and costly grab-bag of government programs that will involve large wasteful bureaucracies, increased inefficiencies and arrested economic growth.
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How to (really) fight poverty in Israel
Originally published 14 Sep 2005 in
The Jerusalem Post
‘It is three years now that poverty has been bothering me,” interim Finance Minister Ehud Olmert recently intimated. So how can he mitigate poverty, when all Israeli governments have tried and failed, after spending billions upon billions of the taxpayers’ money? First, he could help by not repeating past mistakes, and not throwing more money at welfare policies that have already cost so much and delivered so little, by not shifting more funds to failed government “anti-poverty” programs whose sole benefit is political dividends to the distributive politician.
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Farewell Bibi, hello Ehud
Originally published 21 Aug 2005 in
The Jerusalem Post
Until A few years ago, Netanyahu’s replacement as finance minister, Ehud Olmert, was considered by reform-minded Israelis a worthy successor to Netanyahu. Like Bibi, Ehud professed to be pro-market, with the courage, sometimes, to take unpopular stands.
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A challenging revolution
Originally published 3 Aug 2005 in
The Jerusalem Post
One of the major problems facing new entrants into the banking industry is the Byzantine nature of excessive Israeli regulations, which Nobel laureate Milton Friedman described as the most complicated in the Western world.
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