The revolution promised by Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s reforms has barely taken off – crucial financial market reforms must still clear the Knesset’s Via Dolorosa – but the Left is already arming for the counterrevolution.

A group of neo-Marxists, anti-globalists and plain old-time socialists who wish Israel could regress to the good old days of Mapai state paternalism (minus Mapai’s patriotism and its corruption, they vow) has been agitating from their university and media pulpits against the growing popularity of the market economy, which they claim has been dominating public discourse in Israel (we wish!).

Now they have banded together, The Jerusalem Post reports, to form a new “social-economic college… to teach social justice,” namely, anti-capitalism, and create a cadre of activists to militate against economic reform.

The college is sponsored in part by the bankrupt kibbutz movement. Since the faculty of the college is entirely Left to radical left, with several avowed Marxists, communists and anti-Zionists included – but not even one representative of a different point of view – the new college’s true purpose is evident.

Its star promoter is Professor Ariel Rubenstein of Tel Aviv University, a famous theoretician in arcane models of game theory (a reputation he exploits to construct manipulative models that posit two shoemakers in an isolated village, where competition results in the ruin of one and the attainment of monopoly status by the other as a model that “proves” that competition does not work and is actually ruinous).

He complained that Israeli universities, and especially their economic departments, do not teach their students critical thinking or offer them a variety of ideologies.

As if teaching ideologies, especially socialism, which the professor favors, were synonymous with “critical thinking,” and as if in his college there would be any room for a dissenting view.

“It is not surprising,” Rubenstein claims, that when students “leave the universities and become decision makers they support the same neo-liberal ideas.”

Rubenstein does not bother to explain why, if universities indoctrinate their students with neo-liberal ideas, the Israeli economy ranks so low on any index of economic freedom; why it has among the highest concentrations of political and economic power in the democratic world, why the government uses over 55 percent of the GNP, and why the economy is so rife with monopolies.

Nor does he mention that low economic growth causes hundreds of thousands of families to be unable to make ends meet since their salaries are so low and monopolistic pricing adds a premium of between 30% to 50% above world prices.

But then Rubenstein, a recipient of the Israel Prize in Economics, is never concerned by any gap between his pet peeves and theories and obdurate reality. Nor is his fellow college founder, lawyer Aviv Wasserman, who claims that “in Israel today, free-market capitalism has been taken to the extreme, creating terrible social gaps, while the weak have been tossed to the side of the road.”

An attorney is trained to argue any case; but anyone who believes that in monopoly-ridden Israel, where government favor is still a major creator of wealth and crony capitalism is rampant, competitive free markets “have been taken to the extreme” will believe anything. More accurately, he will try to sell you anything, however absurd – such as the claim that in a country where over 30% of the budget is devoted to transfer payments the weak “have been tossed to the side of the road.”

It is this kind of populism that attorney Wasserman evidently wants to promote in order “to create a cadre of people … able to engage in well-informed debate and critically challenge the prevailing neo-liberal and neo-conservative social and political trends.”

The debate is to take place only outside the college, apparently. For no one with neo-conservative views will be invited to join the faculty, of course.

“The college will offer,” its brochure declares, “new ideas based on facts, trends, theories and research in topics such as the influence of the government budget on various population groups, society and the environment, feminism and social change, social and economic aspects of the national conflict, the globalization of capital, growth in gaps, discrimination and exploitation.”

The formulation of topics tells us what the promoters consider “informed debate and critical challenges.” They are also terribly fresh ideas, of course – so fresh that their promoters dare not call them by their true old name: rusty Marxist propaganda packaged in trendy terms and financed, of course, by capitalists.

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