Some readers questioned the contention in my last column that Israeli academicians are largely responsible for inculcating an anti-market mind-set in elites.

For those who need further persuasion, here are several additional examples:

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem school of public administration spawned an “Atidim” program to train promising students from the periphery of the country in public service.

The school offers two core courses in economics. The material is technical and students get little inkling of why market economics promotes both prosperity and freedom.

The rest of the program is replete, predictably, with welfare thinking and extols the role of the state. It is this which inculcates a serious bias.

“You are going to shape Israel’s future,” the program’s director reportedly told his students,” because as technocrats “it will be you, not our elected politicians, who will shape policy options.”

This is not only anti-democratic, it sends the wrong message in an Israel where the unaccountable public sector already employs every third person and utilizes 55% of GNP.

One also wonders if directing the “periphery’s” brightest students into the public sector, instead of offering them opportunities in private employment is desirable.

An ambitious program to train Sephardi “periphery” students in social science and humanities departments put them on the path of their radically Left professors, making a career of complaining about government-caused discrimination (which they blame on the market).

Training bright students to teach English and mathematics in development towns, or to engage in other productive occupations, could reduce inequality better and faster.

The “welfarist” ethos is habitually inculcated even in a Jewish Agency two-year program for Young Diaspora Leadership. Participants told me they never visited a factory or hi-tech enterprise, nor was productive Israel ever discussed.

Preparing them to schnorr for “the poor” seemed good enough.

Despite their almost total domination of the social sciences and humanities, many academic advocates of welfarism are not satisfied. They seek to eliminate any alternative thinking.

At a recent conclave of the Center for Social Justice at The Van Leer Institute, the question was raised whether teaching economics has become disengaged from society (namely from socialist notions) and, if so, what to do about it since “the universities are an important instrument in molding the consciousness of the ruling class.”

The conclave correctly claimed that economic history and ideas were not being taught, and that teaching was very removed from economic realities becoming “socially irrelevant.”

The criticism was not meant, however, to correct these faults but to discredit the very teaching of economics and offer instead a neo-Marxist, New Left “alternative narrative.”

Economics should teach, one speaker explained, such content as is included in the Hebrew University’s Sociology and Anthropology department head’s Web site: inequality, the social context of environmental problems, a critique of the treasury’s policy regarding foreign workers (by one of the New Israel Fund’s radical offshoots), data about corruption, and the “aggressive behavior” of employers and such.

The participants called for the establishment of a school for political philosophy, where a more “socially engaged” economics would be taught. This school would promote, they explained, “a contrary agenda” to what “ideologically conservative” economists advocate in the name of “economic science.”

It would oppose privatization, cutting the public sector, restrained monetary and fiscal policies, flexibility in labor markets, and cuts in the social safety net. It would defend the minimum wage, “social rights,” and union power.

The conclave’s keynote speech was delivered by a professor of economics at Tel Aviv university, Ariel Rubinstein, an Israel Prize laureate in economics (for his brilliance in game theory).

Rubinstein who wears his social consciousness on his sleeve (he really is a socialist) kept debunking the scientific validity of economics. He warned students not to take its nonsense seriously.

Asked why he teaches economics if it is such garbage, and how his social consciousness squares with wasting students’ time and money, he waxed philosophical, accusing the questioner of simple-mindedness, of failing to understand the dilemmas facing moral people.

Rubinstein plays games with distorted models designed to debunk competition, profit maximization etc. For example, he posits competition between two shoemakers in an isolated village to “prove” that competition will only destroy one.

So what if people get cheaper shoes for this human price, he fumes.

But the learned professor must know that for competition to work it must include more than two competitors, and an open market must extend beyond an isolated village.

He would agree, we hope, that more people, mostly the poor, would benefit from cheaper shoes and that resources freed by more efficient (cheaper) production would create additional employment opportunities.

The moral dilemma he posits between profit maximization and layoffs is false too. Profit maximization means a more efficient use of resources, leading eventually to more employment.

This picture makes it clear that Israelis are indoctrinated with the Marxist notion that profits come from exploitation, and that business is an innately immoral zero-sum game.

This attitude is inculcated by our social environment and bolstered by university studies. Certain elements in the universities use capitalist donations to undermine the market and to promote government handouts and controls.

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