Reform: prospects and pitfalls

A Middle East peace strategy that could actually work.

Israel needs to slash its state budget by as much as possible if it wants a chance at fighting waste and corruption.

Too little attention has been paid to how Egypt’s socialist past and welfare-state present shaped the current rebellion.

The Herzliya Conference has become an important international event, but one central issue is absent: Israel’s debilitating economic concentration.

It’s highly unlikely that government can ever learn to make long-term plans and execute them efficiently.

How can one dare compare narrow-minded religion with the all-embracing faith of universality and equality that is socialism?

Many of the social and economic troubles we are experiencing are due to the public’s lack of understanding of the need for economic literacy.

The PM’s courageous decision to tackle economic concentration was misrepresented by several of our media publications—owned of course by tycoons.

Economic concentration hurts the country’s viability and the chances for peace.

A damaging ethos of ‘welfarism’ and distributive politics has come to dominate not only academia but our cultural, military and even our business elites.

The reformers must know the importance of the reform’s success both for Israel and for their careers, and what damage they will incur if it fails.

Kagan’s admiration for Justice Aharon Barak’s philosophy may have revealed her own predilection for radical judicial activism.

We must dismantle the oligarch-owned monopolies that impoverish the Israeli consumer and choke our economy.

The OECD’s invitation to Israel is a “seal of approval” but the country still needs more reforms.

The world’s astonishment at Israel’s response to the Haiti disaster is insulting. What we saw there was Israel’s true face.

Individual initiative and freedom are essential for creativity—in hi-tech as in all other spheres.

As far as Rose Friedman was concerned, public kudos did not matter that much. She persisted in being a rose, no matter what.

Lasting peace must grow from the bottom up, from an “economic peace process” that proves what advantages peace has to offer on a daily basis. It cannot come from signing peace agreements with radical and corrupt entities propped up by corrupting Western handouts.

A courageous recent film has exposes the strong connection between Israeli oligarchs and bureaucrats. Unfortunately however the film’s simplistic pseudo-Marxist treatment is more misleading than revealing.

Netanyahu paid heavily to pass a budget in time; his “partners”’ bargaining tactics, bordering on blackmail, reflect poorly on our politics.

Is Binyamin Netanyahu’s government too big? Yes. So why would Netanyahu create such an unwieldy beast?

Should the government bail out those of our tycoons who cannot redeem NIS 100 billion worth of bonds?

Billions of dollars in foreign aid to the Palestinians has resulted in war not peace. There’s a better way.

The government is dysfunctional. The question is why—and how to mend it.

All government deficit spending is bad. But sometimes deficits are unavoidable. And some deficits are better then others.

Why not exploit the crisis to destroy what little freedom Netanyahu’s reforms brought to the economy? Why care if the country will lose its only hope of deliverance from the economic retardation caused by our statist heritage?

Focusing on a putative pension crisis distracts our attention from the real serious crisis that a worldwide recession is bound to create here.

The country, the pundits conclude, must return to the good old days of “social democracy.”

In the name of stability the comptroller has ignored many of the banks’ offenses.

It must be either naiveté or cynicism that allows “Israel 2028” to recommend a reform that will make government a larger and a more efficient instrument for economic growth.

Israel’s elites—especially the chattering classes in the press and the academy—are hostile to capitalism because our universities’ social sciences and liberal arts departments are dominated by post-modernist and neo-Marxist professors.

Ideas matter. Hostility to capitalism exacts a great price from the Israeli economy and from its hapless workers.

Jewish institutional efforts must now undergo a period of reform and greater accountability. Some charitable efforts should be privatized. Individuals or groups of donors must take personal responsibility for specific projects, to ensure that funds are dispensed in a responsible and cost effective manner.

Israeli politicians are preoccupied with political machinations designed to buy support from powerful interest groups by distributing government largesse. This causes not only the factionalization of politics and growing corruption, but consumes time and energy that leadership should use to address life and death issues.

Government can no more control powerful economic forces than it can the rise and fall of tides. To effectively fulfill its nightwatchman role—to protect us from internal and external violence and to enforce contracts—government must be kept limited.

Our “public channel,” funded by a compulsive tax, does not need to be pluralistic or even-handed.

Like other public institutions that lack well-defined ownership, Channel 1 has consequently been taken over by bureaucrats and by undemocratic workers’ unions.

This man did more good for humanity than any other.

As long as education remains a government monopoly, it is bound to function like all other government monopolies, where union bosses fill the vacuum that lack of defined ownership creates, and monopoly power allows them to blackmail the public.

In the wake of the Second Lebanon War, there is hope that the phenomenal performance of the economy will finally make Israelis realize the crucial role it plays in their lives.

At the recent Merage Foundation conference to help Israel’s hi-tech sector grow, calls were heard for more government “direction”. This despite sixty years of massive government intervention and “development efforts” that have led mostly to massive failures and waste.

President Shimon Peres, we all know, is a man of visions. Some have been better than others. The less successful ones, that translated into costly, failing and even dangerous policies, were those that denied reality.