Year: 2012

Shas and Israel Beiteinu will vote to destroy the Ulpana

rafifarber Israeli Politics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Looks like Eli Yishai, my favorite coward and Hilul Hashem, will be voting for the Jewish homes in the Ulpana neighborhood to be destroyed. Looks like his partner, Housing Minister Ariel Attias, will also be voting to destroy the homes, because they both earn 41,000 shekels a month as government ministers and they like money and don’t want to get fired, and would rather have innocent families who don’t earn as much lose their homes and become homeless. It’s only fair.

Housing Minister Ariel Attias made clear in an interview with Army Radio that his party (Shas) will go along with the Prime Minister’s directive to vote against the Normalization Law. “We will not vote against the position of the coalition (read the position of Netanyahu), and we will not support the Normalization Law, certainly the Ministers will not,” he said. “This is not something to stir up a coalition crisis over.

Yeah, why endanger the coalition that pays you 41,000 shekels a month of my tax money and welfare to your voters when it’s just a few people’s houses at stake who don’t even vote for your party? It’s not like you’re the minister of housing or anything (as if there should even be a minister of housing in the first place, which there should not be).

I’m not angry. I didn’t expect anything more from anybody in Shas, or Israel Beiteinu for that matter, because they are both one-man parties and the Knesset Members don’t answer to any of their constituents, so no matter what they do, they’ll be voted back in if Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef or Avigdor Lieberman wants them back in the list next round.

There are no leaders in Shas or Israel Beiteinu, so they cannot go against Netanyahu. They are just money vacuums. They don’t care about what is right, only about what is profitable for themselves – including Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.

We’ll see what happens in the Likud though, which does answer to the party members. Those who vote against the Normalization Law will have a very hard time keeping their jobs.

You cannot stand up to any pressure if you are not a leader. The only leader that exists is Netanyahu, and no one can stand up to him except Moshe Feiglin, who is the only one actually trying to replace him.

 

The gluttonous Israeli gov’t & the gluten-free subsidy

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Every so often a flash of hope flickers past my eye and I think that maybe, just maybe in these times of global debt turmoil, the Israeli government is smart enough not to do too many idiotic things and get themselves in too much debt. And then I see stories like this one.

According to the proposal, the cost of gluten-free bread will be kept at a level that is never higher than that of standard bread. In addition, those who suffer from celiac disease will be reimbursed for up to NIS 500 per month per family for purchasing special food, and the income tax rates of companies that sell gluten-free food products will not go above 25 percent.

So now I have to pay for the gluten free bread of some guy with celiac who wants to eat a sponge. Beyond costing hundreds of millions of shekels a year, the program will:

  1. Waste every shekel that goes into it
  2. Disrupt market forces and the prices of other foods competing with the gluten free bread
  3. Raise the price of corn that goes into these gluten-free sponges
  4. Cause many many many more people who don’t even have celiac to be diagnosed with celiac just so they can get 500 shekels more a month from Uncle Shmuel
  5. Cause 20 more unintended consequences that the government will then have to regulate by force with committees who get government paychecks
  6. Be immoral, because I shouldn’t have to pay for the luxuries of a celiac, a luxury by the way that tastes like crap.

Before anyone objects to my heartlessness, I am also on a gluten free diet. Not because I am celiac, but because I subscribe to the Primal Blueprint diet and way of life. And I do not eat gluten-free bread either, because I do not eat corn. My food is much more expensive than someone’s who eats grains, and I’m not asking for other people to subsidize my shopping list.

It will be a long time coming before I will be able to convince anyone in this country that it is not the government’s role to take care of someone’s celiac, that it is immoral and unjewish to force someone to pay for someone else’s luxury. Israel is still a country deeply mired in Marxist ideology and is very statist.

I shiver to think that this is where our money is going while the finances of the entire western world are on fire.

Will the Likud ministers pass the Ulpana test?

rafifarber Likud, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

Sometimes it just comes down to simple guts. Much like Ariel Sharon’s ministers all had a choice whether or not to vote for the disengagement and expulsion of Jewish families from Gaza, those who voted against Sharon’s wishes were fired, but their votes counted, and ultimately the one who was fired from the Likud was Sharon himself, whose party, Kadima, no longer exists in a real sense. Polls show that they are down to 3 seats from a current 28 ever since Shaul Mofaz heroically joined the government in fear of losing Kadima if he didn’t. What a brave man.

Now in Sharon’s place is Netanyahu, who is instructing his ministers to vote against the Normalization Law, which would prevent a neighborhood of Beit El from being destroyed.

Most likely, those ministers who vote for the law will be fired, but they will all be supported by the Likud members next election, and we will all know who they are when they vote on Wednesday.

We will simply vote for the ones who voted for this law, and not vote for the ones who did not. Nothing could be more straightforward.

Those who say the issue here regarding the Ulpana neighborhood is “complicated” are spinsters. The issue is very simple. Jews are living on their land, and Arabs want them off. There’s nothing complicated about it. The purpose of the Normalization Law which will make the Ulpana “legal” is simply a fiction. It’s a game of tennis. It means nothing. What the Knesset should really do is simply flip off the Supreme Court on the grounds that they are a self-elected dictatorship, throw them all out, and have the next supreme court elected by the Jewish Nation.

The Normalization Law is merely a symbol that the Jews actually believe the land of Israel is Jewish land.

If a Likud minister doesn’t really believe that, then he’ll prefer his job and his tax money salary. If he does believe it, he’ll prefer the truth. On Wednesday we’ll see who prefers his well earned tax money salary, and who prefers the truth.

We’ll see whose more scared of being fired by Netanyahu, or of being fired by Netanyahu’s boss – the Likud members.

Torah Economics: Austrian or Keynesian?

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

Most people today, even Jews (especially Jews) see Judaism as a religion rather than a national regime. The Jewish nation was not designed by God in order to roam the world and do strange rituals and not eat pork and take off Saturdays. We were designed to be a nation that lived in a certain place under a certain constitution. This constitution is the Torah, and it includes economic law as well as religious law. The question is, is Keynesianism, inflationism, and central bankism consistent with Torah Law?

The Mishnah, codified in the year 200 and the basis for the Jewish oral law, states in Perek HaZahav (the Gold chapter) of tractate Bava Metziah, in the very  first line of that chapter, “Gold buys silver. Silver does not buy gold.”

The statement if read on the surface is quite incomprehensible. Look at the commentaries through the centuries though, and it becomes clear. Gold buys silver means that if someone exchanges gold for silver, the silver becomes his once the gold leaves his hand and enters the hand of the other person. This is regardless of where the silver actually is at the time the gold changes hands. “Gold buys silver” means that the mere act of transferring gold from one hand to another automatically transfers the silver.

But silver does not buy gold. This does not mean that one cannot acquire gold by paying in silver for it. It means that silver does not automatically, by virtue of the fact that silver has changed hands, acquire gold. In order for silver to acquire gold, not only does the silver have to change hands. The gold does as well. The fact that the gold changed hands indicates that both parties agreed to the transfer.

In the case of gold buying silver, there was no need for a clear indication by both parties that they wanted the transfer. The fact that only gold was traded is enough. In the case of silver buying gold, both the parties must agree, and any one party can back out of the agreement before both metals transfer places.

Why is this? Because in Jewish law, there are two types of transactions. There is a barter transaction (Torat Chalifin – the law of exchange) and there is also a monetary transaction (Torat Damim – the law of money). Gold in Jewish law is not considered money. It is considered a commodity, which is higher than money and is more easily transacted. Silver, on the other hand, is considered “damim” or money. In order for a monetary transaction to be completed, both sides must agree by transferring the money for the commodity on both sides. In order for a barter transaction to be completed, the seller need only accept the commodity, and the transaction is completed even before the good is exchanged for the commodity.

This is the basis of Jewish monetary law. Where does paper money come in to the equation? In a Jewish economic regime, no king or president or political leader of the Jews would have the authority to demonetize silver, or de-commoditize gold. Fiat money would still be allowed to exist, but it would be forbidden by Jewish law to affect the status of gold as a commodity or silver as money.

If people chose to use fiat government money, they could. But if they didn’t want to, they wouldn’t have to. A Jewish economic regime would have competing moneys, and the money with the most value would be the one that was most used. If the government decided to print more bills, they could, but the citizens would be able to resist the theft lawfully.

This is how a Jewish state can and should function. This is how it will eventually function. And the world will follow our lead and free humanity from government fiat money Keynesian tyranny. After all, the power to print money is no power at all when the citizens are not under any compulsion to actually use it.

Competing currencies was first proposed by Hayek, one of the fathers of the Austrian School of Economics.

How the Federal Reserve will lose control of inflation

rafifarber Gold and Silver, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Over at Economicpolicyjournal, Robert Wenzel is reporting that the Fed is seriously considering another round of quantitative  easing (QE). The reason they’re considering it is that their gauge of inflation, a formula which changes on a whim depending on whether they like the result of their calculations or not, is still low, so there is room to print more money without affecting prices too much.

The reason inflation is low is that in times of economic slowdown, debt becomes liquidated. Debt that once represented dollars becomes nothing. So let’s say Jay owes Mike $10,000 that Mike lent to Jay to start a business in a time of economic boom, say in 2007. Jay got his business off the ground just before the 2008 crash. Mike owns $10,000 worth of Jay’s debt, and as long as the economy is going, that debt is still worth $10,000 because the debt will be paid back. So that $10,000 still exists in the economy in the form of Jay’s debt.

Now the crash happens. Jay’s business fails. He can’t pay back the $10,000. So the value of his debt goes to zero. $10,000 is erased from the economy. The amount of money in the economy goes down, the value of the dollar goes up. Prices go down, so printing money will keep the prices stable.

Problem is, when there is less money in the economy because the Jays in the world can’t pay their debts, the Mikes of the world have less money, so keeping prices stable while people lose money is equivalent to raising prices while people have the same amount of money. Either way they can’t afford to buy as much with the money they have.

The economy naturally wants to deflate now because people cannot pay their debts. And the Fed keeps pulling it the other way and trying to inflate it. What you have here is a massive tug of war, and someone is going to win. That someone is the Fed, because as much as debt can be liquidated and money erased from the economy, the Fed can always, always just print more.

What will happen? After some round of QE or another, probably after the Euro collapses, gold and silver will suddenly become the only preserver of value that exists anymore. Dollars will be erased from the economy, which should push the value of the dollar up, but the Fed will have printed so many of them that it can no longer increase in value. With no Euro, everyone will pour into gold and silver simultaneously.

That’s when those who own gold and silver will escape with their wealth, and those holding paper will be in serious, serious trouble.

Greece’s Syriza leftists promise money that doesn’t exist

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis

According to CNN, the new Greek Syriza party is promising rainbows and sunshine if elected.

Syriza promised to raise the minimum wage, freeze wage and pension cuts, reduce taxes on food and increase unemployment benefits, the reports said.

Sounds great! But how the hell are you going to do that! Easy. Print the money. Like all statist parties, Syriza believes that money is a function of government decree instead of the hard work of an individual. Since the State is all powerful, they have the right and responsibility to take care of the people.

This is quite consistent with the rest of Syriza’s platform, which states that it is the State’s responsibility to plan the economy, to eliminate competition, and to organize society. You can read about Syriza’s platform on Greekdefaultwatch.com. The post is in Greek, but run it through Google translate and you’ll get a pretty good, if disjointed translation.

The allure of having this kind of ideology is that if you actually believe in it, you feel pretty powerful when you are part of the government that is supposed to save everything. If you believe that the government is supposed to plan everything and make sure all the people are alright and have money, then you pretty much feel like a god when you are part of the government. This is the real allure of Statism. It allows man to be god when man governs.

It is this ideology that got Greece into so much debt in the first place. The government believed they were responsible for running the country instead of protecting the freedom of Greeks. Running a country is too much for any government to do, and it costs way too much. That’s why Greece is now bankrupt.

I’ve said many times on this blog that the beginning of the end of Western Civilization will begin in Greece. Greece is the seat of the West, the seat of Democracy, and it will be the first to fall. Democracy and atheism are a toxic mix. It makes governments believe they are God.

The only democracy that is moral is a democracy that believes that ultimately, God is in charge. When you have that humility, you understand that your basic job as government should be simply to protect the rights that God gave humans. That is, the right to life and freedom.

If you believe all people were created in the image of God, then you will humbly back off when asked to run the country. Instead, you will let the people run it.

If you’re a Statist, you will resort to robbery and theft until the people have nothing left. Greece is at this point now. If Syriza is elected, they will try to steal more money from the people in order to run the country. Problem is, there’s nothing left to steal. The saddest thing is, even if they aren’t elected, the other parties will steal just the same.

Gold and silver are not investments – they’re money

rafifarber Gold and Silver, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Last Friday the stock market experienced a sea change. Perhaps even a game changer. Gold suddenly skyrocketed $66 (about 3.5%), and gold stocks went up almost 7% in one day. You can look at this in one of two ways. Either the value of gold went up, or the value of the dollar went down.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, leaning heavily towards the dollar losing value. Gold and silver generally don’t gain or lose value so rapidly with such volatility. After all, it’s not silver and gold that is being magically produced by a Federal Reserve computer. The increase in the stock of gold and silver is rather slow. Watch this ingenious video and you’ll see that the cost of almost everything has pretty much stayed constant since the 1960’s in terms of silver and gold.

Except, of course, for education, which has been so grossly inflated because of government loans that even in terms of silver the price has skyrocketed.

This tells you several things. First, a silver dime or silver quarter from 1964 or earlier (all dimes and quarters were made of 90% silver before 1965) can buy the same thing today that it could buy in 1964. Second, if you had saved all your money in silver dimes and quarters, then you’d have the same purchasing power today that you would have had in 1964. If you had saved in pieces of paper called dollars, you would be able to buy very very little.

Here’s more: The price of gasoline has actually gone down since 1964, not up. If you want to see that in practical terms, then take 10 dimes from 1964 or older. That’s one lousy dollar in legal tender, and go fill up your tank. One dime will buy you a gallon of gasoline. One dollar in silver dimes will buy you 10.

Owning dollars is opening yourself up to government theft, because the government can just print them. Imagine if there was a magical elf that could simply conjure silver out of thin air. Don’t you think the price of silver would go down? Sure it would. You wouldn’t want to own it anymore. Well, there is a magical elf that can conjure up dollars out of thin air. It’s called the Federal Reserve. So why would you ever want to own dollars? After all, they grow on trees.

Yanis Varoufakis and Economic Morality in the Eurozone

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

I ran into a rather amazing find last week when I heard an Australian radio interview with a Greek economist named Yanis Varoufakis on the topic of the insanity in the Eurozone. Aside from having an awesome name, Dr. Varoufakis is sharp, articulate, and a contrarian. He was saying things I generally agree with but with an angle I hadn’t heard before, and what he said made a lot of sense.

You can listen to the interview here. It really is worth the time. The gist is this: Varoufakis holds that the entire structure of the bailout and so-called austerity is twisted. Greece’s debt keeps going up, so the austerity isn’t working obviously. The reason it isn’t working is that the bankrupt Greek state keeps borrowing money from the EFSF bailout fund to repay the ECB on bonds they bought from Greece to support Greek debt when no one else was buying those bonds. So in repaying the ECB via money from the EFSF, the ECB makes $800 million, and the Greek government goes deeper into debt.

Read that again, and you’ll see that the bailout fund is actually serving to drive Greece deeper into debt while letting the ECB profit off of it, and Greece is only “privileged” to continue this rape if it keeps it’s “austerity” which isn’t balancing its budget anyway.

That is why, says Dr. Varoufakis, the way things are going, the Eurozone will disintegrate entirely, as this domino effect will hit the rest of the PIIGS and the EU will self destruct along with the Eurozone.

Varoufakis’ solution is simple: Europeanize every bank in the Eurozone and have the ECB issue bonds in their name that people will buy. So you don’t have Spanish banks anymore – you have Eurobanks in Spain. The ECB issues bonds and becomes the switchboard, everything goes through the ECB, and now totally centralized, they can navigate forward. Wow does that sound Keynesian.

Varoufakis helped shed the light for me on the nature of this “bailout” and that’s why I like him, but he’s a Keynesian, and doesn’t realize that Keynesianism got us into this mess in the first place. Another example: I read another article he wrote about how Greece can’t be Argentina, which defaulted a decade ago, devalued its currency, and then rebounded. Greece, says Varoufakis, cannot be Argentina because Greece has no currency to devalue. He’s right, but the point is this:

Devaluing a currency, he says, is beneficial for any nation in debt, because it allows the nation to get out of debt. Well sure, a State can get out of debt by pillaging the value of its citizen’s savings and destroying its peoples’ wealth and paying debt back in garbage. They call that “devaluing a currency” in Orwellian language. What it really means is STEALING from citizenry. One day a government spends too much money so it decides to make your money worthless so it can pay back in worthless junk. Sounds great.

Varoufakis, for a Keynesian, is very smart, but he is a Keynesian nonetheless. He’s an economic tactician, recommending tactical moves to get out of a crisis without understanding the real, root cause of it all – a MORAL cause. Maybe Europeanizing everything and having the ECB issue bonds will technically get Europe out of debt in a mega Keynesian centralized way. But everyone will be dirt poor if it succeeds, because it means that the ECB will steal the value of every Euro in Europe by printing it into oblivion to pay the bonds it issues for the rest of Europe.

Why the circuitous Orwellian route of “ECB Bonds”? Just tell it like it is. Steal value from European savers. Just take it. Have the ECB issue bonds and then print the money to pay for them. Why not just do it more directly? Have the Eurozone completely centralized and pass a law that every Eurozone bank account has to give X% of their savings to pay the Euro debt. Just steal the money outright instead of printing it into oblivion.

So Varoufakis’ solution is basically: If European governments don’t get their act together and steal much more money much more quickly from the people, then the Eurozone will collapse.

Well OK. But the root cause of it all is the very fact that you allow a government to print money.

My solution? Get rid of the Eurozone and privatize money. Let people use what they want to use, and the best money will have the most value.

Never again will a government be able to simply steal your money by printing it.

Much like Leftists here in Israel who keep trying to find the perfect way to make peace, who do not realize that peace talks are inherently immoral if they give up Jewish land as a precondition, economic Leftists, or Keynesians, do not realize that the inherent structure of the system of currency backed by force is immoral and must be torn down. Israel leftists will never find peace beyond theft of Jewish land. Keynesians will never find economic solutions beyond theft either.

The trouble with Catholics and Atheists debating about God

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Saw an article in the Jerusalem Post about how the Australian Jewish Community was offended by what some Catholic guy said about the Holocaust or something while he was bickering with Richard Dawkins about whether God exists or not.

I don’t want to address the Holocaust sensitivity issue, though I believe that Jews should stop being sensitive about what people say about the Holocaust, or anything else, because every time they do they sound like little children and make things worse for us.

I’d like to address the very notion of an atheist and a Catholic religious leader arguing about God. The very notion is itself silly, and illustrates the world we live in that lacks Jewish leadership. In an ideal world, the Jew would be the defender of God, as we are the keepers of His law and we are His people. Catholics know very little about God, and most of what they think they know is silly.

Dawkins goes on about evolution, the Catholic guy goes on about Genesis, and the two go in circles as the audience gets dumber by the second. It’s like to kids fighting over a cookie. Invite a Jew who knows who he is on that stage and he’ll change they way these arguments flow.

You, Catholic, on the one hand, believe God actually died and that I killed Him. Then you thank me for killing Him because He died for your sins, but you blame me for killing Him and hate me for it. Then, depending on your mood and the century, you either thank me or kill me over it. And you expect Dawkins to flock to this “ideology”?

The Catholic guy is saying he has to believe in God. Dawkins is saying it doesn’t make sense to. The Jew would say I don’t care what you believe in, but can either of you explain my existence as a Jew? Judaism’s for me. You can both sit back and watch.

Put a Jewish leader on stage and neither of them would be able to explain why the Jew exists, why he’s back in Israel, and why none of the promises in the Bible have been broken. Once the Jew claims his mantel as spiritual leader of the globe, Dawkins and Catholic will fall in line behind us as disciples. And the Catholic guy will suddenly realize God never died in the first place.

The only way to get Jonathan Pollard out of prison

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

There have been murmurings lately that Pollard is in serious health trouble and that our brave heroic President, Shimon Peres, exercising brave heroics as he always does, has sent a brave heroic letter to their President Obama asking meekly and sheepishly to have mercy and let the dying man go pretty please, oh American master of all things, ruler of Israel, we are your people and you are our Protector in the UN, teach us to follow, obey your rules about spying on you to save ourselves, hear O Israel, America our Friend, America is One, now can we have him back please?

Wow, is Shimon Peres brave. And Netanyahu too. I mean, he went so far as to actually ask for Pollard back! Publicly! On the Knesset Podium! Once! In thirty years! Saying he was sorry we spied on America! Meekly and sheepishly! Just like a proud Jew should!

What a hero.

If we really, actually, in real reality, want Pollard out of hell, we must stop playing games now, or he will die in a prison hospital. We must understand why he has been in prison in the first place for so long.

Anti Semitism, Jew-hatred, is not simply a disease that bad people have and good people don’t. Everyone has it. Even Jews. It’s universal. The reason for it is the dissonance between the Jewish mission and the Jewish reality. The Jewish mission is to be the spiritual leader of mankind. The Jewish reality is that, right now at least, we simply aren’t, but for some reason we’re still around and no one can tell exactly why.

It’s obvious to most people that we shouldn’t be here according to natural law. This includes everyone from the most murderous anti Semites to the most outwardly friendly of Israel’s allies. So everyone knows we’re being preserved for a reason, and the reason is for that moment when we wake up as a nation and lead the world to spiritual enlightenment. Every second we don’t do this we are hated and challenged. The murderers will try to kill us off in an attempt to prove we are no leaders. Our allies, on the other hand, will keep us in a state of mental slavery, help us out outwardly, but only when it serves their interests, while making sure we know THEY are in charge, NOT the Jews.

The minute the Jewish nation starts to stand up for itself and act like a leader, take its destiny in its own hands and be independent, it will trigger a very harsh reaction from our allies in an attempt to test if we are actually taking up our leadership role. When America found out that the Jews were spying on them – well, a Jew who takes our money and begs and acts nice and slave like – that’s fine. But a Jew who spies on us and steals secrets for his own safety without asking us first? THAT cannot be tolerated.

What we have to do is quite simple. We have to stop asking nicely as if we made a mistake and Pollard should never have spied for us. We have to stop apologizing. If America or any other non Jewish country wants to test us and see if we are actually the leaders we are supposed to be, let’s welcome it.

Instead of Netanyahu getting up on the Knesset and groveling, he should get up and burst with righteous anger that Pollard was even arrested in the first place. That yes, America, we spied on you because we needed the information for our own safety and you were not forthcoming. Next time, just tell us, or we’ll do it again. Why? Because you were founded in 1776 and we were founded 3,000 years earlier. We’re older, and we call the moral shots around here. We deserve some damn respect.

So for every day you do not release our man, we will arrest an American spy over here, starting today.

You don’t like being spied on? Neither do we. So let’s just be honest with each other and cut the bull.

Not only would that get Pollard released. It would give us America’s true respect as their spiritual leaders, and will end the anti Semitism that is keeping Pollard in prison.

The more we grovel, the more we are condemning him to die in North Carolina.

Need I even mention that the only person with the Jewish guts to do this…is Moshe Feiglin.