Month: March 2013

Why marriage should be outlawed for everybody

rafifarber Humor, Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Ron Paul often opened his congressional speeches with the line, “Imagine for a moment…” In honor of Dr. Paul, and also for its sharp effectiveness, I will do the same here in explaining why all forms of marriage should be outlawed.

Imagine for a moment.

Imagine for a moment that in order to be friends with somebody, you needed government approval. Imagine that you met somebody you liked talking to, hanging out with, drinking a beer with, whatever. But you couldn’t legally be friends with him until you both applied for a government “friendship license”. A friendship license, by the way, costs 600 shekels which goes right into government coffers, not to mention a week of rat-racing around to 6 different bureaucrat offices filling out forms (so all the bureaucrats can have jobs and “stimulate the economy”), so you lose a week’s salary in the mess. Once you pay up and you have those forms, you can then apply for a “friendship license” which gives you and your friend the legal right to get a whopping 2% sales tax break at any restaurant in the country where you order together at the same table, upon presenting a proper friendship license, of course.

Imagine for a moment that not everyone in the country could legally apply for a friendship license with anyone he wanted. Imagine that an unmarried man and a married women, or vice versa, could not get a friendship license. It could lead to adultery, after all. Imagine that an Arab and a Jew could not get a friendship license. It’s a matter of national security, or something like that. Imagine that a father and son, or mother and daughter, could not get a friendship license. Family cannot be friends. Imagine that no more than two people could carry one friendship license. A group of three, for example, could not legally be considered friends, as that would be polyfriendamy. Therefore, all these people – the single man and married woman; the Arab and Jew; the father and son or mother and daughter, the group of three or more – all of them could not legally be friends and therefore they all had to pay that extra 2% in sales tax at restaurants.

Imagine for a moment that a “national discussion” starts taking place, the kind that enlightened media and intellectual elite like to call “a real meaningful debate” and other linguistic smokescreen nonsense. Shouldn’t an Arab and Jew have the legal right to be friends? Why can’t a married man and unmarried woman be recognized by Big Brother as friends? Shouldn’t three people have the right to be friends?

“Friendship equality for all!” the liberals would say.

“Friendship is a sacred human institution that has been around for thousands of years! Family cannot be friends! What sacrilege!” the conservatives would say.

Meanwhile, the libertarian looks around and sees the utter insanity of the whole situation. Take a deep breath and here it is in one sentence:

The government, looking for a way to extract more money out of private people, baits them with the possibility of a 2% tax break, which is essentially a promise to steal slightly less from them, if they pay 600 shekels and run around for a week begging for a license from a massive and totally unnecessary bureaucracy funded by millions of shekels in tax money for a relationship that is essentially private and has nothing to do with the government anyway, and instead of people repudiating these petty friendship licenses and ignoring them, they start fighting with each other about who has the right to a government license with catchphrases like “the right to be friends” and “friendship equality” and “the sanctity of friendship,” while in the meantime both sides are being stolen from in order to fund the bloated bureaucracy that is running the friendship license boondoggle so the government comes out of this way in the black with all the license fees and taxes and levies to fund the system and instead of uniting against the common thief and calling an end to friendship licenses and just lower sales taxes at restaurants for everyone by the measly 2% so we can stop having this STUPID argument and being at each other’s THROATS, we fight with each other about who gets to have the stupid licenses and who doesn’t.

People, we are being hoodwinked. No matter what the government says, the government does not define marriage, nor can it, not any more than it can define friendship. All it can do is promise to steal from us less if we engage in whatever relationship The Man endorses.

But in Israel the situation is even more ludicrous. In Israel, the State taxes you MORE if you get married because single parents get tax benefits. So you have people in Israel arguing with each other about who can “legally get married” and who “cannot get married” essentially fighting each other NOT over who gets a tax BREAK, but rather who gets the merit of being taxed MORE by the government, in exchange for precious, precious State recognition. State sanction to “marriage” is so important to people that no one can see how Uncle Shmuel is simply playing both sides against each other and collecting from both as we duke it out.

This is why marriage should absolutely be outlawed. NOBODY should have the right to be married. Not gays, not straights, not Jews to Arabs, not Arabs to Jews, not polygamists, not polyandrists, nobody.

Someone might say “Marriage has been around for thousands of years! How can it be outlawed?” Marriage has been around for thousands of years. Just as friendship has. If there were friendship licenses, those should be abolished as well, as their only purpose would be to promise us to steal a penny less in return for us funding a gigantic friendship government bureaucracy. The house always wins. It seems to me the institution of friendship, whatever that is, survives wonderfully without government recognition and intervention. So will the institution of marriage, whatever that is. For thousands more years to boot.

If you want to be married to anybody, you have to do it without any legal recognition. You will have to do it in private, without the government’s knowledge, and you will not be allowed to be taxed more for being privately married. Sorry, you’ll have to keep your money in exchange for not having any government recognition of who you marry.

To get to this ideal, I call upon a national boycott of all government sanctioned marriages. Paying bureaucrats for marriage licenses should be a crime. Participating in any way in the marriage license boondoggle should be frowned upon and shunned.

Marriage should return to the private sphere and outlawed as a public institution. Then we can stop fighting with each other over who gets to be stolen from more in exchange for government recognition of marital status.

Imagine for a moment we could have a debate about something that actually mattered instead of get distracted by who gets government recognition while they get all of our money.

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What would Prime Minister Farber’s government look like?

rafifarber Humor, The Jewish Libertarian Blog

(Note: This is satire, but does accurately reflect my feelings towards the Israeli government.)

While I do not believe in the legitimacy of any government to exist at all, if I were forced to be Israel’s prime minister at gunpoint (it could happen any day now) and I had to name ministers, what would my government look like, and who would be in it?

I started thinking about this for more than a fraction of a second when I saw who got what in the divvying up of ministerial positions. So-and-so is minister of “strategic affairs”. Some other guy is minister of “agriculture”. Another idiot is in charge of “water”, because after all, if some politician who knows nothing about water supplies is not in charge of all of our water, we’ll all thirst to death and the Kinneret will turn into sewage overnight. This has already happened twice back before politicians were in charge of water.

And agriculture. Thank goodness a politician who knows absolutely nothing about how to grow food is in charge of the entire agriculture sector so he can tell us what we can import, export, buy, sell, when and where and how. Otherwise no one would be able to grow any food and we’d all starve.

But, OK, let’s assume I had to build a government and name ministers. Who would they be? First of all, I’d build a coalition of 120 MK’s and include everyone in my government by promising everyone a ministerial position. First, I would name Yair Lapid Minister of Male Grooming. He will be responsible for training all men in the state who can’t groom themselves and look like zhlubs, how to look decent, improve their smiles, and generally look kempt. I will pay him $500 a month and give him a budget of $20 all out of my own pocket, and if he goes over that amount, I will fire him and give his job to Ahmed Tibi.

Instead of only one agriculture minister, there will be 5 ministers of one lima bean plant. These 5 people will be Liberman, Silvan Shalom, Tzipi Livni, and two of the smartest apes I can find in the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo. They will all fight over how to regulate the lima bean plant and can pass whatever ministerial orders they want on how to restrict, tax, and at what age to draft the lima bean plant into the army, but nothing else. If they start fighting, they’re all fired, except for the apes, who can continue regulating at will.

There will be an Interior Minister, but he will only be in charge of regulating the interior of his Knesset office. In fact, everyone in my government can be an Interior Minister. They can all decorate them with lima beans they get from the Lima Bean Plant ministers on the off chance that the 5 lima bean plant ministers haven’t regulated and taxed the lima bean plant to death. I’ll give them each a shekel to buy some gum for their offices from my own pocket.

There will also be a Culture and Sport minister. (Yes, in Israel, there actually is a politician in charge of “culture and sport”. Because without politicians, we’d forget how to play soccer and be cultural.) The culture and sport minister will be Gidon Sa’ar, who word has it likes to go to night clubs. His job will be going to night clubs once a week and writing a report about the number of flies on the ceiling of the night club. If he doesn’t write the report every single week and submit it to my desk (This Week: Eight Flies), he will be fired and his position will not be filled.

The foreign minister will be nobody, as I’m not interested in talking to other state leaders.

The education minister will be nobody, as I’m not interested in telling parents how to educate their kids.

The housing minister will be nobody, as I’m not interested in telling people where they can and can’t build and live.

The communications minister will be nobody, as I am not interested in telling people how they can communicate and what cell phones they can buy for how much.

The welfare minister will be nobody, because there won’t be any welfare.

The finance minister will be ME and ONLY ME, and I will cut everyone’s budget by 100% and return all the money to the taxpayers who it was stolen from. I will continue at my private job now in order to earn a living. Every other politicians who have any skills can continue doing whatever their jobs are if they ever had any.

Naftali Bennett will be minister of Himself, in charge of regulating, taxing, and budgeting…himself. Anyone else who wants to be a minister will be Ministers of The Guy Who Sits to the Right of Them In The Knesset, all in charge of regulating and taxing the politician on the right. Politicians who have no one sitting on the right of them will be fired.

The defense ministers will be both Henin Zoabi and Danny Danon, who get along very well I hear. I will bring Balad into the coalition just for this purpose. The defense ministers will be locked in a room with blunt objects for the remainder of my administration and in charge of regulating how they defend themselves from each other. The army itself will be split into a bunch of different private military companies by district and left to fend for themselves by either being profitable or going out of business.

All regulations will be repealed except the regulation not to threaten or inflict violence on anyone’s private property, all markets will be freed, and strict gun control laws will be ruthlessly enforced on all politicians.

And so on.