Author: rafifarber

Tsipras Insists on Saving Democracy, But Democracy is what is Destroying Europe

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

I can’t resist. It’s just too poetic.

Tsipras was quoted as penning this rhetorical flourish, not bad for the Rambam at the end of one of the 14 books of the Yad, except full of much more bull:

Those who perceive our sincere wish for a solution and our attempts to bridge the differences as a sign of weakness, should consider the following: We are not simply shouldering a history laden with struggles. We are shouldering the dignity of our people, as well as the hopes of the people of Europe. We cannot ignore this responsibility. This is not a matter of ideological stubbornness. This is about democracy. We do not have the right to bury European democracy in the place where it was born.

Your people’s dignity? What a sick twisted world where “dignity” is defined by how much of other people’s money you can snort up in a bailout to maintain your bloated pensions for people who do nothing but put restrictions on business.

Real dignity, Tsipras my commie buddy, is when you work for the money you earn, it’s from the satisfaction of having created value for the world, of being rewarded for hard efforts pleasing consumers.

As for burying European democracy in the place where it was born, just because “your people” in Greece voted for you to take other people’s money in Germany because you ran out of money in your own country, doesn’t mean doing so is dignified or morally correct. Here is a beautiful paragraph from an FT article penned by a politician of all people, telling the truth for once.

“The game theorists of the Greek government are in the process of gambling away the future of their country,” Mr Gabriel wrote, in a thinly veiled dig at Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister who is an expert on game theory. “Europe and Germany will not let themselves be blackmailed. And we will not let the exaggerated electoral pledges of a partly communist government be paid for by German workers and their families.“

BAM!

Just because a bunch of people democratically voted to take money from people in another country doesn’t make it holy. Maybe democracy will finally die right where it was born, in Greece, with its body decaying out from there and the rotting corpse of democracy that has all led us to unsustainable global debt trying to steal from one another will decay and be gone forever, all while the democracy worshipers, especially in this country where “saving democracy” is the new god of Israel that took us all out of Egypt to be our god, all wonder what the hell happened.

Kahlon Jacks up Taxes on Home Purchases, Home Prices Plunge (HA HA No They Don’t!)

rafifarber Israeli Politics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

Moshe Kahlon, that fake fraud pathetic slime, has raised taxes on houses for investment by as much as 10% of their value.

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon appears ready to make good on his promises to lower housing prices – but critics said that the first move he was making on the subject was actually likely to backfire.

On Sunday, at Kahlon’s behest, the government significantly increased the purchase tax on apartments and homes purchased for investments. The increases will tag between 5% and 10% on the price of an investmentproperty.

The logic goes like this:

Housing prices are too high, so if we all give more money to the GOVERNMENT instead of to the people SELLING THE HOUSE, they’ll go down.

MAKE SENSE?!

It’s not supply and demand! It’s how much money you give to ME, MOSHE KAHLON, INSTEAD OF SOME OTHER GUY! The more you give to ME…the richer everyone will be!

It’s beautiful logic, especially when you’re a dirty scum politician like Moshe Kahlon. Riding in on a wave of popularity after you accidentally did sort of the right thing but have no freaking clue why it worked.

Raise taxes. That’ll solve everything.

Greeks Partying Hard as the Ship Sinks

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

This is not about the negotiations. It’s actually a dry news story about an actual event that happened and is happening and can be documented, rather than rumors of a report of possible private conversations with intonations and predilections and intimations of something maybe blah blah behind closed doors deal thingee between Greece, and its creditors the CIA, IMF FBI KGB, KKK, ECB, and CBS.

So the Greek public broadcasting station ERT is being reopened. Davka now. Wow. 1,500 state employees hired to spew bullshit about what all the Greek politicians are doing, saying, not doing and not saying so everyone can know. All the time.

I wonder what the hell they’re going to pay the 1,500 bullshit workers with.

Once described as a “haven of waste”, Greece’s public broadcaster relaunched on Thursday evening with a live concert by famous local musicians in central Athens…

“Today ERT is back, once again tasked with providing a service to Greek society of prompt and impartial information. The stakes are high; to show that a public organisation can serve the public interest,” said Tsipras.

It’s thought around 1,500 staff are being gradually rehired as programming progressively resumes.

Reporting from the reopening, Nikoleta Drougka, our correspondent in Athens said: “Here at the ERT headquarters, the mood is celebratory.”

Live it up you wacknuts. Party hard. You don’t have much time to enjoy it, so may as well go out screaming.

It reminds me of that snippet from Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) where God tells him to redeem a field while the Babylonians are busy burning Yehuda and killing everyone. Yirmiyahu asks what’s the point. God says that fields will still be redeemed in My land, no matter what’s happening.

In Yirmiyahu it’s a sad but beautiful note of ultimate continuity in the face of catastrophe. The meaning is, ultimately, we’ll be back. And we are.

But with his reopening of some stupid public broadcaster, it’s like an dark universe version of that same message. We screwed up. So at least let’s screw up some more before the bell tolls. Have a party. Woo hoo.

My Last Word On Greece Until they Leave the Euro

rafifarber Humor, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

The back and forth on Greece is starting to drive even me nuts. As we get closer to the deadline of reality (whenever that is), the Greek government – the entire Eurozone really – is acting more and more like a cornered animal, changing its tune and tone every hour instead of every day. It’s getting nuts, and I can’t believe any stories that come out of there anymore.

One hour Greece has a deal. The next hour the IMF is pissed as hell. Then Tsipras is groping Merkel and then Varoufakis is growling at Scheuble, then some Greek unknown official named Somethingopalous Flabargatopolous says something very hopeful, but Jean Claude Van Dam Juncker says “we have to hurry” and Christine Lagarde gets hot flashes while Jeroen Djisselbooger says Greece’s plan is not credible, but talks were “extremely friendly”.

This is a term I’ve actually seen a lot. “Extremely friendly”. Does anyone not an an asylum use that term? “Extremely friendly”? Extreme friends, sounds like a reality show where two friends go into the Outback and see if they can survive dehydration and kangaroo attacks.

I have never been “extremely friendly” with anybody. It sounds frightening.

So whatever happens, happens. I’m done. Everything is smokescreens now. As we get even closer, the story will change by the minute.

Rotem Sela is Awesome, Publicly Breaking the Law of Book Price Controls

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

This guy Rotem Sela is pretty cool. I know nothing about him, but what he’s doing is awesome. In this video, he’s wearing a shirt that says, “Books at illegal prices.” I’ve written about this minimum book price law twice, here and here. It’s a law that says prices on books by new authors must be above market level, in so many words.

By doing that, they make the books impossible to sell, putting new authors completely out of business.

It makes me want to cry how politicians just simply refuse to understand supply and demand, no matter how simple it is. Supply and demand meet at the market price. Make the market price illegal, and you have a surplus, meaning unsold stuff. The producers of the unsold stuff lose money. They stop producing it.

That’s it. That’s it that’s it that’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Same with minimum wage. Make market price wages illegal, and you have a surplus of workers, AKA permanent unemployment. That’s it that’s it. Nothing else to it.

Moshe Feiglin wrote a pretty good post today explaining the bad effects of the minimum book price law, but he still talks in socialist jargon and it bothers me. This paragraph, specifically, was pretty crappy: (worst parts in bold)

הכוונה היתה טובה – אין ספק (גם מרכס לא חשב להרעיב מיליונים). הרי סופרים מתחילים מקבלים גרושים ואת כל הרווח גורפות הוצאות הספרים המשומנות – אז למה לא בעצם? לקחת מהעשירים ולתת לעניים? מה יותר פשוט מזה. החוק עבר ברוב כמעט מוחלט

The intention was a good one, no doubt. (Marx wasn’t trying to starve millions either.) Of course beginning authors get peanuts and all the profit goes to the fattened book publishers, so why not price controls? Take from the rich and give to the poor? Nothing simpler than that. The law passed easily.

The implication is that, indeed, it would be nicer if authors got more money, but they don’t, and people are greedy, and there’s nothing we can do about it. These “reluctant libertarian” positions I call them are really annoying. It WOULDN’T be “better” if authors got more money. They get the money they get because that’s the market price for it. That’s it.

There is no and there cannot be any value judgement about what market prices are. They just are. They take into account what people want or don’t want and how much they are willing to pay, the supply the demand and the meeting point between the two.

And how does Feiglin know how much “profit” (by which he means interest) goes to the book publishers and how little goes to the authors? Has he looked at their profit margins? Does he see definitively that if the fat book publishers gave more of their fat profit to the sickly authors, they would still be net positive?

Whatever. He sneaks in these wacky sentiments sometimes when he makes a good point. And it’s annoying.

So Rotem Sela is breaking the law publicly and challenging the State in the open. I like this. Let’s see if he gets thrown into the Gulag by our enlightened lunatics in the Knesset. Also, interestingly, if you’ll notice he wording at the beginning of the video – “How did banks become so hated by the public?”

Good segway.

Greece Proposal Rejected Again as 5.2 Magnitude Earthquake Hits Athens

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, The Jewish Libertarian Blog

According to WSJ, Greece’s latest proposal to get its hand on more bailout money was swiftly rejected.

BRUSSELS—A compromise proposal sent by Greece on Tuesday as part of an effort to unlock an impasse with creditors over its bailout program drew a swift and negative response from officials at the European Commission.

President Jean-Claude Juncker told other commissioners at the EU executive arm’s weekly meeting that the proposal appears to backtrack from an agreement on budget targets struck between him and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at a meeting last week, a person familiar with his remarks said.

In the meantime, a 5.2 magnitude earthquake hit Athens this morning.

Foreshadowing.

The Sheer Amount of Bullshit on Israeli Radio is Astounding

rafifarber Humor, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

I now work once a week in Petach Tikva, aside from my day job from my office a block away from my house. I haven’t commuted in almost 3 years, and thank God for that. Using the government roads at rush hour is a waste of life.

The radio in my car doesn’t work and I have never fixed it. That means I never listen to the radio, but today I took 4 tremps (hitchhike) in total to get to Petach Tikva and back. And I don’t control the radio when I hitchhike.

3 years ago I was leaning more and more libertarian, but it hadn’t quite clicked yet, the way the NAP fits into everything. And I commuted every day, involving tremping and bushwacking to and from work. I refused to take a bus and tried to avoid the train, which I successfully avoided most of the time. So 3 years ago I heard the radio a lot, and since I heard it every day, it sounded normal to me.

What sounded normal exactly?

Being bombarded with the opinions and doings and goings on of politicians everywhere all the time and all the bullshit they drip, everything that they say and do, every intonation that they make, everything their meaningless words imply or don’t imply, and so on. Every hour on the hour being bombarded with updates about what the politicians just said, what they say we can no longer legally do anymore, which ones just died and which ones got to a new level of authority.

And every half hour being bombarded with the same bullshit repeated every hour on the hour, this time in bullet points. And if you’re listening to anything other than repetitive crappy boring music off a mixed tape from hell, talking about all the bullshit that was already said on the hour and the half hour, just in long form.

None of it means anything. All of it is stupid meaningless garbage.

If the garbage I remember hearing today, there was President Rivlin spouting emotional rhetoric about how Israel should excel in this and that, and not compromise on this and that, and lead the world in this and that.

That’s code for spend more government money on this and that, and in order to do that, tax or print more.

And then there was Netanyahu spouting bullshit about how touched he was about the left and right coming together to combat the boycotts that “threaten Israel’s very existence”. This is just more bullshit to get you to put more of your emotional energy into the saving graces of politicians that will rescue you from the sure hellfire of the dreaded “boycotts”, politicians that do nothing but exacerbate the problems that make your life difficult already, like traffic jams every single day on the government roads without fail, that drain the life out of everyone that suffers through them day in day out non stop.

And then there was Bennett spouting bullshit about how no child, whether he is from Jerusalem or [Insert Jewish City] or Rahat or Jizr A-Zarka should have the quality of their education determined by their parents income.

Meaning, everyone’s education should be equally worthless even if you can pay for an actual education, and it should focus on the very bullshit that I’m talking about right now and nothing else.

Well, then why should the house you live in be determined by your income? Or the food you eat? Or the car you drive? Everyone, by that bullshit logic, should drive a pinto, eat gruel, and live in a shanty without plumbing. God forbid we should let anything at all be determined by income, Bennett. What a whacked out concept, you pay for what you can afford. How evil.

And then I figured it out. The government sets the market price of transportation on its roads too low (zero) to create traffic jams every single morning in order to keep you stuck in your car so you can listen to you government-controlled state media bullshit for hours on end about the same meaningless crap and become addicted to it like an MSG soaked Big Mac.

Hours, every day, listening to political bullshit about nothing. On the radio.

Imagine if radio covered actual news. Like technological progress. Or medical innovations. Or the latest news about what we know about the the possibility of life on Europa. Or the latest advances in…ANYTHING?! Anything about human progress anywhere!

Just enough of this political bullshit about absolutely nothing!

Who cares what the hell the Supreme Court said about some kid’s stupid passport!

 

 

My Reaction to the Supreme Court Jerusalem Ruling

rafifarber Foreign Policy, The Jewish Libertarian Blog, Uncategorized ,

I wrote this on Facebook just now, in a comment:

I don’t understand why anybody cares what a bunch of deadbeats on a bench think of what should accepted as the “capital” of another group of deadbeats in the knesset. Well, I understand it. People think the deadbeats’ opinions matter and have some cosmic meaning on something. I just think it’s stupid, and it won’t affect anyone’s life, and people can still (!) amazingly, consider Jerusalem the capital of the universe if they want to, and politicians, whether they are on the bench or in the knesset or in jail or on the moon, don’t matter.