The Jewish Libertarian Blog

On Organ Donation, Organ Sales, and Hypocrisy

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog

Update Hoshana Rabba 5776: R. Yanklowitz has reversed his position and I publicly apologize for attacking him on this issue.

—————-

I wrote a post on Times of Israel accusing someone of hypocrisy for supporting organ donation but opposing free market organ trade. It was taken down.

Here is the full post.

Let me preempt this blog with a few sentences.

First, I’m clearheaded and calculated. I know what I’m writing, and I won’t take any of it back, except on one condition. My argument is those who support organ donation, or even themselves donate organs, but are against free market organ trade, are hypocrites. Shmuly Yanklowitz donated a kidney, and that’s great. He is also against free market organ trade.  (UPDATE: Here is proof.) He is therefore a hypocrite. If he supports free market organ trade publicly, I will take back my attack and issue an apology.

Second, I am not against organ donation. I’m totally for it, I believe anyone should be able to donate anything he wants to anybody, and I believe it is a positive mitzva (commandment from God) to do so. What Shmuly did was an objectively good thing, and he deserves credit for saving a man’s life at the risk of his own.

Third, I personally would not donate a kidney unless it was for immediate family (certain) or even extended family (possible), because I love them more than others. I would, however, sell a kidney of mine of it were legal and I needed the money to survive or for my family to survive. So I’m not claiming anyone would donate a kidney and it’s no big deal. It’s a big deal. He did it. Good for him.

Fourth, I carry a Halachic Organ Donor card (a card that says I am willing to donate upon death) in the event I am killed, Chas VeShalom (God forbid), and can donate.

THAT SAID…

Here’s the background. On June 19th an article came out on Times of Israel about Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, who donated a kidney to save a Jew’s life. The article was, I would say, pretty much the mirror image of a hatchet job. It was so clearly structured to make Shmuly look like a saint with a halo that it’s almost hard to read in its saccharine sycophantic tone, showering Shmuly with praise and flattery.

I know Shmuly. Not very well, but I know him. For a year I learned with him at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, which I left after a year to move to Israel. He continued on to get Smicha (Rabbinic ordination). I didn’t. Back then I was not a libertarian, but I was moving in that direction. I was always amazed by Shmuly’s undying energy. The man could never tire. He was like superman. He still is. But I was always uncomfortable with how he made use of his energy, mainly his politics. I hate politics. All politics. And Shmuly was always, and still is, very political. I would say it is his essence. See my article “Politics is a Dirty Word” for more on that.

I never identified with his interpretation of “social justice” and “civil rights” that seemed to me, even back then, to be covers for political power. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and said to myself it just wasn’t my taste. Or that I didn’t have the energy for all this stuff. That Shmuly was better than me and more dedicated, and I was just lazy. Or at least just normal. (Many people on reading this will conclude I’m just jealous.) I can think of very few people who can match Shmuly’s dedication. (In his case, dedication to politics.)

Well, then things started to click in my ideological life, and I found the principle that would guide me for the rest of my life. That principle is the Non Aggression Principle, otherwise known as the NAP. It is an extremely simple thing. It says no human being should ever exert violent force against any other innocent human being. Any human being who does, is, to the extent that he violates that principle or advocates violating that principle, immoral. The NAP is a principle most would agree with. It sounds fairly straightforward. But everyone always finds exceptions, especially Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowtiz.

Before I go into the more esoteric violations of the NAP that Rabbi Yanklowitz engages in, the most pertinent is this, and here, I admit, I am making an assumption, but I think it’s an accurate one.

Shmuly is against a free market in organs. He is therefore a hypocrite, because on the one hand he believes everyone who needs a kidney should have a kidney, but he doesn’t believe in allowing the market to reach the clearing price for such a good. The clearing price is the price where the amount of sellers equals the amount of buyers, where everyone willing to trade for a kidney can get one. When the market price for a good like a kidney is set below the market price, shortages develop. A shortages is when not everyone who is willing to trade for a kidney can get one, due to the fear of government reprisal by force. The government-mandated price for a kidney is ZERO, because one is only allowed to donate rather than sell.

When shortages develop in the organ market, people die. As the article on Shmuly and his heroic deed states, there are 101,662 people in the US awaiting a kidney transplant. Only 17,000 free transplants took place last year, most from deceased people. That means about 85,000 people, most if not ALL willing to trade for a kidney, will definitely have to go through another year of painful dialysis not knowing if they will survive, and many of them will die, because they cannot legally purchase a kidney.

But that’s just one side of it. There are millions of people in the world with extra kidneys. Shmuly is quoted in the article as saying God put two kidneys in his body, so he was meant to give one away. And what about the other 6 billion people on the planet with two kidneys? Should they not be allowed to sell one of them voluntarily to save a life? Is that somehow not as good as donating? Either way you’re saving a life. In one case you get money. In another case you don’t. Either way the life is saved.

The other side is the billion or more (I don’t know these numbers, I’m sure Shmuly does though) people starving around the world, or living in shanties off a dollar a day, mothers who throw babies they cannot afford to raise out into the forest to die. These destitute people, all of them have two kidneys. But they are not allowed to exchange them for desperately-needed money that they need to support their families and survive. And so their families die. And so do the people that could have used a kidney, that they were willing to exchange money for but could not do so for fear of government violence against them.

Being against voluntary organ sales violates the Non Agression Principle, because it employs force against innocent people who want to engage in a voluntary exchange, and threatens them with violence if they do. It also violates the NAP because it advocates violence against innocent sufferers of chronic kidney disease like the man Shmuly saved, because they would be VERY willing to purchase a kidney on the free market to save their lives, but if they do so they are threatened with prison.

Digressing a bit, Shmuly is also against so-called sweatshops in the Third World. Some of his political activity is directed against low-paying (by our standards) factory work in the Third World, and forcibly shutting it down. People who work in sweatshops at low pay by our standards are doing it because it is the best of all possible alternatives. The alternatives in those countries are prostitution or starvation. Those who advocate forcibly shutting down sweatshops without providing an alternative are condemning children to prostitution and death.

Shmuly is also an advocate of the minimum wage, and even raising it. The minimum wage makes it illegal to employ people whose labor is valued below an arbitrary number of dollars. It says that anyone whose labor is not worth X dollars an hour is not allowed to work. And if he works, voluntarily, for anything below that number, he or his employer or both will be put in prison. This hurts the weakest sectors of society, the unskilled, who must then resort to crime to survive because they cannot get jobs at all.

Shmuly is an advocate of “equal pay for equal work,” which is an Orwellian euphemism for “women should be paid more than they are on the free market”. If women are paid a certain amount for whatever work and voluntarily agree to it, stopping that relationship is immoral. The market price for whatever work by whoever is doing it is already set by free agreement. Pushing it higher by violent force will put women below that arbitrary point “discovered” by university academics, out of work, and hurt the weakest of them.

I am aware that Shmuly is not a malicious person. But the things he advocates for are malicious and immoral. He just doesn’t understand why. It’s not because he’s stupid. It’s because if he does recognize it, he will realize the damage he has caused throughout the years and he will have to face it and do teshuva (repentance), which is very difficult to do.

Are there ways to advocate for issues of true justice around sweatshops and women’s issues and wages? Sure. If a sweatshop is caught offering children $1 an hour but only paying $0.50, Shmuly could start an organization fighting for the rights of these sweatshop children to get the amount of money they voluntarily contracted for. If a woman is offered $30,000 a year to be a manager of whatever, Shmuly could start an organization that makes sure she gets the amount of money she contracted for, and make it only for women if he wants. That would be fine.

Shmuly could start an organization that helps low-wage workers gain more skills so their labor can be more valuable. But no. He simply wants to outlaw their jobs, because advocating for political force is so much easier than doing actual work that helps people economically.

And that takes me to the kicker. Here’s the kicker. Shmuly is an incredibly ambitious man. There is no problem with being ambitious. It’s a good thing. The problem is when you use unjust laws, like the law against selling organs, to further your agenda of political force.

Now, please, imagine for a moment that selling organs on the free market were legal. If you wanted to sell your kidney to a dying man on dialysis, nobody would stop you. Women can sell their eggs already. There is no difference. Now, in that case, the supply of those willing to sell a kidney at whatever price agreed upon greatly exceeds those who need them. One could even theoretically contract people to sell their organs upon death with the money going to their heirs. Imagine the enormous amount of kidneys that would result from just that.

If that were the case, if people all over the world, destitute starving weak people, could sell a kidney for money voluntarily, then how much publicity do you think Shmuly Yanklowitz could get for donating a kidney?

The answer is ZERO. The price of kidneys would be low enough that whoever needs one would buy one immediately rather than wait for a donor at the risk of his life on dialysis.

If Shmuly donated in a world where there was a free market in kidneys, donating one would just be viewed as idiocy. There would be no need to do so.

But instead, in the world we live in, it is illegal to exchange a kidney for money. That DOES NOT mean that nothing is exchanged when someone donates a kidney. Shmuly gets a LOT out of donating a kidney. He gets publicity. He gets recognition. He gets reverence. He gets a following. He gets all that, and more. These are very valuable goods. This is VERY valuable to him personally, because he knows how to use all of these goods. To further his goals. To broaden his name. To further his own career.

In the same way that computer parts are only valuable to someone who knows how to put them together, so too publicity is only good for someone who knows how to use it. But it is a good nonetheless, just like money, only less marketable, and only marketable by publicity experts. 

Am I saying it was not selfless of Shmuly to donate a kidney? It was certainly selfless, in a very shallow strictly monetary interpretation of selflessness. It was selfless only in the sense that he did not get actual money for the kidney. But he got other things, other goods, less marketable for others, but very marketable for him. He got a barter exchange – a kidney for publicity – instead of a monetary exchange – a kidney for money. Anyone can use money. Money is the most marketable good, by definition. But only very skilled people, like Shmuly, can use publicity. It is a very specific kind of economic good. He will take this publicity and exchange that for money instead to complete his barter, for donations to his causes, for better job opportunities as the Rabbi who donated a kidney, for further publicity advocating for violence against women and the poor, by outlawing voluntary employment relationships for women (equal work equal pay) and low-skilled workers (minimum wage).

But even then, it is not a moral problem to exchange publicity for a kidney. That’s perfectly fine and moral. What is IMMORAL, however, is to exchange publicity for a kidney when at the same time you advocate outlawing any monetary transactions for kidneys, thereby jacking up the value of the publicity you obtain from donating, and then using that to further your own goals at the expense of the starvation of others, who cannot legally sell their kidneys for money when they desperately need to do so.

For all these reasons, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is a hypocrite. He saved a life, yes, but that’s only because selling kidneys on the free market is illegal, and that is in violation of the NAP. If Shmuly donating a kidney were a truly selfless act, we would not have seen the article on Times of Israel. We would not have seen him claiming he knows what God wants from him, personally. We would not have seen a picture of him davening (praying) out of a Siddur (prayer book) right after surgery. We would not have known how many Smichas (Rabbinic Ordinations) he has or anything else and from whom. He would not have told anybody.

And if exchanging a kidney for money were legal instead of only exchanging a kidney for publicity, nobody would have cared.

And nobody should, except for the man he saved.

 

On Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, Hypocrisy, Organ Donation and Exchange

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

UPDATE: READ THE FULL POST HERE. SHMULY HAS SINCE REVERSED HIS POSITION AGAINST A FREE MARKET IN ORGANS AND I HAVE APOLOGIZED.

Oh boy. I’m gonna get it for this one.

I wrote a blog for Times of Israel that dumped on a Rabbi, one who I do not respect very much, Shmuly Yanklowitz, for donating a kidney to a dying man. That sounds bad even to me, and I wrote the thing. The problem is not the donating. Donating is good. The problem is donating in the face of advocating against a free market in organs.

If Shmuly publicly supports an absolutely free market in organs, I will retract my criticism and issue a public apology.

Some of the sharper points. Read the rest at the link above:

And that takes me to the kicker. Here’s the kicker. Shmuly is an incredibly ambitious man. There is no problem with being ambitious. It’s a good thing. The problem is when you use unjust laws, like the law against selling organs, to further your agenda of political force.

Now, please, imagine for a moment that selling organs on the free market were legal. If you wanted to sell your kidney to a dying man on dialysis, nobody would stop you. Women can sell their eggs already. There is no difference. Now, in that case, the supply of those willing to sell a kidney at whatever price agreed upon greatly exceeds those who need them. One could even theoretically contract people to sell their organs upon death with the money going to their heirs. Imagine the enormous amount of kidneys that would result from just that.

If that were the case, if people all over the world, destitute starving weak people, could sell a kidney for money voluntarily, then how much publicity do you think Shmuly Yanklowitz could get for donating a kidney?

The answer is ZERO. The price of kidneys would be low enough that whoever needs one would buy one immediately rather than wait for a donor at the risk of his life on dialysis.

If Shmuly donated in a world where there was a free market in kidneys, donating one would just be viewed as idiocy. There would be no need to do so.

But instead, in the world we live in, it is illegal to exchange a kidney for money. That DOES NOT mean that nothing is exchanged when someone donates a kidney. Shmuly gets a LOT out of donating a kidney. He gets publicity. He gets recognition. He gets reverence. He gets a following. He gets all that, and more. These are very valuable goods. This is VERY valuable to him personally, because he knows how to use all of these goods. To further his goals. To broaden his name. To further his own career.

In the same way that computer parts are only valuable to someone who knows how to put them together, so too publicity is only good for someone who knows how to use it. But it is a good nonetheless, just like money, only less marketable, and only marketable by publicity experts. 

Am I saying it was not selfless of Shmuly to donate a kidney? It was certainly selfless, in a very shallow strictly monetary interpretation of selflessness. It was selfless only in the sense that he did not get actual money for the kidney. But he got other things, other goods, less marketable for others, but very marketable for him. He got a barter exchange – a kidney for publicity – instead of a monetary exchange – a kidney for money. Anyone can use money. Money is the most marketable good, by definition. But only very skilled people, like Shmuly, can use publicity. It is a very specific kind of economic good. He will take this publicity and exchange that for money instead to complete his barter, for donations to his causes, for better job opportunities as the Rabbi who donated a kidney, for further publicity advocating for violence against women and the poor, by outlawing voluntary employment relationships for women (equal work equal pay) and low-skilled workers (minimum wage).

But even then, it is not a moral problem to exchange publicity for a kidney. That’s perfectly fine and moral. What is IMMORAL, however, is to exchange publicity for a kidney when at the same time you advocate outlawing any monetary transactions for kidneys, thereby jacking up the value of the publicity you obtain from donating, and then using that to further your own goals at the expense of the starvation of others, who cannot legally sell their kidneys for money when they desperately need to do so.

 

 

 

Nitzan Horowitz: Without Government, There Would be No Cultural Activities At All!

rafifarber Humor, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

There’s this whole totally unnecessary controversy right now in Israel about some play about some Arab who kills some soldier and the State having to subsidize the play but not wanting to, and somehow not subsidizing a play with with tax money is tantamount to violating free speech.

If that’s so, what I’m doing right now is not free speech because the government isn’t paying me to do it. I can’t tell if the people who say these things are actually that stupid, or they are just incredibly dishonest. Probably a mix.

Then there’s another play about Yigal Amir somewhere that other people don’t want to be subsidized. And again, both sides hate each other.

Here’s an idea. Don’t subsidize any play whatsoever, and let people watch or not watch them, and leave us all alone. Ah, but then there will be no more plays at all, in fact no cultural activity at all, says Nitzan Horowitz! Wow!

Moshe’s pretty good in this one. Horowitz says something like “If you take away state money from cultural activities, you could say the same about education, housing, and everything else!”

Feiglin: Yes, exactly.

Horowitz: Then there will be nothing!

Feiglin: So you’re saying that if the Minister of Outer Space suddenly resigned, then the cosmos would stop existing.

Now that’s good stuff.

Only one objection. Feiglin says that no one should be forced to subsidize any plays, and Horowitz correctly says that he shouldn’t be forced to pay for settlers. That’s a good point, and Horowitz is correct there.

Moshe tries to answer with a non-sequitur, saying that he doesn’t pay for settlers because settlers are more productive than other sectors. But that’s nonsense. He pays for their protection and everything else public in Judea and Samaria regardless of how productive they are, and he shouldn’t have to because he has a moral problem with where they live. Moshe can’t say that though because then he becomes an anarcho capitalist so he has to say something illogical to keep his minarchy intact.

The other nutty thing about this video was the subtitle that appears around minute 4: “Privatization of Culture: A good solution or morally bankrupt?”

Privatization of culture is morally bankrupt of course. Before the State, there was no culture. First there were people who were in charge of everyone who told the little people who they stole from how to do culture. Then they did culture. Without governments, there would be no culture, and we’d basically be monkeys. Yeah. Sounds right. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking how sick this State is.

 

Headline of the Year: Gennimata easily beats off competition to become first woman to head PASOK

rafifarber Humor, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Great stuff. Love the picture too. And her name, Fofi.

Gennimata easily beats off competition to become first woman to head PASOK

Fofi beats off competition
Fofi beats off competition
Fofi Gennimata took over as the first female leader in PASOK’s history on Monday after comfortably seeing off her two male competitors to secure the presidency of the beleaguered Socialist party.

The ex-minister immediately said that she would seek to rebuild the once-mighty party and would begin a dialogue with other groups on the center-left of Greek politics. Although she did not name them, her comments suggest that she will reach out to Democratic Left, which was part of the coalition government between 2012 and 2013, and the Movement of Democratic Socialists launched by ex-PASOK chief George Papandreou in January.

Reminds me of this great blooper:

 

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.