Israel's Blind Faith in Government

Daniel Doron has another must-read about how Israelis (and Jews as a whole) continue to believe in the salvational power of big government, despite contradictory evidence from nearly every encounter with reality. Ehud Olmert is the probably the best example of Doron's line that government's "chief function is the election of the politicians who make them up":

Israelis - and especially their university educated elites - seem to have a dangerous infatuation, a puzzling delusion about the capability of their governments to solve almost any problem. Otherwise how can one explain the recent crop of suggestions by ostensibly mature people, holding responsible positions, that government protect them from the vagaries of the dollar exchange rate or from rising housing costs.

For decades Israelis have been taking cruel and usual punishment, from runaway inflation to low wages, to monopoly induced inflated costs, to the erosion of their pensions, as a result of their trust in government management of the economy. Yet they keep asking for more, at ever growing costs, though it should have become obvious that governments cannot deliver what they expect. Governments can no more control powerful economic forces that change the rate of the dollar or the costs of housing, than they can control the rise and fall of tides.

Israelis should have discovered by now that the more government over reaches, the less it can deliver. In fact governments create, and then aggravate, most of our problems. When governments' fingers are stuck, as in Israel, in every pie, they are incapable of doing anything. They cannot even perform their legitimate tasks, like protecting the people of Sderot from Kassam attacks.

Read the whole thing...