Economics is the Key to Israel's Election

Here is a must-read by Evelyn Gordon to understand that the central problems that afflict Israel are primarily economic assaults from self-proclaimed "champions of the poor." It explains why free-market economic reforms, championed only by Netanyahu, are the essential solution. Bibi, with his faults, is therefore the best candidate for Prime Minister by far:

The campaign season is under way - and therefore, so too is the season of public-sector strikes. The run-up to an election is the ideal time for public-sector workers to extort money from the government, because no incumbent wants to go to the polls with the public furious over being unable to obtain basic government services due to strikes.

If the word "extort" seems harsh, consider the pretexts for some of these recent strikes:

National Insurance Institute employees launched sanctions in early January to protect a bizarre perk: the right to either come to work 20 minutes late, leave 20 minutes early or be paid extra should they deign to work a full day. The Finance Ministry recently gave this arrangement some long-overdue scrutiny and concluded that it was illegal. NII workers retaliated by denying service to the public.

On January 5, for instance, they crashed the institute's computers to make service impossible. Last week, they shut the institute's doors until further notice. Then they threatened to withhold monthly allotments to some of society's neediest members, many of whom have no other source of income. Keep that in mind next time the Histadrut, which backed the sanctions, poses as champion of the poor: It would rather deprive the truly needy of their sole source of income than make union members work a full day.

Daniel Doron's must-read explains why everyone should care about economics, because it is the driver of Israel's political failures:

Following socialist and then statist economic policies, Israeli governments managed to turn a most talented people, full of energy and invention, into an economic cripple. Most families can barely keep their heads above water, finding its nearly impossible to make it on a salary [average] of about $1,200 a month (this with prices usually higher than those in America!).

Here he begins to explain why Kadima and its vague "trust us" (s'moch) attitude will result in more of the status quo that is exactly the opposite of what Israel needs economically:

Why do Israelis, as they gradually come to realize that Sharon may not be able to lead them, keep flocking to his party, ignoring its amorphous, problematic composition, its undemocratic nature, and its lack of any known concrete plans for meeting the daunting challenges facing Israel?....

The clamor for a strong father figure could, however, further damage an already brittle Israeli democracy. Suffering from an extreme concentration of power - not only political, but also economic - Israel has already damaged orderly governance by relying too heavily on the predilections, indeed the whims, of a few central players....

The same self-destructive concentration of excessive power has made Israeli governments unruly behemoths. Even the best managers, following a coherent policy set by a strong "board of directors," would find impossible to manage them. They have too many conflicting tasks, from allocating land and airwave rights (making the winners billionaires) to assuring the proper branding of camels and the right amount of jelly in Hanukka doughnuts. Their Byzantine bureaucracies are incapable of executing anything resembling a coherent policy. When they overcome their habitual paralysis, they implement a mishmash of conflicting political impulses, their left hand often undoing what their right hand has been trying to accomplish at great cost.