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On People and Values

A recent story I heard about a popular (Orthodox / neo-Chareidi) magazine with an English (primary distribution in the U.S.) and Hebrew (primary distribution in Israel) version:

The English version had a picture of Auschwitz, with some faces blurred. This caused an outrage because the faces blurred were of women. The magazine’s apologetic response was that the tempered picture was initiated by the Israeli magazine, who blurred the images of women according to their policy. When received by the U.S. counterpart, it was assumed that the blurring was done to protect the privacy of those individuals, and not because of other factors that are not in line with the U.S. branch’s policy.
The story could just as easily have read the following:
The Hebrew version had a picture of Auschwitz, with some faces blurred. This caused an outrage because the public has the right to see who was there. The magazine’s apologetic response was that the tempered picture initiated from the American magazine, who blurred the images of people to protect their privacy, according to their policy. When received by the Israeli counterpart, it was assumed that the blurring was done to blur out pictures of women, and not because of other factors that are not in line with the Israeli branch’s policy…

How Briskers Pasken

The Brisker “Voss, not Farvoss” rule has changed Halacha, too, in spite of Brisk officially despising the deciding of Halacha. Instead of magically learning correctly after leaving Yeshiva – as Shittas Brisk is supposedly designed only for the Yeshiva period – the student of Halacha, now hopefully no longer delving into imaginary constructs views Halacha as nothing more than arranging rows: How many Poskim hold X; how many hold Y.

This is dry, librarian work, far worse than what even Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef would (mostly) do, which is why so few Yeshiva alumni go into Halacha at all.

After deciding who voted what, they then try to discover how each one is “Leshittaso” elsewhere, instead of asking: “Is it even logical to believe X in the first place?” If noticing Sevara was not disallowed, they would be asking which words are exact, and which are not.

One example of this style is Rabbi Zevulun Shub’s “Sha’arei Zevulun” (although better than many others). Ponevich alumnus and popular Rosh Yeshiva and Magid Shiur for many years, he is, importantly, also a major Posek in Ramot and beyond.

This is my book review…

The State of the British National Health Service

Patients Are “Dying in Corridors” of Britain’s Socialised Health System

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01/23/2018 

“Patients dying in hospital corridors.” So went the headline which appeared on the BBC’s website last week, detailing the newest outrages which have emerged from Britain’s crisis-beset healthcare system. This most recent revelation came as a result of an open letter sent to the prime minister by 68 senior doctors, offering details of the inhuman conditions which have become common in the National Health Service’s hospitals.

The letter, which collected statistics from NHS hospitals in England and Wales, found that in December alone over 300,000 patients were made to wait in emergency rooms for more than four hours before being seen, with thousands more suffering long waits in ambulances before even being allowed into the emergency room. The letter further noted that it had become “routine” for patients to be left on gurneys in corridors for as long as 12 hours before being offered proper beds, with many of them eventually being put into makeshift wards hastily constructed in side-rooms. In addition to this, it was revealed that around 120 patients per day are being attended to in corridors and waiting rooms, with many being made to undergo humiliating treatments in the public areas of hospitals, and some even dying prematurely as a result. One patient reported that, having gone to the emergency room with a gynecological problem which had left her in severe pain and bleeding, a lack of treatment rooms led hospital staff to examine her in a busy corridor, in full view of other patients.

While it’s tempting to believe that these extreme cases must be a rare occurrence, the fact is that such horror stories have become increasingly the norm for a socialised healthcare system that seems to be in a permanent state of crisis. Indeed, as the NHS entered the first week of 2018, over 97% of its trusts in England were reporting levels of overcrowding so severe as to be “unsafe.”

Almost as predictable as the regular emergence of new stories of this kind is the equally unwavering refusal of British commentators to consider that the state-run monopoly structure of the system itself might be to blame. Many, including the prime minister herself, have pointed to the spike in seasonal illnesses such as the flu at this time of year, to distract from the more fundamental flaws of the system. However, officials from Public Health England recently went so far as to openly dismiss this as a major cause of the current healthcare crisis, clarifying that current levels of hospital admissions due to the flu are “certainly not unprecedented.” The aging of the population, and local councils’ failure to provide more non-hospital care have also been blamed.

By far the most commonly suggested remedy, however, is simply to inject more taxpayers’ money into this failing system. Indeed, the belief that Britain’s perpetual healthcare crisis is solely the result of funding cuts by miserly Conservative politicians is so widespread that it is almost never challenged, least of all by the trusted experts within the system itself, many of whom stand to benefit from increased funding.

However, the popular caricature of the NHS as suffering from chronic underfunding is simply a myth. In fact, even when adjusting for inflation, it is clear that government funding to the NHS has been increasing at an extraordinary rate since the turn of the millennium, much more quickly than during the early years which its supporters look back on so fondly.

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Indeed, under the Conservative government of 2015–16, almost 30% of Britain’s public services budget was spent on its monopoly healthcare system, compared with around 11% in the NHS’s first decade.

One commonly heard soundbite from supporters of the current system is that the Conservatives have allowed healthcare spending to slump to historically low levels; all it would take to return the NHS to the levels of success it supposedly previously enjoyed would be to increase its funding back to the same level it previously enjoyed, or so they say. However, to believe such a statement one would have to make two separate misinterpretations of the statistics, both so basic that they would strike shame into even the dullest high school math students: firstly, it is not the absolute amount of spending on the NHS which has fallen under the Conservative-led governments of 2010–18, but merely the rate at which spending is continuing to increase, even when adjusting for inflation. Second, the only reason that the rate of increase seems to have fallen is because of how disproportionately high it had been been under the infamously spendthrift Labour governments of 1997–2010.

Not only is the NHS not underfunded, but it suffers from dismally low efficiency in terms of healthcare bang per buck compared with similarly developed countries. This suggests that no matter how much its funding is increased, the current set-up is prone to chronically waste that money away.

To overcome these problems, reforms to the fundamental nature of the system itself are desperately needed, to increase the economic freedom of healthcare providers in the UK as well as the freedom of choice of consumers. In short, as long as British healthcare is organised as a taxpayer-funded state monopoly it will continue to fail, just as the other nationalised monopolies of the 1970s failed. To get to a point where the British public would even consider reforms of that kind, however, would require the breaking of a taboo that has defined the past 70 years of British politics.

George Pickering is the Almoayyad Fellow in Residence at the Mises Institute this summer, and is a student of economic history at the London School of Economics.

From Mises.org, here.

Question: How Old Is Atheism?

Yeshayahu Leibowitz noted well, there have been believers and unbelievers in every age.

I posit the true age of atheism started symbolically with the evil French Revolution and de Sade. Indeed, the first people to defend atheism in writing appear to be Matthias Knutzen, Kazimierz Łyszczyński, Jean Meslier, and Baron d’Holbach. (Since “atheism” per se is possibly incoherent, I use the word in the colloquial sense of those publically identifying as such.)

Preternaturally-biased Wikipedia has two articles on the history of atheism claiming it’s both quite old, and quite popular since ancient times.

Nonsense.

Let’s see. Was Adam Harishon an atheist? Ah, I doubt it. He spoke to Hashem as a prophet. So did his children. Enosh started idolatry.

In Tanach (Scripture) it’s unclear there was even one atheist. Even such verses as אמר נבל בלבו אין אלהים in Tehillim 14 and 53 refer to what stays in the heart (as Chazal say, Iyov sinned by Birkas Hashem in his heart) and might refer to denying Divine Providence alone, etc.

Amalek is misotheistic; he hates Hashem. Even Amalek doesn’t deny Hashem’s very existence!

Even pagan societies often recognized One, de-emphasized special “Creator-God”, but focused on deifying their own Henotheistic Mazel\Sar. There are many hundreds of words for Him across numerous cultures, such as the Chinese “Shangdi“, and even the Egyptian “Aten”. As the Psalmist says ממזרח שמש עד מבואו מהלל שם השם, see Menachos 110a “Elaha De’elaha“.

Atheists say every young child is an atheist (and cows are atheists too, presumably!). Well, if we speak of intellectual discourse, they can’t say too much about “Juice!”, either. And if we speak of the weak “Sensus Divinitatis“, that’s there from the start, including presuppositionally. (Although I do suspect they cry more because we can’t teach them much about Emuna yet.)

Skipping to less ancient times, the very fact “Atheist” was an insult, not a proud mantle, shows just how “popular” it was in generations past. Indeed, this means we cannot know “Theodorus the Atheist” was one since this title was given him by his enemies (OK, bad example).

Wikipedia deceptively includes the names of people who denied the truth of various false deities. But by that ridiculous measure, Avraham Avinu, a literal “iconoclast”, was an atheist, too…! (Not to mention אבנימוס הגרדי.)

Here’s an example:

“Little is known for certain concerning his philosophical views or the nature of his alleged atheism. All that is known for certain on the point is that Diagoras was offended by the worship of the Athenian national gods.”

Then why mention him here at all? To poison the well!

And again from Wikipedia:

In the fourth century BC, he points to Plato, as the philosopher imagines a believer chastising an atheist: “You and your friends are not the first to have held this view about the gods! There are always those who suffer from this illness, in greater or lesser numbers.”

That’s “gods” plural, so stop wasting my time! Mishlei says, 17:28: גם אויל מחריש חכם יחשב, אטם שפתיו נבון.

Even by the low standards demanded of modern historians of ancient times (because their work is near-futile), identifications are strictly tentative.

As for “the Epicureans, who were often called “Atheoi” in antiquity, and the atheistic writings of Xenophanes of Colophon“, this may be because they denied Divine Providence, and endorsed hedonism, as we explained elsewhere.

The word “Emuna” itself translates better as native or adopted “loyalty” than anything else (as in ויהי ידיו אמונה), and philosophers are on the wrong track, see Rabbi S. R. Hirsch’s “The 19 Letters”. The supposed “Belief in\Belief that” distinction is unclear because, on the one hand, humans anthropomorphize everything so belief in Avoda Zara becomes a strange “relationship”, while, on the other hand, we simply cannot deny our knowledge.

The words “Kafar ba’ikkar” (as by Adam Harishon) mean nothing more than denial of Divine Providence, as seen in Sanhedrin 45b: מה מקלל זה שכפר בעיקר, and in the Haggadah:

רשע מה הוא אומר, מה העבודה הזאת לכם. לכם ולא לו. ולפי שהוציא את עצמו מן הכלל כפר בעקר. ואף אתה הקהה את שניו ואמור לו, בעבור זה עשה השם לי בצאתי ממצרים, לי ולא לו. אלו היה שם לא היה נגאל.

Sure, there were some ancient atheists (Indian “Carvakas” maybe? Al-Ma’arri?).

And so says the Ramban, Shemos 13:17:

הנה מעת היות עבודת גילולים בעולם מימי אנוש החלו הדעות להשתבש באמונה, מהם כופרים בעיקר ואומרים כי העולם קדמון, כחשו בה’ ויאמרו לא הוא, ומהם מכחישים בידיעתו הפרטית… ומהם שיודו בידיעה ומכחישים בהשגחה…

And the various “proofs” brought in Sha’ar Hayichud of Chovos Halevavos and other works were obviously in demand. But there weren’t a large number of atheists. Foolish knavery has since increased exponentially (Yeridas Hadoros).

By the way, we referenced the above article in our free, special ebook on answering atheists. To receive the full Hebrew ebook, subscribe to Hyehudi’s Daily Newsletter here.

How Come Israel Never Gets Government Shutdowns?!

When Government Shuts Down

By 

Mises.org

January 22, 2018

[Editor’s note: As we face another so-called government shutdown, some may recall that we’ve been down this road before. In this 1996 article, Lew Rockwell explains that government “shutdowns” are neither as unpopular or as troublesome, as the media and Washington politicians assume.]

According to official history, the 104th Congress doomed itself when it shut down the government to force its budget priorities on the president. People got up in arms and demanded that government be reopened. This taught the people and their representatives a valuable lesson. As much as we may complain, we truly need big government. Today, we all agree with the White House vow to never allow the government to shut down again.

Of course, everything about this story is nonsense. Shutting down the government was this Congress’s most noble act. Though the freshmen, who forced the closing against the leadership’s wishes, didn’t properly prepare for the inevitable response from the media and the bureaucracy, they were on the right track. It may have been the only principled act in two years of political compromise.

Moreover, nobody has produced a shred of evidence that the government shutdown was as unpopular as the media claimed it was. It was asserted daily, but never proven. Oh sure, we heard about how people couldn’t get passports, couldn’t get into Yellowstone, couldn’t see the Vermeer art exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. But what’s most startling is that the central government—which consumes 40 percent of the national wealth—wasn’t missed much at all.

There was a fiscal illusion at work. At issue was a budget authorization that entitled government to spend money before it was there to spend. But government could have reopened, and run based on present receipts. That way the budget would be immediately balanced. Everyone claims to want pay-as-you-go government, but nobody suggested this as an option. They acted as if debt finance is part of the natural law.

There is still more to learn about government during shutdowns. Consider what is known as the “Washington Monument Ploy.” When budget cuts are threatened, visiting hours at popular monuments are cut back. A budget cut is voted by Congress, or an insufficient increase, and moments later an official-looking official asks the assembled tourists to please disperse. Thanks to those greedy Congressmen, we’ve been denied essential funds.

The media are there to record every word, and conduct interviews to be broadcast on national television. Average people tell the reporter, “my family and I came all the way from Sacramento, but because of political bickering, our vacation has been ruined,” etc. The lesson is clear: Congress had better vote every dime the president demands or the People will strike back on prime time news. Sadly, this ploy works time and again.

Behind the scenes, the whole scenario has been orchestrated. There are very few things the federal government does that people directly benefit from. Among them are issuing passports, delivering the mail, running monuments and museums, and maintaining national parks. That’s precisely why they take the hardest hit.

Now, in running the Washington Monument Ploy, the White House has to be careful not to cause it to backfire. For example, if the mail stopped being delivered, the public might revolt against the Post Office itself, and fuel demands that it be privatized. The trick is to shut down services that affect a minority conspicuously, in ways the media can dramatize, but not generate anger against government itself.

What’s behind it all, of course, is the desire to keep the largess flowing, not to serve the public. If the feds wanted to serve the public, and Congress wasn’t authorizing new spending, they could divert money from services people don’t need (“Social Services for Refugees and Cuban/Haitian Entrants”) to those they do need (passports). Even better, a truly beneficent leader would simply give away control of monuments and passport offices to private entities to run for profit.

Here’s the irony. The services that people need most from government are the very ones that could easily be run privately. This follows by definition: if people want something, an entrepreneur is glad to make a profit providing it. On the other hand, the services people don’t need shouldn’t exist at all.

From a strategic standpoint, the government has the incentive to hold onto privatizable services like national parks because they are useful in times of government shutdown. It monopolizes some services just to keep the public from thinking they could get along without the government.

This is more than just a budget trick; it goes to the heart of nearly everything government does. Even at the local level, when budgets are cut, the first thing to get the axe are extended hours at the public library. Then the most popular periodicals themselves are canceled. Government, in its malice, gains more benefit from withholding useful services than providing them.

This is the very opposite of how private business operates. When a business has to cut costs, it looks for waste and inefficiencies, but it is loathe to cut consumer services. In fact, it might improve them if doing so is likely to bring in more revenue. Sticking it to the consumer would only create more losses and drive the company toward lower profitability.

With government sabotaging any attempt to cut its budget by cutting services people want, how can government budgets be successfully cut? There’s no easy answer—ideally the person doing the cutting would have massive power over the bureaucracy—but here’s the first step. All so-called essential government services should be privatized. That way government would no longer be seen as economically or socially essential.

Let’s start with the Washington Monument. There’s no excuse for not handing it over to a private company or association to run, just as Mount Vernon is run privately. Those who say it can’t be done haven’t noticed how many people visit that political temple every year.

But isn’t this monument a public good that people should have full access to? Granted. That’s why we need private enterprise, which always focuses on the public, to provide it. The same is true of the mails, national parks, passport offices, the Smithsonian, or any other good or service the government provides that people regard as necessary to their well being.

The advantage would be obvious. During the next government shut down—let’s hope it comes soon and stays long—the bureaucracy would have fewer means of demonstrating that we really need them. They will be reduced to showing how awful it is that the Indian and Native American Employment and Training Program has been shut down.

All of this presumes that government has no other means to fund itself during emergencies. Unfortunately, that is not true. During the 1995 shutdown, Treasury head Robert Rubin conspired with other government-financial elites to run the government on money looted from civil-service pension accounts, although this is illegal.

Then the bureaucracy gave Congress a sock in the chops by forwarding unearned back pay to the entire government workforce. The whole shutdown ended up as a paid vacation for the most despised class in the country. If anything about the shutdown inspired public anger, it was this above all. Sadly, the opposition party took the blame, and then let bygones be bygones.

The lesson of the government shutdown is not that people want it to stay open, always and forever, but that the world doesn’t fall apart when Uncle Sam takes the day off. Let’s give him the next century or so, see how the people on their own can restore prosperity and liberty. With no taxes to pay, there’d be plenty left over to pay even exorbitant admission fees to the Washington Monument.

From LRC, here.