העורך Editor

די לתיאטרון בטחון: קריאה להקהל ולעמוד על נפשנו‎

קודם כל, עובדות. הרי לא מתקרבים בכלל לכיבוש והתישבות של עזה ולא לגירוש האויבים מא”י, והס מלהזכיר אפי’ הרעת תנאים לרוצחים האסורים ושחרור היהודים החטופים בידי מערכת המשפח. רוצחים ידועים חיים בשלוה במדינות שונות! במקום לעצור אבנים ממגנים, במקום לעצור טילים שמים כיפת ברזל, במקום להשיב הרתעה מציבים מחסומים במדרכות, וכו’. השלטון ממשיך לשים בטחונו בקנה רצוץ של אמריקה, ממשיך עם גירושי היהודים, עצירת הבניה, מניעת הגנה עצמית גם מחוץ למונופול המדינה כמעט כמו מקודם, וכו’.

במקום שהראשים יקיימו בעצמם ד’ מיתות בית דין בדרך כפרה, הם עוד ממשיכים כבראשונה. מה הפלא שלא מסתייעא מלתא?

לכן נראה שאין שום חיוב השתדלות להשתתף בסבבי לחימה של “כאילו” ותחת אותה הנהגה של דוגלי הכלה, ניהול הסכסוך, משנת הטפטופים, תבוסתנות וכו’ שגרמה ואפשרה את הטבח, וגם ישבה על הידיים שבע שעות בזמן אמת, הנהגה שלא למדה שום לקח ולא חזרה בתשובה, אלא אדרבא.

מי שוטה ישמע להם בקרוב להפסד ורחוק לשכר? וכי העיקר להילחם כאשר תעשניה הדבורים? ז”ל רש”י גיטין נ”ו א’: בריוני, “אנשים ריקים ופוחזים למלחמה”.

במקום להלין על מי שלא נופל לצבא שלהם, יש לעזור למי שנלכד בידי הרשעים לקבל פטור!

ואפשר לומר שכל הפיזור והגירושים משום קירבה וחנופה לאמריקה או אהבת הקרב והניצוח, וכמ”ש בגמרא פסחים סוף קי”ח ב’, פזר עמים קרבות יחפצון, מי גרם להם לישראל שיתפזרו לבין אומות העולם קריבות (וי”ג קרבות) שהיו חפצין בהן. “קרבות” אפ’ לפרש לשון קירבה לגוים ואפ’ לפרש לשון קרבות ללא תכלית, וכפי’ מהרש”א.

סכלות זו היא ממלכתיות, ויש להמליץ מלשון מעביר בנו למולך. עיין סנהדרין ס”ד א’, “מפני מה תפסה תורה לשון מולך כל שהמליכוהו עליהם אפילו צרור ואפילו קיסם”. ממלכתיות לא בתורת ע”ז (שהרי אין ראוי לישראל שהם חכמים מחוכמים להמשך בהבלים אלו) אלא כמו מלכות וכשוף, “שחושב בעצמו שהוא מועיל לו אם ימליכו עליו ויעביר את בנו לפניו”, כלשון חי’ הר”ן.

ושוב אבהיר, בודאי חובה וזכות להגן על עם ישראל (מדינת “ישראל” כוללת גם ערבים “ישראלים”…), אבל בהנחה שא”א, בינתיים, לשנות את ההנהגה, אין לקיים את המצוה באותה מסגרת שהפכה לרועץ.

וז”ל תוספתא סוטה ספ”ז:

כל השומע דברי כהן במערכות ואינו חוזר לסוף שהוא נופל בחרב ומפיל את ישראל בחרב ומגלה אותם מארצם ובאין אחרים ויושבין בארצם כו.

הצל לקוחים למות וגו’! השותפים בהתאבדות עתידים ליתן את הדין.

מאד מאד אודה לכל מי שישתדל לפרסם זאת הלאה.

Nassim Taleb Takes a Shot at Libertarianism

Mr. Nassim Taleb is considered libertarian-adjacent and a strong ally with “respectability” and so on, all for good reason. But he also powerfully attacks the consistent application of libertarianism as a whole (as he doubts many systemic edifices of ideas)!

I suspect believers in the freedom philosophy are too busy enjoying what they like about Taleb to pay serious attention to his critiques, except for some nipping. Let’s show the way, at least.

I’m not nearly familiar enough with his books, but just in case this suffices, I quote Taleb from his personal site:

I would like to record here (so people get off my back) that I do not belong to the so-called “Austrian School” of economics, in spite of a few similar positions on bailouts and bottom-up systems…

Hold that thought. Now, let’s connect two more pieces.

Piece One:

The common interpretation is that communism failed because it did not line-up to human nature, disregarded incentives, free-market matters etc. But I have not heard any commentary attributing a share of the failure to the top-down implementation by gigantic states & the necessity of a large state for that — making nonlinearities & second order effects dominate.

The large state is qualitatively different from the very small municipal state, one in which people have visual contact with those implementing public policy. The large state brings fragility, the small municipality brings robustness. Just as there is a fallacy of aggregation, I believe in the fallacy of scale (because of concavities). Properties change with scale.

Piece Two:

The problem of nonlinearity is as follows. I am against using drugs for mild illnesses (because of iatrogenics) but in favor of using them very aggressively for severe conditions. Likewise I am against interventionism on the part of government: like drugs, it should only be used when necessary, mostly to prevent systemic effects. Words cannot convey the nonlinearity of the statement. Am I “for” or “against” intervention?

Scale: Singapore and China have similar government, but works in the small better than in the large. So it also happens that the discussion about government misses a dimension. A municipality is a goverment; a top-down centralized system is one as well. Should we have no municipalities or just no central government? A coop in NY has a government, with coercive rules for those who elect to be part of it. Should we have no coops?

Clearly one cannot rule out size and centralization as the main reason the Soviet system collapsed. The same happens with corporations when they get large hence protected by centralized governments.

“Libertarians”, whatever that means, fail to get the nonlinearities/scale effects in these statements. They may be localists (as I am) or simply anarchists (against all rules). There is too much verbalism, not enough logical/mathematical rigor in what I tend to hear. The term “libertarian” is meaningless unless a scale is specified.

Furthermore, many conflate “against government” and “against centralized government” (I stand for the latter, not the former).

Also, here is more from Taleb on scale in politics (but a less convincing presentation).

Got that? As I said yesterday, I shall try and defend the opposite view:

Yes, size makes things even worse. See, for example, “Liberalism” by Mises Chap. 7 on monopolies or the Althusiusian (I can’t pronounce it either!) concept of subsidiarity. Taleb loves quoting ancients; I once saw Aristotle quoted saying the Athens government could only be peaceful at six millions.

But the main point is about justice. It is unjust adults be unilaterally disallowed to make their own (secular) decisions. Co-ops are voluntary! Non-libertarians treat adults like children with intellectual and maturity limits.

As for the medicine example, while appealing at first sight it needs a lot more rigor. Look, as a metaphor, fine, but as an illustration?! First prove the point!

The question is not what to decide, but who gets to decide (as Thomas Sowell often says).

Taleb supports an all-out war on Salafi Mohamedans, but even if true, this would never be taken as a substitute for the present wars but as an additional one (and only use some resources, in such a way as would make them perhaps even stronger), the same way Friedmanite taxation schemes were never taken as the “intended” alternative, but as an idea for more plundering.

Fact is, the empire really is spread too thin for that. And the empire enters numerous engagements it has no capital to pursue at any (moral or economic) cost.

So, the way to knowledge is to restore decision-making back to those with incentives (otherwise known as non-interventionism). As per Milton Friedman, the central bank either does too much or too little, due to the impossibility of knowing the correct answer (even taken on its own terms). As Murray Rothbard noted well, the police have no rational method of allocating resources.

Also, Taleb assumes secularization is perfectly fine and its opposite perfectly awful. To put this gently, that may not reflect the full truth of the world. (Taleb’s grasp of religion generally is lacking.)

So yes, maybe we should massively fight missionaries in Israel (the equivalent of Taleb’s anti-Salafism). But a better approach might be to increase the Jew’s knowledge of Judaism (or, in the case of government, since almost anything it does is illegitimate, to work via negativa; that is, to decrease the State actions that make Jews so Jewishly ignorant and thereby susceptible to the missionaries in the first place).

So, could it be the neocons who always say “X intervention didn’t work because it wasn’t prosecuted ruthlessly enough” have a plausible argument (morality aside)? Yes, but so what? They ALWAYS say that!

“Similar positions on bailouts and bottom-up systems”? If you insist.

Taleb in “Skin in the Game” says:

“I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”

Huh. I thought Walter Block came up with that saying first! (I can’t find the exact source, but here is something close.)

I would say to Taleb, in the words of Rothbard:

The libertarian is also eminently realistic because he alone understands fully the nature of the State and its thrust for power. In contrast, it is the seemingly far more realistic conservative believer in “limited government” who is the truly impractical utopian. This conservative keeps repeating the litany that the central government should be severely limited by a constitution. Yet, at the same time that he rails against the corruption of the original Constitution and the widening of federal power since 1789, the conservative fails to draw the proper lesson from that degeneration.

The idea of a strictly limited constitutional State was a noble experiment that failed, even under the most favorable and propitious circumstances. If it failed then, why should a similar experiment fare any better now? No, it is the conservative laissez-fairist, the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.

And here is a postscript to my remarks.

Restore an Old ‘Minhag Yerushalayim’?

I once read a book of letters from Jerusalem to England written by a Jewish family that came to live in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period.

They received a communal Mishloach Manos containing a kerchief for the woman of the house (who until then wore a sheitel).

And she used it…