How You Tell Who the Israeli Deep State Are

See who comes first…

There is a fascinating demonstration of this in the bestselling “As Long As I Live: The Life Story of Aharon Margalit” (“Es’haleich” in Hebrew), chapter 30 and on (p. 315 in the English-language edition).

“Nobody Nothingstein” as far as the regime is concerned, or as we ourselves call him, “Aharon Margalit”, was scheduled for a critical operation to remove a malignant growth from his face. The rare operation was scheduled far in advance and required many different doctors to be present, etc. Then a VIP’s son fell off his bike, and a scan revealed a tumor on his leg. So the dauphin came first, of course. Socialism (and waiting on line) is for the Little People.

Significantly, the book, published in Israel, casually neglects to mention the identity of this VIP. (I may or may not know.)

Yes, it all turned out for the best in the end (you’ll have to read the book!). But that’s not the point…

Non-Interventionism Is Best for Marriage, Too

“The Surrendered Wife”?

I cringed at the title, but the book, “The Surrendered Wife,” offers a surprising amount of wisdom

I don’t know who her PR agents were. I don’t know what her marketing strategy was. I just know that there couldn’t be a worse title for a truly valuable book than “The Surrendered Wife” by Laura Doyle. Even as I write it I cringe. But it got my attention. And maybe that was the goal…

Despite my reservations, I read the book in an effort to demonstrate how broadminded I am. “The Surrendered Wife” is a book about letting go. It is not a book about submissiveness. It is not anti-feminism. It is a book that demonstrates the destructiveness of trying to control another human being, particularly your spouse. So I read it. Cover to cover.

I saw myself, and many close friends (you know who you are) in Ms. Doyle’s stories. And while she takes her philosophy to an extreme of passivity that I find unpalatable – i.e. “don’t express your opinion, just say to your husband ‘whatever you think'” – there is a lot of wisdom in her insights. Perhaps my husband would enjoy if just once in a while I would keep my big mouth shut and turn to him adoringly and say, “Whatever you think.”

Maybe. Maybe not. But I know he would appreciate it if I didn’t always tell him he took the wrong turn and the slowest route. He might appreciate it if I didn’t tell him how to talk to the waiter, what to order, and the exact amount of the appropriate tip.

Our husbands want to know they have our respect, trust, and, as Laura Doyle suggests, every time we control, direct, or even worse, criticize them, they know they don’t.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with children. If we don’t expect our husbands to succeed, they probably won’t (unless he’s got a very contrary personality and responds well to reverse psychology!)

The nitpicking, the correcting, the “I know a better way” attitude is destructive on many levels – to the husband personally and to the marriage. I know that I don’t enjoy spending time with people who are always telling me I’m wrong – either directly or by implication.

And this situation sure doesn’t augur well for one’s intimate life. It doesn’t encourage closeness and desire.

FOR HIS OWN GOOD

Of course, when we correct our husbands, we mean it for their good. We’re only doing it to help them. But most husbands don’t experience it like that. To them, it’s an attack. To them, it’s emasculating. To them, it’s depressing and destructive.

There’s nothing liberated or egalitarian about being critical. Our husbands are not our project, our work in progress, a piece of clay for us to mold. And our husbands are not children. (It always annoys me when women refer, half-jokingly, to their husbands as one of their biggest children. Do they think their husbands find that flattering or amusing?) It won’t create a new/modern marriage if we whip our husbands into shape. But it is a quick road to divorce.

“But I do know a faster way to drive there,” wives complain. Good. Keep it to yourself. (I would say, “Unless asked”; Ms. Doyle would say, “Even then.”) You’ll get there five minutes later with a stronger marriage.

“But he’s handling the situation all wrong.” Give him a chance to figure it out for himself and grow from it. Don’t rob him of his opportunities to stretch and change.

There is an important caveat in the book that none of this advice applies to an abusive situation. Similarly, if there is, God forbid, a serious crime at stake. If your husband is about to commit armed robbery, don’t say, “Whatever you think!”

We have to lift our husbands through caring and respect. As Rabbi Eisenblatt writes in Fulfillment in Marriage: “…to the extent that the marriage partners appreciate and respect each other they will create a nourishing atmosphere in which each can grow and develop into a still better partner.”

Worth taping to the fridge.

POSITIVE EXPRESSIONS

Positive expressions of pleasure after tasks well done accomplish much more than harsh words. And don’t qualify those compliments. Drop the “but” as in: “That was nice of you to make dinner but why didn’t you clean up the kitchen?” “I appreciate that you went grocery shopping but why did you buy ten bags of potato chips?” Practice saying two simple words: “Thank you.”

A woman’s belief in her husband’s abilities and potential will inspire him to greater heights. Nagging will drag him down.

It’s not about being submissive. And I don’t know if it’s about surrendering either. It is about letting go. We don’t have to run the world. (The Almighty’s on that job 24/7.) We don’t have to control our husbands. We don’t have to dominate our children.

And the most surprising thing of all is not only do things not fall apart without us at the helm, sometimes they actually get better.

Postscript: Whenever I address this topic to women, they invariably say, “What about the men? Don’t they need to hear this?” Of course, they do. There are many men who would benefit from the ideas in this book. Hopefully, their needs will be addressed. But asking, “What about the men?” can also be a way of avoiding personal responsibility. Don’t worry about the men for a minute. Look inward instead of outward. Do you see potential for growth and change? You go girl.

From Aish Hatorah, here.

Social Darwinism Is a Straw Man (and Has Nothing to Do With Darwin, Either)

Social Darwinism and the Free Market

The Free Market 30, no. 5 (May 2012)

In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.”

What did the president mean by this comment? The budget proposal in question, he claimed, would require drastic cuts in government programs designed to aid the poor. “And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last—education and training, research and development, our infrastructure—it is a prescription for decline.” Further, his opponents reject proposals to increase taxes on the rich.

How can anyone favor refusing government aid to the poor and oppose requiring the rich to pay more in taxes? Obama answered that those who think in this way must believe that the welfare of the rich is of primary significance. The poor, and everyone else, must take whatever “trickles down” to them from the rich.

It is this view that Obama had in mind when he spoke of Social Darwinism, but the doctrine is usually characterized in a different way. Darwin, it is alleged, has taught us that evolution is a struggle in which the strong overcome the weak. To aid the poor would in this view act counter to progress. It would be an attempt to promote the survival of the unfit, rather than the fit. Instead, we should stand out of the way and allow the poor and improvident to suffer the natural consequences of their feckless ways.

Responses to Obama’s speech from defenders of the free market have not been slow in coming. The libertarian philosopher and historian George Smith, among others, has noted that Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, usually classed as the main Social Darwinist defenders of the market, believed nothing like the doctrine just described. Spencer approved of private charity and includes in his The Principles of Ethics a discussion of the duties of “positive beneficence.” “Spencer opposed coercive, state-enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed. . . . In one essay he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as ‘the latest and most hopeful fact in human history.’ Moreover, the final chapters in Spencer’s Ethics are devoted to the subject of ‘positive beneficence,’ the highest form of society in which people voluntarily help those in need.”

Further, as the political philosopher Larry Arnhart has pointed out, Darwin did not teach that human evolution depends on ruthless struggle. To the contrary, he emphasized theimportance of social unity and cooperation. “‘Selfish and contentious people will not cohere,’ Darwin declared, and without coherence nothing can be effected. If Social Darwinism is all about selfish competition . . . then Darwin was not as Social Darwinist.”

Ludwig von Mises already called attention in  to this misunderstanding of Darwin. “The notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus is to be understood in a metaphorical sense. . . . It need not always be a war of extermination such as the relation between man and morbific microbes. Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor.” (Human Action, Mises Institute 1998, p. 175)

Indeed, it is difficult to find writers who called themselves “Social Darwinists.” But some of Obama’s critics have gone too far. Jonah Goldberg, e.g., treats Social Darwinism as largely a myth for which Richard Hofstadter, the author of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), bears primary responsibility. “Simply put, there was no intellectual movement—at least not in America or Britain—called Social Darwinism, and the evil views attributed to so-called Social Darwinists were not held by its alleged founders. . . . [Richard] Hofstadter, the historian who essentially invented the idea that American capitalism in the nineteenth century was inspired by Charles Darwin, never offered much by way of actual proof that his idea was accurate.” (Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés, Sentinel, 2012, pp. 102, 110)

Goldberg’s thesis is not correct. There really were a number of people who defended capitalism with quasi- Darwinist arguments. Murray Rothbard discusses one example of such a defense, a speech delivered in 1934 by Colgate University President George B. Cutten. In Rothbard’s summary, “The theory is originally based on an unwarranted extension of Darwinism to the history of man. Supposedly, man develops continually struggling against nature—i.e., struggling to adapt himself to natural conditions. As generations develop, the ‘fit’ or ‘the fittest’ survive, and the ‘unfit’ die. The progeny of the ‘fit’ are also ‘fit,’ while the ‘unfit’ get no chance to reproduce. In this way the human race supposedly improves. As Dr. Cutten puts it, ‘The strong won, the weak lost; the strong left progeny, the weak died early and childless. It worked out pretty well too.’”

Cutten averred that “men are violating Nature’s wishes and injunctions, that the unfit are being protected by ‘modern medicine and modern philanthropy’ and are debilitating the race by being permitted to live and have children. . . . That is the essence of Dr. Cutten’s thesis and the broad outlines of social Darwinism or rugged individualism. It seems to me that the mere statement of it would expose it as obvious bilge.” (, ed., Roberta Modugno, Mises Institute 2009, pp. 50–52)

As Rothbard trenchantly remarks, the Social Darwinist argument is a poor one. Even if it accurately described biological evolution, very much contrary to fact, why would it give us a guide to policy? Why should we aim to promote the goal of evolution, if we prefer not to do so? The Social Darwinist theory masks a recommendation about social ethics with a pseudo-scientific narrative. Rothbard ably sums up the manifest failings of this position. “It is therefore evident that there is no moral or ethical value attaching to a survivor. Sheer luck plays the biggest part in history in determining who has survived. The Rugged Individualist suffers from the delusion that survival—sheer survival—is ipso facto evidence of high moral qualities.” (Rothbard vs. the Philosophers, p. 54)

Instead of falsely denying that Social Darwinism ever existed, supporters of the market do far better to adopt a different defense; and here once more Mises guides us to the proper path. The free market is not, as the Social Darwinists imagine, a struggle between rich and poor, strong and weak. It is the principal means by which human beings cooperate in order to live. If each of us had to produce all his food and shelter by himself, almost no one could survive. The existence of large-scale society depends absolutely on social cooperation through the division of labor. “The fundamental social phenomenon is the division of labor and its counterpart human cooperation. Experience teaches man that cooperative action is more efficient and productive than isolated actions of self-sufficient individuals. The natural conditions determining man’s life and effort are such that the division of labor increases output per unit of labor expended.” (Human Action, p. 157)

Further, as Mises also pointed out, social cooperation by no means benefits only the rich and more productive people in society. Precisely the reverse is the case. Mises, explaining Ricardo’s law of comparative cost as a more general law of association, argued that it is to the advantage of those of superior ability to trade with those less skilled. “Ricardo expounded the law of association in order to demonstrate what the consequences of the division of labor are when an individual or a group, more efficient in every regard, cooperates with an individual or group less efficient in every regard. . . . Ricardo was fully aware of the fact that his law of comparative cost, which he expounded mainly in order to deal with a special problem of international trade, is a particular instance of the more universal law of association. . . . Collaboration of the more talented, more able and more industrious with the less talented, less able, and less industrious results in benefits for both. The gains derived from the division of labor are always mutual.” (Human Action, pp. 158–59)

Of course, such trade helps the less able, since their trading partners are by hypothesis more efficient than they are; but contrary to what one might at first think, the more able gain as well, if they specialize in the area of their greatest advantage. The free market is not a struggle but a cooperative endeavor of supreme importance.

But have we not left one question unanswered? If the market is not the struggle between rich and poor depicted by Social Darwinist myth, how can defenders of the free market oppose government programs that aid the poor through the provision of education and medical care? How can the defenders oppose heavy taxes for the rich? If Obama’s invocation of Social Darwinism does not explain such opposition, what does?

The answer to that is sufficiently obvious, though it escaped the mind of our president. These programs take from some to give to others: they strike against the cooperative aim of a free society. The poor fare far better in the free market than they do from government largesse. Obama would of course disagree, and to show in detail the evidence for our claim is an extended task that will not be attempted here. (For those interested in the issue, Henry Hazlitt’s Man Versus the Welfare State is an excellent place to begin.) But one may note with astonishment that so obvious a reason for opposing his programs failed to occur to the president. Instead, he resorted to a catchphrase, Social Darwinism, virtually empty of substance.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Don’t Emulate Rabbi Elyashiv on This!

Mishna Berurah, end of siman 317:

הפותל חבלים חייב משום קושר והמפרידן ואינו מכוין לקלקל חייב משום מתיר [רמב”ם].

Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv would answer shei’los as they were asked, taking people literally, as though they meant the words they spoke exactly, and without adding any additional clarifications, and with no differentiation between ignoramuses and scholars.

There is a famous\infamous story about this.

Someone observed two Jews asking the rabbi the apparently identical question; about tying bread bag metal strip ties on Shabbos. To one he permitted it and to the second he forbade it.

The observer, shocked, asked why and wherefore the difference in response to the two questioners. Rabbi Elyashiv responded that both had demonstrated the twisting action with hand motions, the first questioner once, and the other twice. To the one who mindlessly showed the twisting motion twice he forbade, and to the one who mindlessly did so only once, he permitted…

Again: Don’t Emulate Rabbi Elyashiv on This!