Why The Torah Mentions Kings, Not Prime Ministers

If you won’t read more than one article on the topic, this should be it.

An excerpt:

Hoppe’s essential argument is that when a monarchical king owned a territory, over which he possessed a governmental monopoly of tax and judgement, he passed it on to his heirs with some amount of farsightedness. He always tried to preserve his state’s capital value. Although he also tried to raise revenue from this monopoly of power, and pushed this to the limit, the population around him always knew who their enemy was, the king, and restrained him accordingly. Thus, taxes never rose above eight per cent, and in most cases rarely got above five per cent. In the centuries-long battles between the City of London and the English King in Westminster, it was often the king who came off worst. And because the king was also chosen at random, through inheritance, and could only come from a small in-bred royal family, the general population never entertained the idea of entering government themselves. It was therefore always something outside of their experience, or possible future experience, so they always tried to restrain it. Quite successfully, for the most part.

But this attitude changed with democracy. Now anyone could enter government and become the caretaker-king (or president). But the caretaker-king could not pass on the capital wealth of his country onto his heirs. He could be replaced in the publicly-owned government by anyone else at almost any time. However, he did have temporary control of his country’s resources. Therefore it made sense to forget capital values and to concentrate on revenues, something the caretaker-king did own. Hence taxes rose in direct proportion to the amount of democracy in a country, all the better to buy off the voters with their own money at the next election, to maintain the current caretaker-king’s power. Democracy also kicked out the second prop against rising taxes. Because now anyone could entertain the idea of being caretaker-king. This meant less people of intellectual substance opposed the rising confiscatory power of the government, for they too could foresee a future in which they themselves took up the caretaker-king’s Ring of Power. An alluring prospect, as any Tolkienesque wizard will tell you.

Treating Gedolim Like God

Why so many Gedolim pictures? See this painful article.

An excerpt:

I recently commented to a good friend  that a quick walk though the buildings of their mosdos reveals a substantial number of large, framed photos of their rebbe (estimate anywhere between 25-40).  In all of those buildings, just how many Shivisis are found? (The signs that say שויתי ה’ לנגדי תמיד.  They can glorify their rebbe.  But do their yeshivas push the agenda of Emunoh in Hashem?)