From each according to his ability, to each his paycheck: The percentage of collectivist kibbutzim left in Israel is now only 28%. Nearly three-quarters of them have turned capitalist. And that number will rise by the end of the year. Oh, the pain, the pain. They even charge for food now! Welcome to the modern world, kibbutzniks.
Arabs criticize Arab [non-]response on Haiti: By the numbers, even.
If you compare the numbers, there are more than 130 dead in the Haiti earthquake for every Palestinian who died in the Gaza war. And there are more than 200 homes that the earthquake destroyed for every for every home that the Israelis destroyed in Gaza.
Something to remember next time you hear about the “humanitarian disaster” in Gaza. I wonder how often the new UNRWA head will use that phrase.
Yes, Palestinians are still trying to kill Israelis: Funny how it never gets mentioned in the wire services that Palestinians are trying, on a daily basis, to kill Israelis. But they sure do go nuts every time Bibi says he’ll never turn Ma’ale Adumim over to the Palestinians.
Watch them blame the Jews: More than 100 Russian Orthodox Christians were hospitalized after drinking holy water taken from wells in and around the church. So, if Russian water is undrinkable (as the article says), how stupid were these people?
Trash picks up the trash: A neo-Nazi group adopted a highway in Colorado. Yeah, those adopt-a-highway campaigns are like the best. ever. marketing tools. I can remember the names of all 753 groups and companies I’ve seen on those signs. Suckers!
I always considered the kibbutzim to be the best (and probably the only semi-workable) implementation of socialism possible. One of the first socialist philosophers, Charles Fourier, calculated that a socialist population begins to require exponentially more government oversight as it increases beyond about 100 individuals, eventually reaching a point (around 5000) where more government workers would be required to create a functioning socialist government than there are individuals actually present. Beyond that point socialism literally could not work, only fail more slowly with everyone working for the government. He was obviously also a pure theoretician, since his solution to the problem was to forcibly break up all countries in the world into cities of populations no more than 100.
For small populations, though, socialism provdes the fastest and most effective means of resource allocation as well as the least intrusive government, which is why it remains so popular on an individual, “grassroots” scale, which in turn perpetuates the belief that it could be scaled up to work for entire nations with just the right combination of circumstances, much like stories of giant animals and people remain popular, despite their physical impossibility. The kibbutzim and their success stories showcase how it can work, but only for small settlements and only if the option to convert to a capitalist economy is retained and eventually used once the population expands beyond a certain point.
I don’t understand why the snark with regards to the privatization of the kibbutzim. I lived on one for nearly 5 years. Don’t thumb your nose at them as the kibbutzim still is one place where incredible soldiers are prduced, incredible ideas are realized and incredible friends still live. The kibbutzim were instrumental in the building of Israel. Their demise is probably an unfortunate, natural progression – and not something to snark at.
A KKK chapter did the same thing last year in Missouri. In reply, the state renamed the highway the “Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel Highway.”
Tatterdemalion, those small communities of 100 proposed by Fourier sound like the European farming villages of the Dark Ages, which probably had an average population around 100-200. What a delightful style of living that would be, no? Certain to appeal to any advocate of “sustainable agriculture”, eh? By the way, isn’t Fourier the guy who predicted that if socialism was adopted all over the world the seas would turn to lemonade?
gliker: So how much now is the subsidy that the rest of the Israelis have to pay to keep the socialist kibbutzim running? Some time ago I heard it was a billion dollars a year.
I read that the snake in the socialist Gan Eden of kibbutzim was the private tea kettle, which some of them brought back after serving in WWII. The curse of private property entered the paradise of socialism, and nothing was ever the same again. A system that is so fragile that it cannot endure a few private possessions without breaking up is hardly going to be a lasting institution.
The virtue of the kibbutzim was that their members, ideologues though they were, never succumbed to the socialists’ sin of trying to make everybody conform to their goals, like the communists did. That, of course, would have required massive, coercive violence, as it did where Communism was implemented. Kudos to the Israeli socialists for failing to become as inhumane as their comrades elsewhere did. This was a real success on their part, given the ideological nuttiness that tends to prevail on the left.
There will be good soldiers produced elsewhere, good friends too. And as for ideas, Israel’s entrepreneural class is bursting with them.
The Haitian earthquake and the campaign in Gaza are not really commensurable, given that one was by human intent and the other by geological forces. A more accurate criticism would be that the Arabs have done diddly-squat to help the Haitians while Israel quickly sent a sophisticated field hospital there. Obviously the Arabs believe that zakat begins, and ends, at home.
Gliker, socialism is a fantasy construct. I am not snarking at the people of the kibbutzim. I am mocking socialism. And anyway, well, I snark, therefore I am. I have no illusions that my snarks are welcomed by all and sundry.
“4.Tatterdemalion, those small communities of 100 proposed by Fourier sound like the European farming villages of the Dark Ages, which probably had an average population around 100-200. What a delightful style of living that would be, no? Certain to appeal to any advocate of “sustainable agricultureâ€, eh? By the way, isn’t Fourier the guy who predicted that if socialism was adopted all over the world the seas would turn to lemonade?”
No, he was the one who predicted that if socialism was adopted we would all be able to live in houses made of solid marble with gold bathroom fixtures. (Yes, really.) As for living in the European farming villages in the Dark Ages, better to be living on one than dying in the wilderness between them. A lot of people recoil from the idea that socialism can actually have a place, given the horrors its misapplication has created, but just as Robespierre proved that too much of even as good an idea as democracy can be a bad thing, there is seldom any idea for which there is no use whatsoever. We exercise the basic socialist premise whenever we give food to our children rather than forcing them to earn their keep, or when we deprive them of the opportunity to explore the bottles of bleach and bug spray despite their objections. It works in families, but not in social units much larger than that, which goes a long way toward explaining why it remains popular despite its dismal track record.
I don’t think the Arabs are being inconsistent on Haiti, Meryl. Let’s assume that in fact there are a hundred and thirty Haitian dead for every Palestinian death. The Palestinians expect the Israelis to give them several hundred prisoners for the bodies of a couple of Israelis, and God knows how much they’re going to get for Gil Shalit. So this doesn’t seem unusual.