I lived half a year on a kibbutz back in the late 1980s, just as the intifada was starting.

For most of that time, I was the “shotef sirim” — the pot scrubber. For me, it was a proud title. It was the one kitchen job they wouldn’t let women do (something about the weight of the pots or the height of the top shelves), so I spent the work days surrounded by women — but with my own little domain behind the oversized sinks and the power spray of hot and cold water.

Now I learn from the Financial Times (“The rise of the capitalist kibbutz”) that “Tasks that used to be performed by kibbutzniks regardless of their education and background — such as washing the dishes — are today largely the preserve of hired workers from outside the community.”

As the article’s title implies, that’s not the only change confronting the kibbutzim, the once-upon-a-time bastion of voluntary socialism — the “proof,” as some of us once claimed, that “it worked.”

As kibbutznik-turned-economics-professor Omer Moav argues,

the kibbutz movement was always destined to fail. It worked, he says, only as long as kibbutzniks enjoyed a standard of living broadly comparable to, if not better than, the Israeli average. “People respond to incentives. We are happy to work hard for our own quality of life, we like our independence,” he says. “It is all about human nature — and a socialist system like the kibbutz does not fit human nature.”

This blog post (“Uncle Sam Will Use Schoolchildren to Pressure Parents on 2010 Census,” h/t Carolyn) inspires me to rerun this lowercase liberty “classic” from several years ago:

Back in my previous professional incarnation, I managed the development of Sesame Street’s 30th Anniversary Trivia Game.

Having grown up on Sesame Street, I found the project warmly nostalgic and quite rewarding.

There were a few new faces among the muppet cast of our trivia game, but mostly it was my old friends.

As my babymomma and I start window-shopping for baby clothes, toys, children’s books, nursery sets, etc., I find I have an ambivalent reaction to all the Disney and Sesame Street merchandise. I’m not nearly so anti- “commercial culture” as I once was, and I like the idea of my child having the same characters in his or her life as I did. But I also wonder how much authority we’re unwittingly handing over to those whose values and agenda are different from ours.

This sort of thing is especially present for me as I begin to look into homeschooling. As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don’t want the Enemy’s message infecting their children.

I find I don’t have to be religious to sympathize. All it takes is a strong belief contrary to the mainstream ideology. Their enemy is Satan; mine is the State.

I was schooled in statism. If you think the idea is paranoid, I can only imagine that statism is still your unquestioned foundational assumption.

Going back through some old articles on Mises.org, I find this ominous piece of recent history:

For many years, voluntary compliance has been falling. In anticipation of this problem, the Census Bureau has been relying on wholly owned sectors of society to propagandize for its campaign. The Sesame Street character named Count von Count is touring public schools to tell the kids to tell their parents to fill out the census, even as more than 1 million census kits have been sent to public schools around the country. Think of it as the state using children to manipulate their parents into becoming volunteers in the civic planning project.

“The Census and Despotism”
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

(AP) Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to “Laodicean” to become the nation’s spelling champion.

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, p. 1202:

Laodicea

The church at Laodicea is bitterly condemned, not for being outspokenly opposed to the doctrines favored by John, but for being neutral. John apparently prefers an honest enemy to a doubtful friend:

Revelation 3:15. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

Revelation 3:16. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

"Laodicean" has therefore entered the English language as a word meaning "indifferent" or "neutral."

At the Charlottesville City Market yesterday morning, I desperately wanted a cup of coffee. I bypassed the nearby coffeehouse thinking I should spend my money with one of the City Market’s weekend merchants. But all I found was “organic fair-trade” coffee. Nope. I’m not tithing to that religion. I like my coffee full of pesticides and produced with maximum exploitation.

Similarly, I like my housing to have maximum environmental impact, and yet, I sure do see the aesthetic appeal of this Welsh environmentalist’s “‘low-impact’ Woodland home,” taken from the pages of JRR Tolkein:

See more. (Thanks, Carolyn.)

In his interview with the New York Times on May 3, 2009, President Obama said,

I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, you know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

As H.L. Mencken put it,

The more reflective reader reads next to nothing in the way of newspapers and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile. The essential difficulty here is that journalism, to be intellectually respectable, requires a kind of equipment in its practitioner that is necessarily rare in the world, and especially rare in a country given over to the superficial. He should have the widest conceivable range of knowledge, and he should be the sort of man who is not easily deluded by the specious and the fraudulent. Obviously, there are not enough such men to go round. The best newspaper, if it is lucky, may be able to muster half a dozen at a given moment, but the average newspaper seldom has even one. Thus American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant. (Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, p. 74)

Or as my father put it,

To be a lawyer you have to fail a morality test; to write for the media you have to fail English and logic.

Postscript: I had an old college friend who, after several years in a top Ivy League graduate school, showed up at my local university as a new tenure-track professor. We had lunch and played catchup. She told me, without any apparent irony, that she agreed with almost everything she read in the New York Times.

From Barbara Frank Online:

Ok, class, time for a quick current events pop quiz:

Which country just approved a $6 billion initiative that includes the following, directing its legislative body to determine:

“….whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

FULL BLOG POST

Come on!

Seriously, how hard is this distinction?

Obama Change in Stem-Cell Policy Imminent

“U.S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.” (Reuters, Sunday)

Correction: The ban wasn’t on research; it was on tax-financing of research.

FEE Timely Classic

“Some Thoughts on Taxation” by George C. Leef

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have, for years, thought the ban was on the research itself.

(Can you blame this one on my not reading newspapers? Apparently the newspapers perpetuate the confusion.)

During my sojourn in Israel, two things conspired to make me, quite fleetingly, a newspaper reader:

1. Someone — either the Jewish Agency or the kibbutz — provided all ulpanists with free copies of the Jerusalem Post;
2. Israel’s state-run radio and television stations went on strike for 52 days.

So for the only time in my life, I read more than the funny pages when handed a newspaper.

I remember three things from that brief tryst (or was it a forced marriage?):

1. The scandalous official visit to Israel of Italian porn-star-turned-politician Cicciolina;
2. Black Monday;
3. an editorial on why Israel should side with Iran against Iraq.

The gist of the editorial was that Arabs hated Jews more than non-Arab Muslims did, and not only was Iran non-Arab but the Iranians had a strong historical link with the Jews, and the recent anti-Semitic rhetoric from Iran was just bluff and posturing for the Muslim world.

I had no idea what it was talking about. I don’t think I had fully realized before reading that editorial that Iranians are not Arabs (!) and I had no idea what historical links it was referring to. I’m sure I didn’t know that "Iranians" and "Persians" referred to the same people, and if I had known, I didn’t have much clue who the Persians were in history and what their connection was to Judah, Jerusalem, or the Jews.

Now the two worst enemies the Jews had before the Romans destroyed the Temple for the second and last time in 70 AD, were (1) the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple in 587 BC (and exiled the Jews from Judah), and (2) the Seleucids whose treatment of the Jews is written about symbolically in the Book of Daniel and less symbolically in 1 Maccabees.

Iran Rescues Jews from the Babylonians

Cyrus the Great, in founding the first Persian Empire, overthrew the Babylonians, released the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and even sponsored the building of the Second Temple. The Jews were so fond of Cyrus that the Book of Isaiah refers to him as God’s anointed (aka messiah aka christ).

Iran Rescues Jews from "the Grecians"

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, pp. 720f:

Persia

The Jewish victory at Beth-horon was sufficiently spectacular to raise the rebellion from a local tumult to an internationally observed matter. Clearly the prestige of the regime now required that a major effort be put into the suppression of the rebels.

Unfortunately for Antiochus it was easier to see the need than to do something about it. The same old problem arose — lack of money. Furthermore, the empire was fading at the other end, too. If Judas and his army of irregulars were shaking the west, in the east whole provinces were falling away.

The Parthian rulers, who had been subservient to the Seleucids even as late as the reign of Antiochus III, were little by little enlarging their independence. In 171 B.C., a vigorous king, Mithridates I, ascended the Parthian throne and the last vestige of dependence on the Seleucids disappeared. Indeed, Mithridates extended his power in all directions and was making himself a major factor in central Asia.

It may be that if Parthia had remained quiet, Antiochus could have handled the Jewish rebellion. As it was, he found himself pulled in both directions. His prestige abroad, already badly shaken by his humiliation in Egypt, demanded that he not allow the Jews to remain unpunished. On the other hand, if he could but bring the eastern provinces back into the fold, he could collect all the money he needed in the form of punitive tribute. With prestige pulling one way and money the other, he made the worst possible decision. He decided to divide his forces and embark on a two-front war…

As the Arabic proverb supposedly says, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

So the Persians (aka Parthians aka Iranians) helped out the Jews of Judah twice, once against their Babylonian oppressors and once against their Greco-Syrian oppressors. That’s Big Enemy #1 and Big Enemy #2. What about Big Enemy #3, the Roman oppressors?

Well, no one came to the rescue when the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple, and no one could really help the Jews of Judah after that, because there weren’t really any Jews left in Judah. They were scattered to the neighboring empires, Rome and Rome’s only viable enemy … Persia!

Iran Rescues Jews from the Romans

Despite the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews faired relatively well in the Roman Empire — until the empire became officially Christian, at which point official suppression of the Jewish religion began. But while the Jews were hunkering down for more than a millennium of oppression in the Christian West, Judaism was flourishing in Persia.

Here’s Wikipedia on "The Parthian Period" of Jewish history:

The Parthian Empire was an enduring empire based on a loosely configured system of vassal kings. This lack of a rigidly centralized rule over the empire had its drawbacks, such as the rise of a Jewish bandit-state in Nehardea (see Anilai and Asinai). Yet, the tolerance of the Arsacid dynasty was as legendary as the first Persian dynasty, the Achaemenids. There is even an account that indicates the conversion of a small number of Parthian vassal kings of Adiabene to Judaism. These instances and others show not only the tolerance of Parthian kings, but is also a testament to the extent to which the Parthians saw themselves as the heir to the preceding empire of Cyrus the Great. The Parthians were very protective of the Jewish minority as reflected in old Jewish saying "When you see a Parthian charger chained to a tombstone in the Land of Israel, the hour of the Messiah will be near".

Today, on the front page of JPost.com, the website of the same newspaper in which I read that “pro-Iranian” editorial back in 1987, the third-most-prominent link in their nav bar (after Home and Headlines) is Iranian Threat. That’s before the links for Jewish World, Israel, Middle East, or even Elections ‘09.

I prefer reading history to reading the news.

From “This actually did happen” by Jeffrey Tucker at blog.Mises.org:

In Los Angeles, a window repairman secretly went around breaking windows by shooting them with a slingshot. Times are hard and he needed the business. The police caught him and, because he was a private individual instead of a state, now he is in trouble for his attempt to stimulate the economy. Thanks Broken Window Watch and Vanguardist.

From Mises.org:

Why the heck is this happening to us?

What happened to mortgages, to banks, to large retailers, to retirement savings, to stock prices, to the availability of credit? How could so many errors have coincided?

To the media pundits and government officials, this is a market failing that requires the government to take trillions of dollars from you and run the money presses full time. Otherwise we are doomed

But there is another way to look at the great market collapse of 2008: the whole thing, including the bubble that preceded it, is the fault of the government and the Fed.

All attempts to “fix” the problem are like forcing the patient to swallow more of the poison from which he currently suffers.

Mises.org has been making this argument, and warned of the coming crash years ago. But where can you find the argument explained for the average person in a convenient package, without technical jargon and with logic and facts?

Enter Tom Woods with his blockbuster book Meltdown.

It’s all here, all the information you need to understand what is happening and what to do about it.

Walter Williams writes:

News media people, often plagued with little understanding, fail miserably in their duty to inform the public. This is particularly evident in their reporting on the current financial meltdown, suggesting it was caused by deregulation and free markets.

Professor David Henderson, research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes about regulation in “Are We Ailing From Too Much Deregulation?” in Cato Policy Report (November/December 2008). The Federal Register, which lists new regulations, annually averaged 72,844 pages between 1977 and 1980. During the Reagan years, the average fell to 54,335. During the Bush I years, they rose to 59,527, to 71,590 during the Clinton years and rose to a record of 75,526 during the Bush II years. Employees in government regulatory agencies grew from 146,139 in 1980 to 238,351 in 2007, a 63 percent increase. In the banking and finance industries, regulatory spending between 1980 and 2007 almost tripled, rising from $725 million to $2.07 billion.

So here’s my question: What are we to make of congressmen, talking heads and news media people who tell us the financial meltdown is a result of deregulation and free markets? Are they ignorant, stupid or venal?

My friend David Miller tells me a plane leaving La Guardia just went into the Hudson. “I watched it, mostly submerged, float by the windows of the office gym. … you know the Auden poem Musee de Beaux Arts?”

Here’s what he’s referring to:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And here’s the painting Auden is referring to.