Merav Arlozorrov has a nice analysis of Israel’s situation and choices after the “social protests”. I don’t agree with her that the protests prove that the Israeli public has chosen the Scandinavian over the Swiss-Australian models of the welfare state, but that will be proven in the next elections.
Read the whole article (in Hebrew) but I would like to translate the last paragraph for you. She writes:
A welfare state demands that the individual sacrifices for the general good – if it relates to taxes, salary, work rules (and strikes), the willingness to cede a higher current standard of living in order to invest in the future …. In a country in which medical interns threaten to destroy the public health system because not all of their salary demands have been met, where trains strike more than they go, where most think that tax evasion is the norm and everything dealing with long term planning is foreign - it is worth asking ourselves if a “deeper welfare state” is really for us.
It has always fascinated me that we in Israel are completely opinionated and stand by our every right to privacy and freedom - yet we are always so willing to cede our individual liberty to the country’s “experts”, politicians, rabbis, professors and union bosses.
No comments:
Post a Comment