Bibi by Benjamin Netanyahu

Author:Benjamin Netanyahu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

37 “THIS IS SOCIAL JUSTICE!”

2003–2005

All my market reforms were anathema to the self-described “social justice” lobby, which accused me of “piggish capitalism,” enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor.

I argued the opposite: it was free market reforms that had lifted a billion people out of poverty in Asia, while the policies of the social lobby, guided by a distorted interpretation of social justice, kept hundreds of millions of people impoverished in unreformed countries.

What is social justice, anyway?

The Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Amos said social justice meant charitably helping the weakest members of society: the poor, the aged, the sick, the handicapped, the orphaned, the widowed.

Some two thousand years later, the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, Maimonides, had a somewhat more complicated approach.

Social justice, he believed, was a series of activities to help others. He ranked these on the rungs of a ladder, reserving the lowest rung for giving handouts, the middle rung for providing loans, and the top rung for helping people get jobs. Maimonides believed that the greatest help one could render others is to help them stand on their own feet.

So who was right, the prophets or Maimonides? As in the well-known joke about a rabbi’s response when asked to adjudicate between two potentially conflicting claimants, the answer is: they’re both right.

The key to sorting out the possible tension between these two conceptions of social justice is to understand that they deal with two different groups of people: those who can work and those who cannot. Those who can work should go to work. Those who cannot should be helped. This is not only good morality; it is good economics.

In fact, the only way that you can help those who can’t help themselves is to get the able-bodied to work and then tax them modestly. I emphasize the word modestly because, as we have seen, if you overtax you often end up with less and not more money to help the needy.

In Israel this distinction between the two populations had been gradually eroded. For decades, the proportion of people living on welfare and government-guaranteed income rose steadily. By 2002, only 54 percent of the adult population participated in the workforce, the lowest participation rate in the developed world (the average for the thirty-eight member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], which Israel was not a part of, was 70 percent).1

Entire segments of the population, especially the ultra-Orthodox and Muslim Arab communities, were severely underrepresented in the job market. They and others were supported by an elaborate system of welfare payments that grew year by year, keeping able-bodied adults out of the job market and placing an enormous strain on those who did work.

Indiscriminate welfare spending had ballooned to $10 billion a year by 2002, making it the second-largest item in the government budget, trailing only interest payments. Assorted welfare organizations and NGOs lobbied to increase this welfare spending further. I knew these organizations would be gunning for me with a vengeance, but I also knew that without reforming welfare I couldn’t put the country back on track.

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