Slavery or Freedom?

By Michael Fuah

The tent city protests have now gone in the direction of solutions. In a certain way, we are facing an Oslo-like social danger. False messiahs are talking about "justice" and lofty goals, as if the State can cure all the ills of the human race. Affordable housing, mandatory education from birth (in other words, government funding of pre-school care from birth and up) free medical care and more are the slogans just barely concealing Socialist - and in some cases, Communist - policies.

History has proven that a welfare state is a state of servitude and tyranny. Just a small reminder of the socialist worldview that we have not yet managed to uproot from our country is the battle being waged by families right now over their right to bring their children home from kindergarten for lunch and not to leave them there against their will until 2 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

Capitalism, though, is not a cure-all. Individual liberty and the freedom to do just about anything easily descend into anarchy, in which the individual is concerned only with his own success while social responsibility crumbles away. In a socialist regime, the people are slaves to the government and the system; in a capitalist regime, they are slaves to work and the eternal drive for more and more material goods on the mistaken assumption that they will provide true happiness.

We would like to propose a social justice system based on Jewish heritage and culture: Let’s call it "a Jewish society". The Jewish Society's economic method would be based on the Jubilee. In the Jewish Society, the citizens enjoy true liberty. They are free to do what they want, but shoulder personal responsibility for their livelihood, the education of their children, their family’s health and for helping others who truly need help. As opposed to the "welfare state" in which the citizen is trained to expect the state to provide for everything with no responsibility on his part, the Jewish Society teaches its citizens to take responsibility for all that they can. No more focus solely on personal gain, trampling anyone and anything in the path to material success.

As a first step, and on the backdrop of the genuine housing shortage in Israel, we propose to give each citizen an initial economic base that really should be his, but was stolen from him. 93% of the land in the State of Israel is owned by the State. This phenomenon is unique to Israel, a remnant of the days when the socialist Mapai party ruled. Land is a resource that belongs to all the citizens of a state. The State of Israel must return it to its rightful owners. We propose to give - that's right, to give - every household in Israel half a dunam of land.

Another issue that we need to strengthen is the family structure. Both the capitalist and socialist approaches have wreaked terrible damage on the proper development of parental responsibility.

The prominent British Jewish journalist Melanie Phillips recently addressed this topic:
http://melaniephillips.com/goodbye-to-the-enlightenment

As I have been writing for more than twenty years, a society that embraces mass fatherlessness is a society that is going off the edge of a cliff. There are whole areas of Britain (white as well as black) where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon; where serial generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these girls and women have yet more children, and whose own daughters inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and utterly dysfunctional parenting.

The result is fatherless boys who are suffused by an existential rage and desperate psychic need, who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at the world around them. And all this is effectively condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the welfare state which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that welfare fatherlessness brings in its train.

And the unutterably wicked thing is that this catastrophe has been deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians, well-heeled media feminists and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism, witlessly prattling about poverty and social justice and hurling execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is in general a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women) and that the state should stop subsidising family and social breakdown and start encouraging married parenthood instead.

It is urgent to regain our handle on societal norms, to strengthen the family unit instead of fostering its disintegration. It is time to free ourselves of foreign influences and return to our Jewish culture and heritage, developing and applying them to all facets of our lives.