Patriots or Pigs

After this Tuesday, every player on the stage of this American presidential political season will either take a stand or be exposed as an opportunist willing to let the divided house burn for some benefit. These players include not only the candidates themselves but also pundits and proxies who take to channels of social and mass media in the pursuit of relevance and influence. Perhaps more than anyone, Marco Rubio's political future will depend on his realization that he will not win the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

By any metric of the primary process, Marco Rubio and John Kasich have no path to the Republican Party nomination. It stands to reason then that if Rubio and Kasich sincerely want to support conservative, constitutional, free-market American values in the coming executive election, they need to drop out of the race and leave the contest to the two front-runners, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. If Marco Rubio truly wants to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the GOP's nominee, the same Trump who loses in every poll to Hillary Clinton, then he must drop out and back Ted Cruz, who handily defeats both Trump and Clinton in one-on-one contests.

Fox News must also make clear that it is not in the tank for Donald Trump. The cable news network has allocated more time to Trump than to any of the other candidates. For the past two weeks, its televised pundits, with the exception of Megyn Kelly, have treated Trump with kid gloves if not outright approval. Furthermore, Fox has announced that coming GOP debate hosted by Fox will include Trump, Cruz, Kasich, and Rubio as debaters even though the latter two have no way of winning enough delegates through the primary process to even be considered for nomination. This violates Fox's own criteria for debate eligibility and effectively has Fox preventing the one-on-one contest that would have the best chance of resulting in unified support for a GOP front-runner going into the summer's party convention.

It is widely considered that Cruz would wipe the floor with Trump in a debate. Cruz has a far better grasp in the breadth of issues affecting the executive branch; he actually cites real numbers and cogent arguments in contrast to Trump's boasts and baseless reassurances of "knowing better than anybody" as Trump exhorts his audience to "Believe me" regarding each and every one of his self-serving claims. Conservatives who have been taken in by Trump's doublespeak need to see this.

The institution and office of President of the United States is bigger than any of its single human occupants. The system of government designed by the U.S. Constitution makes the office great by its very restrictions on the office. The best presidents in American history, including Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Coolidge, and Reagan, respected this. The worst presidents, such as Wilson, FDR, and Obama, who made of themselves demagogic, self-serving centerpieces, either ignored or defied this. Ted Cruz has clearly demonstrated his allegiance and deep familiarity with the Constitution. In contrast, Donald Trump has declared that, as president, he could issue illegal orders as commander-in-chief which would be obeyed. Trump has barely mentioned the Constitution throughout his candidacy.

This will be a fateful week for the American Experiment, as Jefferson called the U.S. enterprise of democratic, limited government. Even after the votes are counted, it will be up to central figures who claim to be patriots to prove their patriotism by removing themselves from the nomination process. In particular, Marco Rubio must make an historic, personal choice whether to benefit politically from prolonging his place in a competition he cannot win, and thereby delay the crucial head to head battle between Cruz and Trump; or whether to bow out and actively clear the path for Cruz to eliminate Trump. The former almost certainly results in a Trump nomination and a GOP defeat. The latter would unify the Republican party and likely result in the first truly conservative administration in almost thirty years. It would also make Marco Rubio the most heroic political figure of this political season.

Rally Against the Iranian Nuclear Deal

Today, American patriots demonstrate in the capital of the United States of America. Individuals gathered in the cause of freedom are demanding that the nation founded on individual rights refuse to capitulate against an evil regime that recognizes no human rights.

It is no accident that the movement that considers the citizen a sovereign, that seeks to minimize the burden of government upon the citizen, leads in this struggle. It is no accident that this celebration of the individual human being has its roots in a philosophical union of individual liberty, individual prosperity, and individual morality.

It is no accident that statists who exploit the achievement of the free market, of individual accomplishment, in order to enslave those who produce, would support those who despise freedom and individualism. If anything, the free world has learned a bitter lesson about the importance of limiting government, of maintaining a government of laws, legislated with restraint by the people, through their representatives, and not a government of men.

Today, we urge the United States to deny the mullahs of Iran access to two awesome powers. One is the nuclear bomb, developed to defeat powers of darkness from enslaving the world seventy years ago. The other is financial power, $150 billion in monetary assets. Money, the symbol of freedom and trust among human beings to trade value for value, can be used, and has been used, to buy the means of killing vast numbers of innocents.

A guiding light for liberty, Adam Smith, laid the foundation of free market economic theory in "The Wealth of Nations." He formalized the truth that rational self-interest and competition can lead to economic prosperity. Freedom unleashed from tyranny is the greatest wonder of the world and the free market has raised more people from poverty than any other economic system in history.

Yet Adam Smith also gave us "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," wherein he taught that man can form moral judgments in spite his natural inclinations towards self-interest. Smith presented a theory of sympathy, in which the act of observing others makes people aware of themselves and the morality of their own behavior.

Combine the two works and you see the effects on American founder John Adams who stated, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." With freedom, even within the framework of the greatest code of self-government in history, comes responsibility. Freedom is the unleashed power of human intelligence and initiative, and yet statists and other tyrants would take the fruits of that freedom and enslave their producers.

So, today we join with our brothers in Washington, D.C., and with millions around the world - who look to the United States for economic, strategic, and moral leadership - to take a stand against tyrants of all types, but especially against those who dehumanize their own people and worship a cult of death, those who would use our own economic tools and weapons to enslave us.

Obama is No Lame Duck

The 2014 midterm elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate are over... well, mostly. There remain several runoff elections in certain states which require absolute majorities for choosing their Congressional respresentatives. What is presently clear is that the Republican Party expanded its majority in the House and has flipped the Senate solidly into Republican control.

There were also historic "firsts." Tea-Party-endorsed Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina became the first black senator from any southern state since the period of Reconstruction, some 150 years ago. Tea Party hopeful Mia Love was elected the the first black woman Republican representative in the House. These particular outcomes revealed the lie in the left's libelous and groundless claim that racism personifies the Tea Party. Democrats regularly play the race card to vilify their opponents, especially critics of Barack Obama, while shamelessly whitewashing their own racist history, while the Tea Party has always focused on policy.

Tim Scott (Sen., S. Carolina) and Mia Love (Rep., Utah):
Two historic firsts in the Senate and House.
The latest faces of the so-called "racist" Tea Party.

Some have inerpreted the election's apparent swing to the right as a popular repudiation of Barack Obama's policies. Some have applied the "lame duck" label to Obama's potential to exert influence during his second term. But that label works only when a second-term president is constrained by Congressional resistance. Obama, who wields executive privilege as an alternative to legislation, feels no such constraint. Also, he does not accept that Americans knowingly reject his goal to transform America into a collectivist welfare state. His immediate post-election comments declared that the Democratic party failed him by not effectively explaining and communicating his vision. Rather than make him a lame duck, the midterm election has made Barack Obama, and his political machine, a wounded tiger.

Barack Obama after the 2014 Midterms:
The voters just didn't understand.
No lame duck, but a wounded tiger.

Barack Obama and the far-left interests he serves have demonstrated that their actions are not focused on governance. They want no part of the system of checks and balances that protects a free republic from government over-reach. They see themselves as being above that, with every unpunished violation of the Constitution serving as positive reinforcement, power begetting more power. They are intent on changing the rules of engagement with political opposition, to transform how America allocates power and permanently estrange her from her founding principles. The seek to radically redefine, and effectively nullify, the concepts of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" enshrined in America's Declaration of Independence.

The phrase, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," was not penned as a philosophical foundation for wealth redistribution. These are not collective rights; they're individual rights. The Founders declared that government's role is to protect these rights, God-given to every single human being, including black Americans eventually freed from the abomination of slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr., called the historic inclusion of these three inalienable rights a delayed "promissory note" cashed in by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamtion, freeing every African-American slave eighty-seven years after the Declaration's signing,

Barack Obama's presidency has, perhaps more than any other, made the most overt push for a collectivist interpretation of the basic rights. In this, Obama has a philosophical kinship with Antebellum southern, pro-slavery Marxist George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh argued that slavery was the highest form of social justice and humaneness, especially for the black man, because it "relieved him from the burden" of decisions and responsibilities. No racist, Fitzhugh advocated slavery for poor whites as well.

In his 1854 book,  Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society, Fitzhugh candidly declared, "Slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism." He explained, "Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class; to bring about, at least, a qualified community of property, and to associate labor.  All these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains..."
According to statist left's interpretation, in the process of realization by Obama, the right to life no longer guarantees the right of an individual to individually protect his person or health as he sees fit; the state acts "in loco parentis" to treat virtually every individual citizen as a decision-making invalid and enforce a collectively standard "quality of life." The right to liberty is either ignored by Obama or redefined to mean the an immunity from liberty's consequences. The right of pursuing happiness has become the right to an equivalent economic outcome, a standard of wealth redistribution from rich to poor that is disconnected from merit or achievement.

At this point, Obama's remaining transformative goal, the jewel in his crown of tyrranic stewardship following his gutting of the free market in health care insurance, is "immigration reform." This will serve Obama as a euphemistic excuse to abuse executive privilege in order to usurp legislative authority. Obama intendes to ram through a program of amnesty, imminent citizenship, and extensive entitlements for illegal immigrants. His aides have indicated this as his goal and there are numerous indicators that Obama will defy opposition from a clear majority of American citizens and their legislative representatives on this issue. His executive order granting temporary residence status for border jumping children, and his refusal to sescure the southwestern border, practically advertised unhindered illegal entry. According to reports last week, Obama authorized the printing of up to 34 million green cards, allowing border-jumping criminals to live and work permanently in the U.S. If the political opposition to Obama fails to stop it, Obama's transformation irreversible as the two-party electoral balance becomes skewed by an abrupt 2% shift leftward.

When the new Senate and House are seated this January, the legislators will likely face what Obama hopes will be an irreversible fait accomplis. By then, Obama's executive order will likely have been issued and countermanding its effects will a major change in the status quo of the Congress. Both the House and the Senate will have to act with determination and authority which have been lacking in the mainstream Republicans for the past six years. RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) will have to start acting a lot more like Tea Party legislators in this respect, taking back their authority and legitimacy by checking Obama's lawlessness and shutting down his unconstitutional amnesty push.

If the conservative opposition fails to accomplish this, and tens of millions of illegal border-jumpers are fast-tracked to social benefits and citizenship, two outcomes will cripple the GOP. First, there is the aforementioned 2% shift to the progressive left among the population. Second, the GOP will have, perhaps irreversibly, lost faith among its center-right base; there will either be an upheaval in the principly compromised leadership that we know today or the GOP will go the way of its own predecessor, the Whig Party, and vanish as a new party forms to house America's conservative base.

The CDC's Global Community Organizer

Most Americans think of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as an efficient, effective, professionally staffed and operated government division, charged with our protection from infectious biohazards. Lionized in fiction, including movies like 2011's "Contagion" and 1995's "Outbreak," most Americans would never imagine that the real-life organization's activities might be affected by political bias. At least, that's the way it used to be.

Ebola has claimed its first casualty in America and, given the current administration's irresponsibility and unaccountability on border issues, the disease will likely spread, at least to a limited degree. The first line of defense in this situation should be the isolation of the source areas, in this case parts of West Africa. And yet, the Obama administration and its politically appointed CDC chief have refused to invoke a commercial flight ban.

CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD

The face of the CDC to the American public since 2009, Director Thomas Frieden, has spent the past two weeks giving either nonsensical excuses or outright non-sequiturs when pressed on this point. Among several other puzzling apparent lapses in administrative judgment, this is very puzzling. Frieden pointedly ignored challenges that a commercial travel ban would not prevent special charter flights for humanitarian and crisis management purposes.

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal op-ed section, Peggy Noonan tried to explain Frieden's reluctance to invoke a travel ban. According to Noonan, Frieden (like Obama) hates Americans. They hate the idea of America as self-interested and privileged. Just as Obamacare's goal is to eliminate perceived privilege in the capitalist institution of free market health care, Obama, Frieden, and Co., would like to eliminate any such privilege when it comes to global epidemiology. And, just as Obamacare's government decreed standardization of health care has affected most Americans negatively - with rising health care costs and reduced access to health care professionals - the new "we're all nations in this together" CDC approach to Ebola will compromise public health best practices for "community organizer" values taken to possibly lethal extremes. While Noonan's argument has legs, she doesn't go quite far enough in explaining how the general power-grabbing aspect of the administration's approach to crisis management. 

This past spring and summer, an Obama created humanitarian crisis erupted along America's southern border with Mexico. The administration's refusal to secure that border, coupled with its encouragement that young border jumpers would not be deported, resulted in a huge influx of illegal aliens, both young and old, crossing the border. Some parents in Latin America packed their children onto buses and made deals with human-smuggling coyotes to get their children into the U.S.A. illegally. In his final two years in office, it is widely believed that Obama will utilize executive orders to grant a de-facto amnesty to millions of south-of-the-border illegals, effectively granting them instant citizenship - and government dependency - which will quickly bring the far-left wing of the Democratic Party many committed voters. It is a community organizer's dream-come-true and could neutralize any significant conservative challenge to progressive political hegemony for the foreseeable future.

Fast forward back to government policy towards the Ebola outbreak. Invoking a travel ban would reveal the administration's lie about its lack of seriousness in securing the southern border. Exercising the responsibility to secure a border from pathogens might raise questions over why an effective fence (which Obama falsely claimed has been constructed) doesn't exist. This could complicate Obama's expected amnesty push.

CDC Director Thomas Frieden is a political appointee of Barack Obama. And while Frieden's resume includes solid experience with infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis, his career, both as the CDC's Director and as New York City's Department of Health Commissioner under the Bloomberg administration, has been linked to accusations of letting political and ideological factors influence health policy. Frieden played a major role in the attempt (, later ruled unconstitutional,) to limit to 32 ounces the size of a sugared, carbonated soft drink for purchase in New York City. As both New York's Health Commissioner and as CDC chief, he insinuated his medical role into the very non-medical, very ideological, and completely political arena of gun control, equating gun violence and even gun ownership as "diseases."

In a 2012 Oberlin commencement address, Frieden's "pearl" was that optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was a useful-idiot companion mantra to the Hope and Change slogan used to persuade a majority of witless young voters, most of whom lacked either an appreciation or basic knowledge of political history, to vote for Obama. Later in his speech, he described himself as a "community organizer" for a health clinic. The same point brought home, that in the leftist power center, political concerns will trump public service - whatever the ostensible purpose of a public office might otherwise entail - and, if need be, the laws of physics.

A leftist progressive true believer, Thomas Frieden serves the party and its leadership. He believes that central government control is necessary to protect the typical American citizen from himself. Meanwhile, CDC-issued Ebola protocols seem to change daily, and airports and hospitals are not prepared to deal with the threat. May God save America from bureaucrats like this, even if Americans are stupid enough to elect men who will appoint them to positions of responsibility. A propagandist should not be running the CDC and Frieden's resignation is overdue.

Hostage Situation -

This entry was written before the terrible news was released, that Naftali Frankel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah, of blessed memory, have been found brutally murdered. May the families never know such sorrow again. With the exception of the epilogue, the premises and conclusions of the piece remain unchanged.

It's never pleasant when a bad decision from the past comes back to haunt you. Knowing that you opposed that decision, and correctly predicted its terrible future consequences, is not much consolation. Many Israelis felt this trepidation during the process that culminated in the exchange of 1,027 Hamas terrorists, collectively responsible for the deaths of over 560 Israeli citizens, for one abducted Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

On June 30, 2009, Infantryman Bowe Bergdahl went missing from his base in Paktika province, Afghanistan. Members of his unit have stated their unequivocal conviction that he had deserted in order to join the Taliban. Correspondence between Bergdahl and his father, Robert Bergdahl, exhibited Bowe's sympathy for the Taliban. After five years in captivity, Bergdahl was swapped for five senior Taliban terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), two of whom were involved in the 9/11/2001 bombings. Pundits and politicians alike referenced the Shalit prisoner swap as justification for the release of five members of the jihadist tactical elite.

The latest dividend of that terrible decision was paid out two weeks ago in Israel. Naftali Frankel (, 16, from Nof Ayalon), Gilad Shaer (, 16, from Talmon), and Eyal Yifrah (, 19, from Elad,) were hiking in the Judean hills near their homes when they were kidnapped by Arab terrorists. An additional disturbing development is the violent demonstrations Arab Israelis in support of the kidnappers.

It isn't terribily difficult to connect the dots. Negotiating with terrorists is an act of weakness that emboldens barbaric enemies and weakens allies. Since the Shalit prisoner swap, attacks on Israelis have continued. Why wouldn't they? His kidnappers won an immediate tactical victory. What Netanyahu, and the west that lauded the swap, refused to see was that the terrorists won a strategic victory as well. The bar of resistance against jihadist terror and the psychological warfare of kidnapping had been significantly lowered.

Over the past few days in Israel, support for the terrorist kidnappers has emerged among Arab-Israelis in violent demonstrations against the IDF's effort to find and rescue the abducted teenagers. Anti-Zionist Balad PartyMK Hanan Zoabi, who incredibly remains in the Knesset despite regularly supporting the effort to destroy Israel, justified the kidnapping and criticized the Palestinian Authority's cooperation to locate the boys. Because of a refusal to adopt an offensive posture to eliminate our existentially threatening enemies, jihadists roar and moderate Arabs remain silent. The latter will not risk their lives for futile gestures, no matter how noble those gestures might be. It is difficult to see how a society, or a civilization for that matter, can survive while it tolerates such challenges to its survival from within.

I was present at a rally on behalf of the kidnapped Israeli teenagers at the Boca Raton Jewish Center last Monday night. I'm disappointed to say that the tone smacked of a large measure of learned helplessness and some political posturing. It didn't help that none of the speakers had bothered to learn how to pronounce Eyal's name.

At one point a presenter rattled off the names of Democratic Party politicians who made statements of support for the kidnapped boys. That presenter apparently hadn't bothered to solicit such statements from a single Florida Republican supporter of Israel, such as Allen West or Marco Rubio. The presenter also declined to mention the efforts of Sen. Rand Paul, a couple of weeks before the kidnapping, to introduce a bill in the Senate cutting off all aid to the Palestinian Authority until it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. No, such a hack would consider it to radical to actually stop paying people who regularly and violently challenge Israel's right to exist.

Israel's Consul to Florida and Puerto Rico only went so for as to urge people to participate in a Twitter #bringbackourboys campaign. Yes, the Israeli Consul believes that an internet social media petition made up of a hashtag will get under the skin of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood's neighborhood proxy. Honestly, I was ashamed and embarassed of the utter fecklessness of these presenters. What sent me over the edge, though, was the end of the evening. Someone, perhaps a rabbi or a cantor, thought it fitting to lead the congregation in rousing renditions of "Oseh Shalom Bimromav" and "David Melekh Yisrael," songs of peace and celebration.

No, when three teenagers are lying somewhere captive, perhaps injured, perhaps starving, perhaps dead, it is not the time to talk of peace. It is not the time to sing proud songs of celebration. It is time to get angry. It is time to channel fear and outrage in deeds in the physical world. That means rallies in front of embassies and government buildings. That means telephone campaigns that at least gain the attention of government staffers. It means standing on busy street corners with banners. It might be inconvenient, it might require more than a few mouseclicks and keystrokes.

It is time to ask, why is the Palestinian Authority still getting American tax dollars? It is time to ask, how many more Israelis will be kidnapped because their government chose populism over real security. It is time to ask, why didn't the Senate even vote on the bill to defund the PA at the very time its president, Mahmoud Abbas, officially allied to share power with Hamas? It is time to support real efforts to deal effectively with our enemies, rather than demure because it might make a political conservative like Rand Paul look good.

Epilogue - 30 June 2014:

Naftali, Gilad, and Eyal, of blessed memory, have been found brutally murdered near Hebron. Now is a time of mourning for the Frankel, Shaer, and Yifrah families; may they never know such sorrow again. While Israelis and Jews around the world mark this time of sadness, the sovereign state of Israel has no such luxury; it must respond - decisively. Israel should immediately announce (a) the elimination of all restrictions on Israeli construction in the E-1 corridor adjacent to Jerusalem, (b) the authorization of three new settlements in Judea and Samaria, and (c) the resignation of Interior Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich.

Limor Livnat, Cancel the Book Law Now

Limor Livnat, Cancel the Book Law Now

by Amir Weitmann

translated by J. Michael Jaffe

Original Hebrew version inThe Marker, Opinion Section, 30.06.2014
Available at http://www.themarker.com/opinion/1.2363150

About a year ago, I urged against the passage of the Law for the Protection of Literature and Authors in Israel, ("the Book Law;" "Open skies for the book market as well," May 2, 2013, The Marker), which restricts bookstores from selling books at discounted prices and whose stated purpose is to make books more expensive.

The article was part of a long campaign of activism against the law by the Israel Freedom Movement. Already in 2010, data and projected harms were presented to the public and legislators in a position paper written by Boaz Arad, a founder of the movement, as part of a JIMS (Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies) research framework. Since then, we've warned that the law will damage Israeli culture. Unfortunately, our efforts were in vain - and the law was passed by the Knesset. It was enacted on February 6 this year – a date we declared "Remembrance Day for Israeli Literature."

We said all along that without the excessive interference of politicians in an otherwise free, thriving, and growing market, the inability of publishers and stores to freely set prices would lead to rising prices of books, which are also subject to the laws of supply and demand. We communicated our warning via every possible platform, including the Knesset, that the law would lead to a crisis in an area that has cultural, intellectual, and spiritual significance for the state and its citizens. International comparisons showed that European countries which imposed restrictions on book pricing annually published 0.8 to 1.7 titles per 1,000 citizens, while countries without such restrictions published 1.14 to 5.8 books per 1,000 citizens.

Initiators and supporters of the bill, led by Culture Minister Limor Livnat, rejected our claims and said the impact on sales would be insignificant, and that eventually authors would benefit. Livnat - with the support of powerful lobbyists, including Steimatzky, which has since become embroiled in its own operating crisis – succeeded politically. The question, of course, is whether this political success translates into success or failure for Israeli culture.

Five months after the law took effect, we can already draw preliminary conclusions: as expected, the law indeed harmed the industry. In 2012, before the law's enactment, 7,487 books were published, an historic record in Hebrew book publication and an increase of 11% compared to 2011. In 2013, immediately after the law was passed, there was a decline in new book publication.

Even more worrisome, young and new writers are the main victims of the law to benefit authors. Sales of new books and the publication of author debut books saw a significant decrease – of at least 20% - since the law took effect, due to the increased business risk associated with publishing a new book. New authors found that books of theirs readied for publication had been frozen.

We warned that the number of titles per capita would decrease and, indeed, since the law took effect, the publishers have published much fewer books, illustrating the following - long-term damage to Israeli literary creativity, both in quality and quantity. We warned of dangers to the industry's profitability and, indeed, the law's enactment was accompanied by a decline in average bookstore receipts in significant percentages compared to last year.

In addition, public libraries are withering, and finding that their limited budgets now buy fewer new books in the absence of discounts. The director of the Nahal Sorek Regional Library, for example, writes, "the Book Law raises deep concerns about the ability of libraries to continue to serve as an effective, available, timely and free agency in the matter of books, "a fact that hurts the underprivileged population, of course.

To the Minister of Culture: There is no shame in admitting a mistake. It is possible and necessary to repeal the law immediately, before it is too late.

The author is a founder of the Israeli Freedom Movement.

Political Thuggery vs. Free Speech in Israel

Labor Party Thug-in-Chief Eitan Cabel

Over the past two months, the Knesset has been considering the "Bill for the Promotion and Protection of the Printed Media in Israel." The proposed law, introduced by Labor Party fixer-in-chief Eitan Cabel, states, "No person shall publish, or be responsible for the distribution of, a widely circulated daily newspaper free of charge (to the consumer), for a period exceeding six months from the start of its free-of-charge distribution." Anyone who believes in Israel's aspirations to freedom of speech and thought should be angered by the arrogance of such a proposal.

Cabel is no newcomer to abusing the government's media regulatory apparatus for political gain. As a former minister running the Israel Broadcast Authority, he demanded taxpayer funds to keep the quasi-commercial Channel 10 out of bankruptcy. Of course, it didn't hurt Cabel that Channel 10's content generally communicated a leftist, Labor-Party-friendly bias.

Arnon Mozes: criminalize the competition

No law can "protect printed media." Print is a technology which, in a free society, is easily accessible. In authentic Orwellian doublespeak, this bit of tyranny "protects" the interests of a narrow, elitist interest by falsely labeling the law an exercise in universal morality. The elite is personified by Yedioth Ahronoth owner Arnon "Noni" Mozes, whose family numbers among the dozen or so wealthiest, most connected and influential in the country. Before Israel Hayom broke onto the scene seven years ago, Yedioth Ahronoth dominated newspaper circulation. Today, Israel Hayom has either matched Yedioth Ahronoth or taken the lead in circulation. This law would thus criminalize Israel Hayom's business model of cost-free distribution to the reader and advertising-only-based revenue. 

The bill was co-sponsored by eight additional Knesset members: Yoel Razbozov (Yesh Atid), Robert Ilatov (Likud Beytenu), Elazar Stern (Hatnu'ah), Ariel Attias (Shas), and Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), Ilan Gilon (Meretz), Yitzhak Vaknin (Shas), and Yithak Cohen (Shas). These disgraceful individuals are not fit to serve as the "public's representatives" in Israel's legislature; members of their respective parties should be the first to condemn them. Perhaps sensing a growing outrage within their party constituencies, Vaknin and Cohen have since withdrawn their support for the measure.

These MKs, from parties on both the right and the left, share a political antagonism towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has been constantly attacked by Yedioth Ahronoth and the other major, leftist, oligarch-owned newspapers. Israel Hayom, has arguably been the only nationally circulated newspaper that has presented positive coverage of Netanyahu, even in a balanced context.

Currently, it appears that the Bill for the Promotion and Protection of the Printed Media in Israel will not pass in the Knesset. It was heartening to read of a demonstration in Haifa opposing the bill, organized surprisingly by the Labor party and by pensioners. These are positive developments. It is troubling, however, that several MKs from both the left and the right have supported the bill. In effect, they are supporting the partisan suppression of political speech on the part of a newspaper. In the eyes of these MKs, has this become an acceptable norm for the purposes of political gain? If this type of political warfare is introduced on the part of the political opposition, does the tactic not become fair game for those in power? Do these MKs not believe that the principle of free speech is to be protected as an article of Israel's national identity as a democracy?

Unfortunately, government over-reach in controlling speech and business is still problematic in Israel, as evidenced by the passage last summer of the Law for the protection of authors and literature in Israel. That law regulates agreements between publishers and authors as well as sale of new books in Israeli bookstores. Authors may not negotiate a royalty rate lower than 8% and bookstores may not sell books at a discount for the first 18 months of a book's sale, regardless of whether authors are willing to make such concessions for the sake of getting their books into print. The greatest beneficiaries of that law are Steimatzky, Israel's largest chain of bookstores, and older, established authors. New authors will find it relatively difficult, as a result of the new law, to get signed by publishers. If the experience of other countries which passed similar laws is any indication, the number of book titles published per year will drop. Customers will pay more if they want to read newer books, which many will probably forego. Entrepreneurs with innovative strateigies, trying to provide value at lower prices, will find the bookselling sector more difficult to enter. Is it any wonder the law is known as "the Steimatzky Law?"

Israelis cannot expect their government to restrain itself until the citizens themselves demand this en-masse. That means a widespread cultural movement to promote freedom and responsibility. It means teaching Israelis that government is not the ultimate provider of material sustenance, but a necessary apparatus that must focus solely on providing vital governing services and nothing more. When government tries to manage the economy it fails, especially when it tries to stave off the complementary cycles of ecnomic growth and recession. In a free market, these cycles both drive healthy competition, which lead to innovation and true productivity. When they try to "protect" an industry, the end result is almost always to weaken that industry by making it less competitive and less productive.

Too many Israelis still expect and rely upon government handouts, but do not grasp how the system providing those handouts handicaps their potential to prosper. The more social benefits become legal "rights," the larger the government bureaucracy created to guarantee those "rights." Government grows and siphons wealth out of the marketplace just to sustain that bureaucracy. It is a decaying cycle that eventually reduces national productivity while increasing citizen dependency on government for even the most basic needs. Add to that the inevitable corruption feeding upon the power of unlimited taxation and money-printing, and the problem is even worse.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are basic rights that must be guaranteed, not restricted, by government. They constitute a red line to be defended if Israel is to be a country that is free and prosperous. Another message must also be made clear. No industry or individual has a right to manipulate the legal system in order to guarantee itself an advantage or an income, especially at the cost of another's freedom.

The author is a member of the Israel Freedom Movement. http://liberal.co.il/