On Milton Friedman and Karl Marx

Caveat lector: Whole books have been written on what I do not understand about economic theory. Nevertheless I understand that economics is rightly called “the dismal science.” Last week Milton Friedman died. He and Karl Marx would seem as far from each other as polar opposites can be, but to these eyes, not distorted by hours of actual reading, there is a remarkable similarity between the two giants. (There is the well known story that on his death bed Karl lamented, Je ne suis pas un Marxiste, a claim Milton could also have made.)

Friedman predicted what another economist would later call stagflation—the concurrent rise of prices and decrease in employment. The way out of this dilemma is by fostering a market economy. The market will clear things up if government doesn't interfere (except to control the money supply). But that's not all. Government should not interfere in any way in the economy. Doctors should not be licensed, the market will weed out the good from the bad practitioners. It is an invisible hand, controlling everything.

Marx also believed in the invisible hand. It wasn't the market though, it was class struggle. Soon the gap between exploiter and exploited would be so narrow that the overthrow of capitalism was inevitable. Government would eventually wither away once the workers had survived the inevitable assault on their revolution by capitalist forces.

So, the arch-capitalist and the scientific socialist, are both economic determinists. Marx being discredited, let's explore Milton. Of course the market will weed out the good doctors from the quacks, but without a regulatory agency there'll to be a lot of quacks doing a great deal of harm until word of mouth exposes them. Have you tried to book an airline ticket since deregulation? There were about a dozen national carriers and the meals were free and travel agents could book you. Now? Choices are limited, food costs, and fares are way up. When energy was a monopoly controlled by government, Enron didn't brown-out California. It couldn't; there were regulations that prevented it. I'm not old enough to get confused about which Medicare plan I'll choose, and my hope is that by the time I need it the market will have driven out the crooks, but in the meanwhile, how many seniors are confused? Friedman advocated abolishing the draft—a smaller army means less money to sustain it and longer enlistments mean better soldiers. Let's compare. With the draft we lost Vietnam; without it, we are losing Iraq. If the idea of having an army is winning, what has been accomplished other than creation of what we used sneeringly to call a mercenary army? The poor, the unskilled, still predominate. We talk a good game about supporting the troops, but the non-economic reality is that while those mercenaries are fighting and dying, we're not paying attention, we're watching football and tsk-tsking whenever we see on TV that four more Americans were killed. And why should we be paying more attention? They're mercenaries after all; it's what they do. If they were our children I think we'd be more involved.

Milton said that “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.” These are strange words coming from a man who provided economic advice to the Pinochet regime in Chile. He had Stalinist Russia in mind, but blaming Marx for Stalin is like blaming Jesus for Jerry Falwell. Give the guys a break. Marx was living in a period of ruthless exploitation of the proletariat and he saw the world through that prism. Allowing the market place to dominate wages would result only in continued degradation of the human workers without whom there is no product to sell on the open market.

What Marx and Milton ultimately share is that they are both wrong. There is no economic law valid for all times and all places. The world works beyond economic statistics. Those soldiers I callously called mercenaries might define themselves as patriots. Marx said that family was, essentially, only a mutually beneficial economic unit. I beg to differ. Love, companionship, humor, sharing of emotional burdens is more than an economic relationship.

I'm sorry Milton is dead. He was a brilliant man who missed the point. I'm sorry Marx was forced to say that he wasn't a Marxist, so far from his ideals had his successors traveled. Long live humanity as, dismally, we work through the fog of economic theorists.

Morgan's escape

On another page you will note pictures of dogs and other lesser pets. There you will see Morgan the Wonder Dog, canine of my heart, bane of my existence. That she is smarter than most people I know, including myself, is obvious. That she knows and exploits this is, unfortunately, equally true.
For example... Last winter we had a heavy snowfall, eight inches of the white stuff, which a few days later was reduced on sidewalks to occasional patches of ice. To make a bad situation worse, my wife packed her bags and left me. No, she hadn’t finally come to her senses; she had a conference up in Cambridge. This meant I, I of all people, had to take the dog on her early morning walk, a joy I generally am more than willing to avoid.
So, we are walking, Morgan and I, and she pooped and I scooped and then I hit the inevitable patch of unseen ice. Flop-plop I flipped somehow managing to hold onto the bag of poop but releasing the leash. Morgan immediately realized she was free, but stayed around long enough to make sure I wasn’t dead (after all, no Josh equaled no breakfast). I wasn’t too sure myself. I’d managed to fall on my left hip, or what passes for my left hip since all that’s there now is steel and cement connecting femur to pelvis. I was sure I’d smashed it and wondered if the lack of excruciating pain meant that I was dead. Morgan, about 10 paces away, looked on with an expression of some concern (breakfast, now being in doubt). “Morgan, come!” I commanded menacingly. In vain.
“Ha! He lives,” the light in her eyes announced, and she frolicked away, leash dragging behind her. But then, to mock me she came back, circled me once (I was still aground, trying vainly to get up). I lunged for the leash, and missed. “Morgan, come here!” I said in my most authoritative voice. (Just how commanding I could be under the circumstances—prone, feet slipping on the ice as I tried to rise up, a bag of dog poop in my hands, you can only imagine.) Finally, as from the lagoon out of our most ancient amphibious ancestors arose I unsteadily achieved verticality. But Morgan had fled.
My limbs were sore, my chest was sore, my hip was sore, and my dog had run away. In all the world, all I had left was a bag of poop. But then, salvation. Morgan, who loves to ride in cars, saw that some people were opening their car door. She jumped in and commanded, “Drive, quickly, let the wind rustle through my ears as the air is sucked into my nostrils; drive, drive, drive.” The mother screamed in terror, the children, who had helped me gather in Morgan on previous escapes, screamed in delight, and grabbed the leash. I hobbled over to them, collected my disloyal dog and limped slowly home.
“Breakfast, Josh?” She asked, hopefully. “What happened to loyalty?” I asked. What happened to “if you’re hurt, I’m there for you”? “Instead of kibbles, how about some of that canned food?” she replied. “Why did you leave me when I called you?” “Because of the story I read last week.” “You’re hitting our books again?” “Only when you sleep.” “Which story?” “‘The Last Match.’” “That’s what you model your behavior on? The man is dying of hunger and cold, he calls his dog, and the dog abandons him?” “The dog left the man because the man was going to kill the dog and eat it.” “Oh, yeah, but I wouldn’t do that.” “You never know, you just never know. Open the door; let’s eat.” Well, I fed her, of course, but I also punished her. When I went out onto the deck to fill the bird feeders, I didn’t let her come out with me—she loves to chase squirrels out there and to see the birds flap away—so she sulked. It by now being late I grabbed my lunch bag and hopped into the car. As I drove off to school I looked out the window and saw that she was looking out at me with a smile on her face. I didn’t know quite why until I got to my office and noticed the poop bag still in my coat pocket. My lunch bag was safely at home. For those of you keeping score, it’s Dog 106, Human 0.

On Indian Schools and the Jews of Russia

In the 1870’s some bureaucrat did the math and discovered that it would be cheaper to turn Indians into regular Americans than to kill them. The result was Indian Boarding Schools, the first in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, later a dozen others across the country.

Even assuming a nobility of intention, the process of recruitment was appalling. Troops entered villages, rounded up terrified children, put them onto sealed trains and took them far from their weeping parents. Upon arrival at the school their hair was cut and their Indian clothes burnt, replaced by “American” clothing. This merely increased the separation trauma. At some point early in the process there was an arbitrary selection. Children were assigned a number, 1,2,3,4. All the ones became Methodist, the twos Baptist, the threes Presbyterian, I don’t remember what became of the fours, but my guess is, “not Jewish.”

The school day began at 5:00 with the donning of military attire, military marching, military inspections etc. In class the children were taught math, spelling, history, all of which is useful, and, yes, patriotism as well. In the afternoon the boys learned a manual skill, the girls received domestic and office training. Participation in sports was encouraged, songs were sung. “English only” was the rule, strictly enforced. Upon graduation the Indians had a trade, thought in English and were considered civilized. If they chose to they could return to the reservation, but there was nothing there for them anymore, other than their parents, who now lived in a foreign world, thought uncivilized by their own children. Success, in the eyes of the bureaucrat.

The obvious comparison is to Nazi treatment of Jews, at least in terms of “recruitment” and “selection.” One obvious difference, though, is that whereas American kidnappers thought they were doing the Indians a good (if unappreciated) turn, the Germans were out to annihilate not only a culture, but the physical existence of a people. Similar tactics were attempted in czarist Russia. Nicholas I (1825-1855) decreed that all Jews must wear Russian clothing and trim their beards in the Russian manner. Crueler, he initiated a policy whereby Jewish youths as young as age 12 were kidnapped and placed in army camps (cantons) where over the next six years peasant sergeants would try to force them to give up their religion. Later he recruited an American rabbi to set up a system of Jewish schools where children would be taught the Russian language, history, etc. When the young rabbi realized that the schools were to be a front for proselytizing Jews, he fled the country and the scheme came to naught.

But for all the trauma, for all the negative comparisons, we must still ask—was what Americans did to the Indians worse than life in an English public (boarding) school, designed for the upper classes? Same military grooming, same physical and mental abuse, same tearful early separation from parents and a life loved. The difference, of course, is that the English voluntarily sent their children knowing that for all the cruelty they would encounter, their sons would emerge as leaders of society. Individual Indians, stripped of their culture, were given a trade. A fair exchange? Maybe. Maybe not.

So, the historian in me knows that questions remain—Were the methods used as bad as the results were good? Were the Indians better off living in poverty and disease on the reservation or forcibly removed from their parents’ love and brought hundreds of miles from home to learn to be American. (I suppose that from their perspective it’s an unfair either/or. The best thing that could have happened was if Europeans had never come to America.) The pragmatist in me, the assimilated Jew that I am, says the Indians benefited despite the trauma of the experience. Having a trade (and later, after the era of compulsory “recruitment” taking college preparatory courses) is better than being an unskilled worker. The humanist in me (also the product of being an assimilated Jew) says that if the Indians were doing no harm (their principal crime was being in the way) they ought to have been left alone to live their culture as they had, undisturbed, for centuries. If I knew the correct response to this quandary, I’d give it to you, but I am sunk in my ignorance as to what are the divine intentions. No doubt many of my readers are not, and will inform me of the truth, which will set me free.

On Rabbis against living wage

Returning from schul on the first day of Rosh Hashanah I was happy to see that my copy of the Forward had arrived in the mail. After lunch, my stomach full, my spirits high, I perused the front page and saw a story about “Top rabbis of Conservative Judaism” who promoted a plan to encourage women to go to the mikveh. “Very nice,” I said to myself, totally useless, but very nice. Women who already go to the mikveh will continue to do so and those who don’t, still won’t. But then, just below this courageously ground breaking legislation I read that “In a separate vote, the committee failed to pass an opinion requiring Jewish business owners to pay hourly workers a living wage and, when possible, to hire union workers.” I glanced at the date of the paper. Maybe this was an early or a late April Fools’ Day joke or an early or late Purim edition. But no, it was the September 22 edition. I read further.

Of the 25 members of the Jewish Law and Standards committee, only three rabbis voted that workers employed by Jews should get a living wage; 10 abstained; seven voted against and five were absent. The principal opponent of the resolution seemed to have been one Paul Plotkin, described (I hope erroneously) as religious leader of Margate, Florida’s Temple Beth Am. The proposal would have made a nice sermon, he patronizingly said, but it’s not suitable for an halachic argument. The Forward explains that with increased affluence, today’s Jews are less sympathetic to the plight of workers. This may be so, but it’s a circumstance to be cured, not pandered to.

These rabbis who voted “no” or were brave enough to abstain, have they never read the haftarah from Yom Kippur, the one that contains these words: “Is this the fast that I have chosen? … This is My chosen fast: to loosen all the bonds that bind men unfairly, to let the oppressed go free, to break every yoke. Share your bread with the hungry; take the homeless into your home. Clothe the naked when you see him, do not turn away from people in need.” Have they never sat at a Seder and discussed the ruthless exploitation of the workers known as Hebrew slaves in the days of pharaoh? Have they not intoned the words “We were slaves in Egypt, not just our remote ancestors?” Don’t they say, “All who are hungry let them come and eat”? Or maybe these Conservative rabbis, fat and happy, representing their affluent congregants, protecting their paychecks, playing golf in Margate while withholding straw from those who need it most read from a different Haggadah, the one that says, “Hey, we’ve got ours, let’s bring in some more Mexicans to whom we can pay bupkiss.” That Hagadah.

Had they no parents or grandparents who lived in slums on the Lower East Side (now the trendy Lower East Side, I’m told)? Wasn’t it the unions that brought the workers the American dream of home ownership, of the opportunity of a college education for their children? Didn’t greater prosperity come when more workers had more money to spend on more goods and services? Don’t these rabbis who claim to be religious leaders know that they are in an exactly congruent position with the founding fathers of the United States? And I don’t mean that as a compliment either. Those wise men decided that it would be better for the country if they allowed the continuation of slavery. No slavery, bad economy. Our (well, not my) rabbis who argue that the “pro-labor paper would create an undue hardship on Jewish business owners” are arguing exactly as the anti-abolitionists argued in the 18th and 19th century.

As the chief proponent of the paper on “Work, Workers and the Jewish Owner” Rabbi Jill Jacobs put it, “We ask people to do all sorts of things that put them at an economic disadvantage. That’s because we believe in Jewish law and we don’t believe that making money is the highest Jewish law.” Brava, rabbi Jacobs, Brava. You stand for Judaism as an ethical norm, not an upwardly mobile social class looking down at those below.

And you? Where is your heart this penitential season? With the exploitation of labor, or with Isaiah? To me, the choice is obvious. If capitalism is going to succeed, wages must be equitable. Workers are what give the things value. Ask Adam Smith. Ask HaShem. They’ll tell you.

September 29- On scurrilous letter re: France as anti-Semitic

Have you been receiving the same internet nonsense I have? It purports to inform of the horrors afflicting the Jews in France. In Lyon a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire; the Jewish religious center in Montpellier was firebombed; on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris the words “Dirty Jew” were painted. Other atrocities are listed. All of this happened in the past week, we are told. No wonder French Jews are fleeing to the relative safety of Israel. We are urged to boycott French products and its shores. We can exert amazing pressure, the broadside reads, “and whatever else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they are like a cobweb in a hurricane in the face of well directed pressure.” We are urged to send this message along to our family, our friends and co-workers.

OK, friends and family and co-workers, you can stop sending me this; I’ve seen it.

Is any of it true? Well, yes, the specific events did happen. But they happened not this week, but in April 2002 at the height of the Intifada. The culprits were not French Frenchmen; they were Muslim immigrants, or the children of immigrants, mostly poor, religious and susceptible to violence. Some few of them saw what their co-religionists were doing in Israel, they felt solidarity with them, and they acted. Once the attacks began the French police protected Jewish institutions throughout the country and prosecuted captured felons and the attacks ceased.

Did French Jews panic? No. They took reasonable precautions, as did the Jews of Rhode Island after the recent shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation, and continued to live their lives. There was no mass Jewish emigration from France to Israel.

When Muslims rioted in France in the fall of 2005, again the Jewish community did not panic. “Manek Weintraub, of the Representative Council of the Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) told the British website TotallyJewish.com, ‘So far nothing has happened. There was a Molotov cocktail that seems to have been hurled at a small synagogue but nobody really knows about it. It [the riots] will concern the public authorities but Jews are largely absent from the story, which is welcome.’”

This does not sound like panic to me.

So who wrote the “Jews are being led to the slaughter in France!” piece that has crossed your desk and mine? Answer: Not my cousin, not my friend, my not my co-worker, they just took the bait, believed the hype and passed it on. Who does that leave? Someone with an agenda, perhaps? One source could be Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), a right wing Israeli online media network banned by the Israeli government because of racist incitement. In fact, a quick Google search confirms that it was broadcasting this material in 2005. But where did it get it? As early as April 2002 there was a similar piece going around the internet, purportedly from Senator Joseph Lieberman. It contained the same information. But Lieberman didn’t write the letter; it was a forgery. So who’s responsible for that? Perhaps someone who is angry at France for not supporting America’s attack on Iraq, someone angry enough to object to the fact that France was right (as the government in Washington now fully admits) that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein never cooperated with Al Qaeda, that he and Osama hated each other. The French knew all this and spoke up. They must be punished.

Is France, after all, the only country recently to experience anti-semitic acts? “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Inc.” (no, I’m not making this up) issued a broadside on December 8, 2003 listing thirteen recent acts of anti-Semitism in Europe (two in Belgium, four in Britain, two in Italy, one each in Germany, Ukraine, Greece, Holland, Slovakia.) And then it comes to the point: “But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France” and then it gives the usual old examples. What does “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership” advocate? My initial guess (considering the source) was “Pack a Rod, Plug a Frog” but no, boycott etc. just as the original letter with the identical words urges.

Am I the only one smelling a rat here? Aren’t there anti-Semites in all countries, including or own? (Seattle, anyone? The LA nursery school shooter?) Bad things happen in even the most wonderful places. Vive La France.

September 15- Lessons about proportionate response to kidnapping from the Iliad

The return of the Jewish New Year is happening with increasing frequency, or so it seems. Already I can taste the flavors of my wife’s cooking and hear the Rosh Hashanah-only tunes. We have survived 5766. As a child I used to think of God sitting with an open book on His lap deciding who should live and inscribing the names of the fortunate. Now, as an adult, I see no evidence that He isn’t, so like the famous wager of Pascal, I’ll bet on the side of belief and see if it pays off.

Jews are Janus-faced this time of year. We look backward to see forward. I always look backward; I’m an historian. It’s an occupational hazard. Last week I was teaching about the ancient Greeks. I told them the story of the contest between Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena. Each wanted the golden apple inscribed “To the Fairest.” Zeus refused to choose—he was as dull witted as he was strong and randy, but he wasn’t insane enough to get involved in this no-win (for him) situation. Instead they sought out a man, and asked him. Naturally a mere mortal couldn’t choose the most beautiful among the three goddesses, so each tendered a bribe. Hera, offered power; Athena, wisdom; Aphrodite, the most beautiful of women. Paris, a prince of Troy tending sheep (his father had received a prophesy when he was born that he would be responsible for the destruction of Troy; rather than kill the infant he gave him to a shepherd to do it; these things never work out, of course) chose Aphrodite who delivered on her promise. But she had failed to tell the young, foolish, man, that the woman promised would be Helen (she of the face that was soon to launch a thousand ships) already married to Menelaus, the warlike king of Sparta, scion of the cursed race of Atreus. They met while he was on grand tour following his punishment. When Menelaus was away, they stole off, landing safely in Troy, but bringing in their wake those self-same thousand ships filled with Greeks, determined to get her back.

There were those in Troy who told Paris to return the girl, that she wasn’t worth the price, but Paris being vainglorious, and knowing that no one could force him to return Helen, insisted on keeping his prize. The Greeks eventually came and destroyed the city.

As I was telling the students this familiar story, it occurred to me, mid-sentence: Can there be a more analogous situation in literature to what happened in the Middle East this summer? Hezbollah stole into our territory, stole our two soldiers (thinking, it is now revealed, that there would be no consequences). Many prominent Lebanese asked, begged, for the soldiers to be released, but Hezbollah refused, in its arrogance, and Lebanon was bombarded, its infrastructure devastated.

In the ancient story as told by Homer, the end of the war was not ambiguous. The Greeks, love ’em or hate ’em, knew what they were after and settled for no less than the return of their hostage (yes, Helen was a willing hostage, but even she yearned to return to Sparta).

When I teach the Iliad I usually root for the Trojans, especially for their great hero Hector. The Greeks, it’s always seemed to me, were the arrogant Yankees, the Trojans the noble Brooklyn Dodgers, doomed to fail gallantly. But now, now the Greeks are still the Yankees, the Trojans still the Dodgers, but current events allow me to view the past with a different perspective. When they steal your people, you have to go in and get them back. Innocent Trojans died; innocent Lebanese died. They should have taken control of their destinies by forcing Hezbollah to give up the captured soldiers, by forcing Paris to give back Helen. If Israel’s response was disproportionate, it was just acting as people always do, when they can, when their people are snatched up.

At year’s end, year’s beginning, let me end where I started, with a New Year’s reflection. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak to you, to pique your curiosity, occasionally to entertain, not infrequently to annoy (apparently). One day I’m going to trade in this old Olivetti portable electric typewriter, but not yet. Shanna Tova; may 5767 be for us a year of love and joy, peace and prosperity, good health and the wonder of discovery. Be strong and resolute, Haverim.

Response to David Klinghoffer on the religious right

Every once in a while I hear the ground rumble. Usually it’s my mother turning over in her grave as I commit one faux pas or another. It’s nice to know that she’s keeping an eye on me. But when it happened a couple of weeks ago, I checked and no, it wasn’t her this time, it was old Abraham Cahan.

Cahan (1860-1951) established the Jewish Forward in 1897. His paper espoused socialist principles. The rights of the workingman, the release from the superstitions of the religious, were his rallying cries. The newspaper was also a way to Americanize his readers. Yes, it was written in Yiddish, but the goal was to turn the children and grandchildren of immigrants into the American doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers, union activists that they became. “It is as important to teach the reader to carry a handkerchief in his pocket as it is to teach him to carry a union card,” he famously wrote.

So what made him turn over in his grave? Probably the piece by David Klinghoffer who began his August 18th column in the “Forward” with “Some members of America’s political and cultural elite…” This is code wording for liberals, we élitists not in touch with the common man; it’s a word “compassionate conservatives” (as opposed to the usual kind, I suppose) use to slur liberals who, as far as I can tell, are the people who speak for the underclasses in America—the poor, the worker, the black, the immigrant.

OK, so what are we élitists doing today, according to Klinghoffer? We are confusing the political philosophy of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and America’s religious conservatives. Who knew? And we are wrong to think of Bush, Jr. etc. as attempting to impose an Iranian style theocracy on America. As a former colleague of his at the “National Review” argues, disingenuously, “even the most ambitious members of the so-called Christian right wish to do nothing more radical than return the United States to the status quo of the 1950s” and that was certainly not a theocracy.

Ah, the 1950s, I remember them well. Bible-thumping ministers denouncing integration, voting for the likes of Orville Faubus, Ross Barnett, and George “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” Wallace. It was a quieter, gentler time when Mrs. Hollman, my fourth grade teacher, would start our day at PS193 by reading form the from Psalms, but other teachers across the country began their classes with the Lord’s Prayer. The words “Under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, though the pledge’s author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister, had deliberately omitted them. But even in the 1950s I don’t remember anyone teaching creationism in school or even the deceptively re-coined version of it “intelligent design.” That throwback to the 1920s had to wait until our own enlightened time, foisted upon us by the Christian right, if they can get away with it. I don’t remember in the 1950s arguments that religious symbols such as the Ten Commandments, should be emblazoned on public property, but I do remember that come Christmas we Jewish students of PS 193 learned to sing “Silent Night, Holy Night” as well as “Jingle Bells.” I loved being excluded from the rest of America, didn’t you?

Klinghoffer argues that we élitists miss the point that some of biblical law is essentially natural law—thou shall not murder, thou shall not steal, etc. Fine, so we don’t need religion to teach it. The Ten Commandments begins, “I am the Lord Your God…” how in conformity with the first amendment’s separation of church and state is that, festooned behind the judge? And what kind of God does it mean? The unitary God of Jews and Muslims? The Trinity of Christianity? The Divine Spirit of Reason preached by natural law philosophers such as Cicero? These are the kind of questions people kill each other over, each certain that he has the correct answer and that the others are infidels (or, to cite Klinghoffer in another context, “pagans.” A blurb for a forthcoming book reads: “Addressing such timely topics as the controversy over public displays of the Commandments and the battles over Intelligent Design, Klinghoffer demonstrates that Christians and Jews are united in their opposition to the pagan aspects of our culture.”) Oh, Zeus, why do you not strike such people with your thunderbolt? That’s the trouble with Zeus. He’s never around when we need him.

No wonder poor Abe Cahan is rolling over in his grave.