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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 362.0/October 31,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / America in
Jeopardy, if Israel is Destroyed
- Friday Feature / Forbes: How Capitalism Will Save Us
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Important for Investors to Understand
- Readings /
The
Week / America in Jeopardy, if Israel is Destroyed
GEORGE
GILDER, Gilder Telecosm Forum (10/23/08): Here is my
response to Tom Friedman's view that the Israelis, who hold less than half of
one percent of mid eastern territory should trade land for peace with the
Palestinians:
After thirty years covering this area, cataloguing every olive tree in the
Middle East, Friedman can no longer see the imperious forest of basic facts
before him in the region. G.K. Chesterton got it right. As I paraphrase: “If it
were true that the man who is trained is the man to be trusted—if the man who
saw something every day saw more and more of its significance—the argument for
expertise would be unanswerable. But the man who sees and studies and practices
something every day does not understand more and more of its significance, but
less and less.”
Reflecting this blindness of expertise is the utterly conventional and
obviously fantastic consensus view of Friedman and nearly all the other
authorities on the subject. The key problem in the mid-East, they conclude in
chorus, is that Israel has too much land. Their remedy is for Israel
to give up land for the creation of yet another fanatical Moslem
nation-state in various areas of Palestine amazingly even more cramped than
Israel. Created would be a prospective nation with no identity to sustain it
beyond the Palestinian sense of grievance and its hatred of Israelis.
It is hard to imagine two more preposterous ideas so widely and
prestigiously upheld by experts. Chesterton’s law is fully vindicated by
Friedman’s follies.
Also supporting this pastiche of absurdities is French writer-“activist”
Bernard-Henri Levy. Author of a book on the killers of Daniel Pearl of the Wall
Street Journal and articles and essays galore on Israel and anti-Semitism,
he amazingly slips into an objectively anti-Semitic mode himself. Believing
that Israel must trade land for “peace,” and give the Palestinians a state,
Levy fails to explain why, of all the nations of the world, the only one not
permitted to command a defensible territory, capture the staging areas of
invaders, or exclude immigrants devoted to their destruction are Israel’s Jews.
By contrast to Israel, the Palestinians are surrounded on all sides by
spacious and compatible Arab countries of whom they theoretically could become
citizens. Why not the East Bank? That’s Jordan, where 100 thousand Palestinians
voluntarily fled during the 1967 war? As David Pryce-Jones witnessed at the
time on the Allenby bridge, “Fear did not seem to be the motivation. These
people had not seen a single Israeli soldier….Something in the culture more
powerful than either self-interest or common sense was at work.”
A Moslem Arab state from time to time sustained by Israel and created in
part as a home for the Palestinians, Jordan held the West Bank until King
Hussain’s treacherous 1967 invasion and shelling of Jerusalem. Jordan retains a
far more compelling obligation to these people than Israel does. In the 1980s,
Palestinians taking refuge in Jordan did attempt to overthrow the Jordanian
government. So the Jordan solution may take some work, but it is surely more
practical than the seawater solution favored by the Palestinians.
Should the Palestinians shun Jordan, perhaps they would prefer the Soviet
Jihad state of Syria, which in its guise as “Greater Syria” stretches its
reptilian tentacles throughout the region, including nearby Lebanon. Moreover,
Egypt is contiguous with Gaza and could easily absorb the Gazan Palestinians.
It is outlandish to say that, because of some democratic nicety interpreted
tendentiously by the U.N., Israel must commit effective suicide by giving
citizenship and equal voting rights to 4.5 million anti-Semite enemies who want
to kill them.
Yet Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in a helpful piece called “Is
Israel Finished?” reports that accepting this line of democratic thought
are not only leading Israeli writers such as the prizewinning Amos Oz and my
own favorite, the eloquent Edward Grossman, but also the then incumbent prime
minister Ehud Olmert himself. Grossman’s waffles may be understandable because
of the loss of his son Uri during the Lebanon War in 2006. But Olmert and his
allies had no excuse. Nonetheless, this former mayor of Jerusalem nominally
dedicated himself to removing the some 400 thousand Jewish settlers in the West
Bank and Eastern Jerusalem. Goldberg’s article justifies this surrender by
suggesting that, together with the demographic trend, the West Bank settlements
are “a castastrophe.” Echoing Jimmy Carter’s ingenuous view, Goldberg even
raises fears that “Israel will become a state like pre-Mandela South Africa, in
which the minority ruled the majority.”
Clinching the argument, Goldberg writes: “If the Arabs of the West Bank
and Gaza were given the vote, then Israel, a country whose fundamental purpose
has been to serve as a refuge for persecuted Jews [where they could live as a
majority], would disappear, to be replaced by an Arab-dominated ‘binational’
state.”
This is a democratic ideology that accords no significance to the prospect
that an Arab run Israel would quickly expel all its Jews and cripple its capitalist
economy. Such rules of democracy would make democracy a suicide pact.
Without a functioning and legally protected capitalist system, democracies
swiftly sink into ochlocracies, ruled by mobs. Without the independent private
sources of power imparted by free businesses, unbiased courts, and other
institutions of economic order, any democracy becomes a despotism ruled by any
tribe of thug politicians that manage to gain control. If they have oil or
foreign aid they may stay in power for decades. The failure of leading Israeli
intellectuals and politicians to comprehend this reality is far more portentous
than any supposed demographic trend.
In stark terms, Israel and Palestine raise the issue not only of the
prerequisites of viable democracy but also of the nature of capitalist wealth.
Are entrepreneurs, in Israel and around the world, chiefly givers and
benefactors, or are they predators and exploiters? Should policy focus on
fostering economic growth for all or on closing “gaps” between rich and poor?
Should it seek to enable an economic spearhead of excellence and creativity or
to dispossess the successful to subsidize the wretched of the earth? Clutching
their Fanon and their Koran, their Howard Zinn and their Noam Chomsky, the
ersatz voices of the “wretched of the earth” punctuate their claims by a
flaunted fist of hate, a clenched mind of murder. Does Israel owe anything at
all to such people?
To many observers—in the army of the left—it is obvious that Israeli
wealth causes Palestinian misery. How could it be otherwise? Jews have long
been paragons of capitalist wealth. Capitalist wealth, as Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon put it in regard to “property,” is “theft.” Karl Marx was said to have
shaped his opposition to property rights and his Jewish self-hatred, by reading
Proudhon, who in anti-Semitic virulence, exceeded even Marx. In an 1883 diary,
Proudhon declared that, “The Jew is the enemy of mankind. This race must be
sent to Asia or eliminated.” This fits well with Osama Bin Laden’s view that warping
the entire U.S. economy and its global impact has been the effects of Jewish
usury.
History, however, favors the view that poverty springs chiefly from envy
and hatred of excellence—from class war Marxism, anti-Semitism, and
cleptocratic madness. It stems from the belief that wealth inheres in things
and material resources that can be seized and redistributed, rather than in
human minds and creations that thrive only in peace and freedom. In particular,
the immiseration of the Middle East stems chiefly from the covetous and
crippling idea among Arabs that Israel’s wealth is not only the source of their
humiliation but also the cause of their poverty.
Most of the world, even many citizens of Israel itself, want to muddle
these issues. The favored answer to all categorical pronouncements is: “All of
the above.” Democracy, equality, multicultural kumbaya, Sharia law, gay
marriage, capitalism and freedom, the children of coddled West want it all in a
cornucopian cocktail party of inebriated contradictions, from green austerity
to entitled affluence. They mix nominal political support for Israel with
celebration of Palestinian voters who elect and applaud anti-Semite terrorists.
They match a devout belief in abortion with fears of demographic disaster in
Israel, and with continual bows of political reverence toward an
ever-diminishing complement of children. They combine opposition to nuclear
weapons and defense spending with demands for American intervention everywhere
the U.S. has no conceivable national interest, from Burma to Tibet. They oppose
nuclear proliferation while urging US nuclear disarmament that hugely enhances
the incentives for secret nuclear programs. Without peremptory US nuclear
superiority a small complement of nukes can confer global dominance and make it
impossible for the US to defend Israel or anyone else.
The Israel test forces a remorseless realism. It disallows all the bumper
sticker contradictions of pacifistic bellicosity. Either the world, principally
the U.S., makes the sacrifices to support Israel or Israel, one way or another,
will be destroyed. There are no other realistic choices. And if Israel is
destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the
epitome of productive and creative capitalism, spurred by Jews, will be in
jeopardy.
Read more posts by George Gilder and the Gilder
Telecosm Forum members. Log on with you subscriber password at www.Gildertech.com
today.
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Feature / How Capitalism Will Save Us
STEVE FORBES, Forbes magazine (November 10 issue): We are experiencing the
devastating consequences of a chain of major economic policy errors, which, to
use a current cliché, created the perfect storm. These government blunders
temporarily paralyzed the global credit system and are now sending the U.S. and
Europe into recession, while sharply cutting back Asia's growth rates.
Left
to its own devices, the credit crisis, which began in August 2007, would have
crushed economies as severely as did the Great Depression.
Belatedly, but thankfully, governments recognized that the only way to get credit flowing again was for them to make quick and direct massive infusions of new equity into beleaguered banks, as well as commit to other emergency measures hitherto unimaginable.
If
sensible rescue efforts continue--and they will--the immediate crisis will
quickly pass. Shell-shocked businesses and consumers won't recover rapidly from
the trauma of recent months, especially as we now cope with recession. But the
downturn shouldn't be prolonged: The economy here and those overseas should
start to pick up no later than next spring.
That
soon? Despite the crisis, the global economy still retains enormous strengths.
Between the early 1980s and 2007 we lived in an economic Golden Age. Never
before have so many people advanced so far economically in so short a period of
time as they have during the last 25 years. Until the credit crisis, 70 million
people a year were joining the middle class. The U.S. kicked off this long boom
with the economic reforms of Ronald Reagan, particularly his enormous income
tax cuts. We burst from the economic stagnation of the 1970s into a dynamic,
innovative, high-tech-oriented economy. Even in recent years the much-maligned
U.S. did well. Between year-end 2002 and year-end 2007 U.S. growth exceeded the
entire size of China's economy. Obviously China's growth rates were higher, but
China was coming off a much smaller base.
The
world is flush with cash. It's frozen because of fear, but the cash is there.
Productivity gains are burgeoning.
So,
will this global boom resume next year, slowly at first and then with
increasing momentum? It should. Whether that happens, however, depends on the
next, highly dangerous phase: the political aftermath….
Read on:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1110/018.html
Read more of the Forbes “Intelligent Investing” Special Report:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/10/22/intelligent-investing-economics-cz_1022invest_land.html
__________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / Important for
Investors to Understand
The Taylor Frigon Advisor blog (10/27/08): The latest Forbes
magazine (cover date of November 10, 2008) contains an important article from
George Gilder entitled "The Coming
Creativity Boom."
In it, the author highlights the critical role that creativity plays in a
successful economy. Creativity is the heart of entrepreneurship, and
entrepreneurship is at the heart of the economic success America has enjoyed
for over two centuries.
Chris Anderson of Wired magazine
recently wrote a
post in the Wired blog which shows just how insightful George Gilder
has been for over two decades in his vision and his articulation of the
direction technology is going and the impact it will have on every area of our
lives.
This blog has also called attention to the importance of George Gilder's
insights, such as his discussion of "The
Exaflood" back in February of this year.
In this most recent article, George points out that "the current crisis is
mostly confined to the boondoggles of finance." The important thing to
keep in mind is that "The real source of all growth is human creativity
and entrepreneurship, which always comes as a surprise to us, especially in the
worst of times."
To back up this last assertion, that surprises are often developed by creative
individuals and companies during "the worst of times," he links to another excellent post
written by Rich Karlgaard last week, which details some of the innovative firms
that sprouted during the 1970s.
These things are important for investors to understand, especially at a time
when few are focusing on them.
Check out the Taylor Frigon
Advisor blog:
http://taylorfrigon.blogspot.com/2008/10/another-important-article-from-george.html
__________________________________________
Readings /
Stock’s
Rise Despite Glum GDP
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122536378578883911.html
John Doerr’s Top 10 List
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/10/30/investors-doerr-sequoia-tech-personal-cx_ec_1030doerr.html
Fans and Skeptics Argue on
Fibre Channel Over Ethernet
http://www.pcworld.com/article/153058/.html?tk=rss_news
After the Crash
http://techliberation.com/2008/10/24/after-the-crash/
Tivo Set To Stream Netflix Movies By Christmas
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/tivo-set-to-str.html
Why Windows 7 Will Smash Vista
http://gizmodo.com/5070219/giz-explains-why-windows-7-will-smash-vista
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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