ליברטריאנים בישראל

Up until recently, Israel did not have a libertarian movement. In fact, the entire country is far more socialist than America is – it was, after all, founded by a gang of socialists who ran the place until about the late 1970’s. There is a libertarian think tank (the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies), but that’s pretty much it. On the other hand, there’s a sizable amount of libertarians on the Internet – including some very well-educated people and well-formed online communities.

So to remedy this, I spoke to some of those people and set up a Facebook Group and Google Group, and we scheduled a meeting in a cafe at the Azrieli Towers.  Because I fell sick on the week before, the final effort of choosing the cafe and reserving two tables was done by two other people. In theory, about 15 people were scheduled to come. About seven people did did – Yossi, Avi Aharon, Asaf Raz, Alisa, Leandro Fleischer, and Rafael.

So, on Tuesday, February 16th, I turn up at the Azrieli Towers and start looking for the restaurant. It takes me some time until I finally meet a guy wearing a shirt with TAXATION IS THEFT on it. I realized immediately he was one of us – and specifically, it was Leandro.. Together we found the cafe, and pretty soon the other people assembled – six guys and a lady.

I gave a speech. I talked about how the US libertarian movement was also very small once and grew through hard work to what it is today. I said that we have the advantage that we have a very small country and in such a country, a small amount of dedicated people can make a big difference through activism.

Another fellow educated us about the efforts of early libertarians to repeal the income tax in Israel in the 1970’s, and Leandro talked about his experience as a libertarian in Argentina. An MBA student talked about getting his house accidentally no-knocked by cops who got the wrong address.

A lively discussion then commenced about tactics and strategy. Several people spoke about the possibility of setting up a political party, but I cut the political fantasies short by saying that we must consider our near-term steps first. (Or, as I put it: “Before we get to the stage of setting up parties or being elected to office, we must consider what each of us will do next week”).

I pointed out – and it was agreed upon – that the great theme we must play on in our future efforts is that the government is not really run democratically. It is run by oodles of faceless, elderly public servants appointed by people appointed by previous cabinets, oftentimes in the era of Total Labor Rule [tm]. Other themes were also discussed (waste, the military draft, public servant unions, and the failure of the education system.

Finally tasks were assigned for everybody involved – setting up a writing workgroup for producing educational material and forming campus libertarian groups at all colleges where we have representation, starting with Bar-Ilan and Tel-Aviv University. I am responsible for filing the papers at TAU next week.

I hope everybody carries their tasks out successfully and we get on to a great success.

~~Boris Karpa