Koret
Israel Economic Development Funds (KIEDF)
Institute
Interns/ Koret Fellowship Program
Koret Israel Economic Development Funds
IASPS created and put together the Koret Israel Economic
Development Funds, an Israeli non-profit organization which has generated
nearly $5,000,000 of approved financial assistance for over 90 small businesses
and developing high tech firms since its inception in April 1994. New
immigrants and the Negev have especially benefited from the KIEDF loan program.
Institute Interns/ Koret Fellowship Program
The Institute Interns/Koret
Fellows Program is a project of IASPS designed to train students to be members
of an independent policy community dedicated to limited government. The
preservation of economic freedom is the best guarantor of this principle.
"Seven Koret Fellowships Awarded"
|
|
"From the Program Director"
by Zev Golan
Every once in a while someone reminds
us why we are in business.
IASPS/Jerusalem received a fax dated
February 1, 1999, which began:
“Thank you for sending me your Policy
Studies. I believe that the Institute's publications are the most
important event...taking place today in the State of Israel.”
Though the author of this fax was
speaking of IASPS publications in general, the specific Policy Studies
that generated the fax was IASPS Koret Fellow Shlomi Shuv's research on the
state's monopolistic employment bureaus. Shuv proved that while enjoying a
monopoly in certain areas, the state employment system finds jobs for only 14
percent of the unemployed who come to it seeking work. In effect, the only
“unemployed” people for whom the state system finds work are the 960 people
employed by the system itself.
Shuv's research, honed to Policy
Studies perfection with the assistance of IASPS Associate Fellow Yossi
Laster, mentor to all the IASPS Koret Fellows, generated another response that
reminded us why we are in business: The director of the State Employment
Service informed a meeting of cabinet ministers that Shuv had recanted his
research, come to his office and apologized.
We are in business to put people like
that out of business.
Arm
Yourselves
Nietzsche praises Schopenhauer for
believing that the proper role of government is to protect its citizens from
outside physical threat, protect them from internal physical threat, and protect
them from the protectors. (Not that Schopenhauer is necessarily an expert on
government, but he got this one right.)
Regarding external threats: In Israel
the immediate response to, I believe, every terror attack of the past six years
or so has been to decry the PLO's failure to protect Israel, and to demand that
Arafat stop the terror. Regarding internal threats: The current minister
of police has urged citizens to arm themselves as he cannot protect them, and
the police announced they were only going to investigate crimes they knew they
could solve. So much for the first two proper roles of government.
Heaven knows we need protection from
the protectors. And that is where the IASPS Koret Fellows program comes in. For
who will protect us? Will the employees of state-funded universities do
the research showing the damage done by state-funded bureaucracies? Will the state-paid academics at state-funded banks or
research institutes reveal the nakedness of state-employed bureaucrats?
Bureaucratic
Chutzpah
The IASPS Koret Fellows are talented,
dedicated, free market-minded individuals. Yet they are in danger of
extinction. Unless we act now, the best of them will face a choice in the
coming years, whether to join the system and make lots of money at taxpayer
expense by further oppressing the taxpayers, or to join the private sector and
suffer a never-ending series of indignities heaped high by those people
who did join the statist system while they did not.
The response of the Employment
Service to Shuv's study shows the brazenness of those from whom we need
protection. We see the same chutzpah in the system's response to IASPS
Koret Fellow Amir Etzioni's Policy Studies on the state-supported
cement monopoly. He was accused, in letters sent to every member of Knesset, of
lying about the high price of cement in Israel, but of course his data was
correct. The monopoly was forced to lower its prices as a result.
Then there was IASPS Koret Fellow Bar
Dadon's study of the state-organized auto insurance monopoly. She was
accused of misstatements and errors, but, of course, there were none and the
monopoly was legislated out of existence.
At IASPS we are used to these
responses. The state-supported Dairy Marketing Board had threatened to
sue the Institute when we published Corinne Mellul's Policy Studies on
the dairy industry. The charge, as recorded in its lawyer's letter to us:
“Defamation of Israeli cottage cheese.” Literally.
But, of course, Mellul's research was
solid and three years after its publication, almost to the day, Mellul's policy
recommendations were implemented. Since price controls on most dairy products
were lifted on June 12, 1997, dozens of new products have appeared on the
market and the quality of Israeli milk has risen to European levels for the
first time in 50 years. Mellul's Policy Studies was used as the
blueprint for the reform; but when it was published, she was accused of
falsifying facts, not speaking Hebrew, and deliberately misinterpreting data.
All of us at IASPS received threatening and rude, even obscene, phone calls.
Either/Or
Weak natures will cave in before such
chutzpah. Weak natures may even join the offenders.
The IASPS Koret Fellows are so
talented that they will stand out wherever they go. That they come to IASPS for
training and give us two or three years of their lives shows the confidence
they have in IASPS. We dare not let them down. For there are but two
alternatives: Either they will oppose the statist system or become part of it.
Our mission is to ensure that
Etzioni, Shuv and Dadon do not become taxpayer-funded “protectors” from
whom we need protection; to ensure they retain their commitment to freedom in
the face of a system that will do everything to erase such commitment.
Every year hundreds of young students
apply for the program. Every year we make the hard choice to limit the number
of those we accept. Most recently, Ariel Marks, Shiri Winter, Roni Azoulay and
Limor Aviet entrusted us with their future. With the help of our friends in the
United States, under the direction of IASPS Director of Economic Policy
Research Alvin Rabushka and the guidance of IASPS President Robert Loewenberg,
we have two years to inoculate them against the dangers and sometimes temptations
that await them. We have no alternative. They have no alternative but IASPS.
The author of the February 1st fax we
received continued with this comment: IASPS-published research “is the
only basis for hopes for economic freedom, which is to say any freedom, in the
State of Israel.” I can only thank the writer for reminding us why we are in
business.
IASPS Associate Director Zev Golan directs the Koret Fellowship Program at IASPS