Richard Kostelanetz
Disinterring Jewish Socialism (2004)
I had to go to Israel some two decades ago to make a perception that should be have been obvious to me before—that whoever sold Jews on the “ideal” of socialism should be disinterred and quartered. It didn’t work, not even in its “democratic” forms, because taxes were too high and wages kept artificially modest (on the false grounds of “idealism,” I suppose), so that Israelis I knew at the time either borrowed over their heads (in part expecting beneficial advantage in future monetary inflation) or hid their savings until they had to appear, say to pay for a trip abroad; or they lived off money from another country, usually the USA, but sometimes South Africa or France. Indeed, the Israeli “privileged class,” who were incidentally resented by most of their countrymen, identified people living off an economy outside Israel. Incidentally, when I mentioned my disinterment scheme to a friend then residing in Jerusalem’s Old City, he replied, “That would require a lot of work with so many guys.” (I have the same gut negative reaction to Jews advocating gun control, knowing that the Nazis wouldn’t have killed so many Jews had they access to weaponry, but that’s another story.)
The Israeli problem has been that people who have benefited from open competition, not only against others but against one another, were not just discouraged but prevented from competing optimally. The principal virtue of D.G. Lesvic’s self-published Intellectually Incorrect (P.O. Box 331005, Pacoima, CA 91333-1005), subtitled “The Amateur Science of Economics and the Professional War Against It” (2004), is establishing the culture of Jews encourages economic competition and should not be discouraged, or even worse forbidden, from playing money games.
Obviously reflecting passion, as most self-published books do, Intellectually Incorrect is best for its provocative unfamiliar aphorisms:
“Anti-capitalism is inexorably anti-Semitism, hatred of the competitive system hatred of the best competitors.
“Attacking employers is attacking employment; and the real message of employee lawsuits: don’t be an employer in he United States. But, after they’ve been driven out, who will employ us, the lawyers?
“Families create life, mobs destroy it. The authority of mobs over families is not ‘family values’ but mob values, and not of life but death. Life depends upon self-governing, not self-destructive families, and families on good parents, not do-gooders, on freedom for the family, not for moral mobsters and mushheads.
“I don’t give a damn about getting into the Gentiles’ clubs. I can’t think of anything duller. I just want to stay out of their concentration camps. I don’t want any right to force myself on them because I don’t want them to have any right to force themselves on me. They can discriminate against me all they want so long as they leave me alone.
“There was prefect Gun Control in the concentration camps. No inmate ever shot another.
“‘Soak the rich’ and ‘save the environment’ really meant to get rid of the poor and the nasty industries that support them, and reserve an environmentally pure playground for the rich and famous.
“If the politicians could really be trusted to invest our tax dollars for us they wouldn’t have to tax the money away from us, for the capital market would lavish it upon them. The only reason their ‘investments’ depends upon tax dollars is that no investor in his right mind would entrust his funds to them.
“It is not mean-spirited to consider the actual consequences of our actions; and not compassionate but simply irresponsible not to.”
Otherwise, I regret to say that this book is a mess. Lesvic writes discrete paragraphs in the tradition of great aphorists, but his ordering of them often strikes me as arbitrary. An omnivorous reader, he frequently includes whole paragraphs written by others, sometimes insufficiently separated from his own.
(Some of the strongest quotations come from Franz Neumann’s Behemoth [1944], which I recall among my favorite books of modern political analysis when I first read it four decades ago. Neuman’s widow married another brilliant gent named Herbert Marcuse; his son, Marcuse’s stepson Tom Newman, I knew in the East Village around 1968 as the principal of courageous agitators calling themselves the Up Against the Wall Motherhumpers. But that’s another story.)
Much of the later sections of Lesvic’s book is devoted to picky economics criticism (pro-Ludwig Mises, anti-Milton Friedman) that I found tough-going. In the age of stylish desktop home publishing with programs including various typefaces, Lesvic favors prosaic typography and design that remind me of IBM Compositors favored by small publishers three decades ago. Given the truth of his message, I often wish this book were better, much better. Once more caveat, living among lefties as I do, may I suggest that the epithet “free enterprise” is more effective than capitalism to define our ideal.
Reading Intellectually Incorrect made me realize once again the implicit Jewish intelligence of free-enterprise thinking, having noted before that, of the five most influential libertarians (in Liberty magazine’s survey of its readers), four were Jewish in origins (though all would probably be horrified to be identified as such in print): Ayn Rand (née Alice Rosenbaum, don’t forget), Milton Freidman, Ludwig von Mises (whose surname derives from Moses), and Murray Rothbard. (About the origins of the fifth, Friedrich von Hayek, there is debate.) My own libertarian pantheon includes such cradle Jews as Emma Goodman and Paul Goodman. As Lesvic writes in one of his classic sentences, “Almost every Jew in America owes his life to laissez faire capitalism. It was relatively laissez faire America that welcomed Jews in unlimited numbers and ‘progressive’ New Deal America that turned them away from the boatload and back to Auschwitz.” True, too true.