Sunday, June 20, 2010
Building Permitting Reform Stalled
Netanyahu spoke against the bureacratic obstacles to build in Israel and one level of the three-levelled permitting system was to be eliminated. That was a year ago and nothing is happening. Maybe there are bureaucratic obstacles to improve bureacracy. Since many contractors and developers and regulators are being investigated by the police for irregularities, the system has became frozen and impassable. Since people didnt stop being born, marrying and having children, the demand for housing has grown and prices have increased to absurd levels. A three-room second hand apartment in Kever Benjamin costs about 1.6 million shekels, that is about 450,000 US dollars. Triple than three years ago.
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11 comments:
USD450,000!?? How many years does a wage slave have to put in, to get a glorified bird cage in the sky? One doesn't need to be a gold bug, or a maths whiz at the level of Falkenburg to make money. What was required was a little humility in accepting Grandma's advice to buy a house instead of dissipating one's youth. Then we would have real estate, with emphasis on the 'real' part. Not for nothing does the word mortgage, mean death-pledge or death-grip in the original Latin.
It's amazing how many things in Israel seem purposefully designed to make it difficult to live. This is the opposite of what I expected from such a high-IQ population. Maybe those with a high iq and common sense create, those with a low iq and high common sense sell, those with a high iq and no common sense legislate, and the rest enforce (the only entity I've seen that's comparable to the Israeli Police in incompetence, inefficiency, unprofessionalism, hostility to the law-abiding citizen and lack of public trust was...the Iraqi Police.)
Hostility to the civilian... you are perceptive. It is said that this attitude is a legacy of the Turkish Empire that ruled 500 years here. May be. Advice: Dont try to change it. Dont criticise. They dont take it with understanding. The best: Avoid them like the pox.
J,
I have to reject the Ottoman hypothesis, because I got here from Turkey after travelling 1000 km through there, and their cops were incredibly helpful and friendly. I cannot for a second imagine the Turkish cops having a guy who was jacked for everything but phone, wallet and pocketknife come in to their station and confiscating the pocketknife, then claiming to have no idea where it went the next day. I'm betting that this extends through the regulatory bureaucracy.
If I had to blame anything, it would be the Russian empire, where those who created the core institutions of modern Israel came from. I found the Russian government to also be disorganized and predatory towards the common citizen.
I hope you are insured and the insurance company will compensate your loss. The police presumed that you came to their station only for the paper to be submitted to the insurance company, and the list of valuables was inflated, so they felt entitled to a help themselves to your knife. No one ever dreams that they go out to the streets to look for your bycicle. Boy, you have arrived to the Middle East! Enjoy it!
The overhead costs in a society with this kind of MO must be huge, and must soak up a lot of the value created by the productive class.
Forget about this.
Buy into RTZ, BHP Billiton, Lonmin, Xstrata and Anglo-American.
Quickly.
Anon.
Mining shares! Copper also is rather cheap.
It's amazing that Israel has accomplished as much as it has, despite (and not because of) its government. Jews do not see government service as a promising career path. Aside from bribes (and confiscated knives), the pay is limited. Jews always preferred to be in business or the professions.
In addition, for much of its history, government service was tied in with socialist ideology, who sees business (and most individuals other than enthusiastic party members) as class enemies (we are seeing this now in the US w. Obama). Rather than Russia, I would liken it to another former British colony, India, with it's famous Permit Raj (before you could open a business until the '90s you had to get countless permits, which might take years or never).
Also part of the way the Zionists decided to make their way in the Middle East was to take on a tough persona, at least on the outside. The classic image of the Israeli is the sabra (cactus fruit) which is tough and prickly on the outside (but conceals a sweet heart). The sweet heart is sometimes so well armored and hard to get to that it's hard to believe it's in there.
There has undoubtedly been a cost to this. In the late '40s, my father and his 2 brothers were living in a DP camp in Germany. They had strong Zionist feelings and made plans to move to Israel. They planned to set up a (small) shoe factory and bought machinery, etc. and had it shipped to Israel and they sent the oldest brother (my uncle) ahead first. When he arrived, not only were conditions bad as far as housing, food, etc. (they expected this) but unexpectedly, there were all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles to setting up a business - huge customs duties were demanded before the equipment could be released, etc. The telephone system was part of the post office and the waiting list to get a telephone line was years long. My uncle wrote to his brothers telling then not to come and that's why I am an American and not an Israeli. As I said before, Jews are very entrepreneurial so the prospect of moving to a state that had been organized by socialist ideologues I'm sure dissuaded many of the best and brightest refugees from coming - these same refugees did tremendously well in America and would have surely enriched an Israel that was less socialist oriented. The Arab enemies they could do nothing about but the socialist ideology was an own-goal. I should add that of course the economic/political climate in Israel has changed somewhat for the better and I'm discussing the situation as it prevailed in the late '40s and not now. But in some alternate history where Israel was business-friendly from the start, I and my parents and their circle of refugee friends and relatives (most of whom and their offspring did very well in America) would have enriched the economy of Israel and not the US.
K
Regarding the knife, I'm not sure of it's legality in Israel (countries have different rules about how large a knife you can carry legally). It may be that the knife was illegal and that the police were doing you (and themselves, admittedly) a favor by disappearing the knife. Rather than having to issue you a summons or arrest you, fill out police reports, etc., the knife is just disappeared and it saves everyone trouble.
Societies can be separated into "high context" and other - in "high context" societies there are all kinds of unstated assumptions so that people don't have to lay everything out explicitly. What is left unsaid is understood by others in the culture and it is even considered rude to explain every damn thing like you are talking to a small child or an idiot. Israeli society is not "high context" but it has higher context than some other Western societies.
K
A key part of policing is something called "selective enforcement," based on desired outcome and common sense. Since I am obviously an outdoorsy tourist and not Jack the Ripper, a policeman worth a shit would look the other way, as they did the whole time I was in Turkey and the first time I came to the station. Every Israeli I've related this story to has scoffed. As far as high context, US society is incredibly high context compared to what I've seen of Israel. How you could have a functional high-context society half of whose members have stepped off the boat from Ethiopia or Russia in the last thirty years is beyond me.
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