I have proposed that we all adopt the term "Reichstag Investigations" to refer to cases where politicians themselves directly produce a problem or cause an evil and then these same politicians demand that an official commission of investigation be set up to determine whose fault it is.

The term comes from the case where Hitler ordered the German Reichstag to be burned down and then set up a commission of investigation to discover who burned the building.

There have been many opportunities for Reichstag Investigations. There was the case where Department of Energy price controls in the United States on gasoline caused long queues at gas stations, and where Jimmy Carter, who had ordered and administered the price controls that produced these lines, set up a commission of inquiry to see what and who caused the gasoline "shortage".

Then we had the more recent case where Arafat ordered his stormtroopers to engage in three months of atrocities and violence, beginning on Rosh Hashana, and then demanded an international commission of inquiry to find out who and what had caused the violence. Naturally, Ehud Barak decided it would be insensitive of Israel not to cooperate with Arafat in this Reichstag project.

While one can identify many other cases, my favorite Reichstag Investigation of the week is where Israeli lefties are demanding a commission of inquiry to discovery why the Arab unemployment rate is so high in Israel.

They are demanding this at the very same time that they are proposing a massive increase in the minimum wage law that caused the unemployment in the first place.

Minimum wage laws are the main cause of unemployment in industrialized countries. They cause unemployment because they "price out of the market" those workers with low skill levels. When a minimum wage law requires that no one be paid less than, say, $5 per hour, then anyone lacking the skills to produce a service or product in an hour worth $5 in the marketplace is effectively "priced out" of the labor market by the law. No one will pay someone $5 per hour if the best that person can do is to provide some service worth (that can be sold in the market for) only $3 per hour. The minimum wage law is based on the supposition that poor and low-skilled people are better off being unemployed at $5 per hour than employed at $3 per hour. Since they are prohibited from working at $3 per hour, they are also prevented by the do-good law from ever acquiring those work skills and experiences that will allow them to earn far more than the minimum wage. Since they are priced out of the labor force, many turn to alternative non-labor forms of earnings, such as drug selling and other forms of crime.

Minimum wage laws are the byproduct of economic illiteracy and the refusal of liberal posturers to abandon recreational compassion and take freshman economics.

The minimum wage laws hit hardest minority groups and others with high incidence of low levels of skills. Before the US adopted its minimum wage laws, black teenagers had lower unemployment rates than whites. We know what happened after the law was introduced.

In Israel, the minimum wage laws hurt those with high incidence of low skill levels, including new immigrants and Arabs. In both cases (and other cases), the unemployment statistics themselves are misleading because many "unemployed" are in fact employed and working for cash unreported payments while also collecting "unemployment compensation" dole payments from the government. The proportion of high school grads is FAR smaller among Israeli Arabs than among Israeli Jews, and so Arabs are among the main victims of the minimum wage law. But not the ONLY victims. Ethiopian immigrants are another victim group. So are ordinary Israeli army vets who never finished high school.

There operates in Israel a form of organized crime known as the Histadrut trade union federation. The Histadrut has been the main force pushing for RAISING of the minimum wage in Israel. At the moment the Histadrut is the fiefdom of the Zapatista politician of Israel, Amir Peretz. Peretz was the sidekick of Red Haim Ramon of the Labor Party for many years, but when the Labor Party refused to save him a slot in its slate for the last Knesset, Peretz used his donship at the Histadrut crime family to finance setting up his own party with union dues, and got into the Knesset. With a new election coming, Peretz is trying to grab some headlines with his campaign to raise the minimum wage in Israel by over a third to $1000 per month. He is supported in this by the same leftists who see their raison d’etre as promoting the interests of Arabs.

Except that Peretz’ scheme will RAISE Arab unemployment enormously. If you do not see why the $1000 minimum wage is absurd, ask yourself why Israel should be so modest and ONLY set the minimum wage at $1000 per month. Why not make it $10,000 per month or $100,000 per month? If, as the Israeli Left claims, raising the minimum wage does NOT cause unemployment, why stop at $1000? Meanwhile, the claim that this does NOT cause unemployment is based on the argument that the only place on earth where people do NOT buy LESS of something whose price has risen is the Israeli labor market.

So don’t all these leftist politician friends of Ishmael realize what they are doing? Are they really so stupid? My guess is they know EXACTLY what they are doing. They want to engineer a situation where Arab unemployment goes up because then they can "prove" what a discriminatory and racist country Israel is and so they can promote their agenda of Oslo national suicide. I see no other way to explain their behavior.

Meanwhile, Peretz is unlikely to succeed in again extorting his way into the Knesset with misappropriated union funds, like he did last time. He may have to go get a job as a gardener in Los Angeles County. But only after leading the campaign for a Reichstag Investigation of the high unemployment figures in Israel.

Lord Haw-Haw’s web site is gush-shalom.org.

Another quaint story has to do with the wackiest professor of the week. It is Professor Janet Dolgin, who teaches law at Hofstra University in New York (http://wwwa.hofstra.edu/Academics/Law/law_dolgin.cfm). She purports to be an Orthodox Jewish woman, but her mission in life is promoting gay "marriage" and similar PC abominations. She is a leading legal jihadist against the "traditional" family, the kind with a mother and a father present. She is in Israel this week promoting her agenda (see Haaretz Dec 18), where she simply gushes with loving approval of gay "families" and the attempts by the judicial activists in Israel’s judicial system to impose them on the country.

Oh, and in yet another Reichstag Investigation, the PA (Palestinian Amalekites authority) has granted a special Palestine Prize to the camera crew for the French television channel who filmed the 12 year old Arab boy getting killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip with bullets that were in fact fired by the PLO’s "police".

Copyright © 2000 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission