29 November 2010

The resource curse working in real time

By removing Haredi youth from the workplace and from military service the Haredi leadership subjects its followership to a life of poverty and calumny. It is an enforced ghetto-ization of the Haredi community which guarantees that Haredim will remain dependent on their leadership for sustenance and devotion. This impoverishment of the Haredi population (economic dependency and servility) and this exclusion from military service (political dependency and alienation from the body politic) undermine the two basic pillars of political/economic life in the nation. 
Here is the resource curse working in real time. Here we can see the difference between alienation in diaspora, which is almost a foregone conclusion and nearly impossible not to experience, and alienation within one's own homeland, which is dysfunctional in the extreme and leads to having the resource curse descend onto the nation. 
The Haredi anti-work and anti-military-service program condemns the Haredi population to the sort of oppressed existence – limited work opportunities and a life of public humiliation – to which some cruel, foreign, anti-Semitic ruler might, in the past, well have subjected them. 

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