Why Amnesty International Accusing Israel of Genocide Is Pure Rubbish (Pt. II)

On October 7, 2023, Israeli citizens are attacked by Hamas. These terrorists committed heinous acts against civilians, whether that is rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, or decapitation. There are still hostages in Gaza to this day. In addition to Hamas and Hezbollah having lobbed hundreds of rockets into Israel since then, the anti-Israel crowd lobs several false accusations at Israel: apartheid state, occupier, settler colonizer. The most egregious of these accusations is that of Israel trying to commit genocide. A couple of weeks ago, Amnesty International released a 296-report accusing Israel of just that. 

I already wrote Part I in response to that accusation. First, I pointed out the legal definition of genocide and Israel's actions do not constitute genocide. Amnesty International is so flustered that they tried to change the definition to make Israel out to be the bad guy. As a side note, the Irish government is similarly frustrated. Don't like the current legal definition? The Irish government is so anti-Semitic that it is actually trying to appeal to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to make the definition exceptionally broad. 

Second, I pointed out the historical context in which Israel has been and continues to share a border with Arab entities that are hellbent on wiping out the world's only Jewish state. Last time I checked, that would constitute genocidal intent. Third, I reminded us all that Israel is under such scrutiny that it would have been nigh impossible to hide a genocide for all these years. The fact that the Gazan population has historically been growing and has continued to grow in spite of this war refutes the genocide accusation. In case you need more reasons as to why Israel is not committing genocide, read below. 

Israel has a multiethnic, multi-religious population. While Israel is the only Jewish state on the planet, it is home to Jews, Christians, Druze, and also 1.8 million Muslims. Far from being an apartheid state, Muslim Arabs have equal rights under Israeli law and there are Muslims who hold positions of power and influence in Israel. The sort of diversity that allows Muslims to coexist with Jews in Israel could not be a reality under a regime intent on wiping out Muslim Arabs. 

Israel has tried for "land for peace" multiple times. In 2005, the Israeli Defense Forces unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and had no physical presence in Gaza until Hamas attacked on October 7. The fact that Israel has tried to peacefully coexist with Muslims in bordering territories to no avail is not the behavior of a genocidal regime. Genocidal regimes do not offer "land for peace." They simply try to wipe out the targeted demographic without caring what the rest of the world think, much like Hitler, Hutu militias in Rwanda, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia did. 

The Israeli Defense Force's actions reflect desire to minimize civilian harm. Israel clearly has the military capability to destroy Gaza. Instead of killing citizens for the sake of killing them and wiping out Gaza, the IDF has taken extraordinary measures to minimize civilian harm. The Israeli army sends Arabic-language warnings prior to striking terrorist infrastructures and legitimate military targets. No other military in human history has given the other side a heads-up because it means losing element of surprise. At the beginning of the war, Israel delayed its ground operation to give civilians time to evacuate. The IDF also facilitates humanitarian corridors, aid deliveries, and evacuation zones to Gazan citizens. For Amnesty International, this is all part of some complex, diabolical plot to commit genocide. It is so convoluted of a conspiracy theory that it would make Q-Anon members blush.  

In contrast to Amnesty International's conspiratorial views, these are all signs that a reasonable person would accept to indicate that Israel is not committing genocide. Reasonable people in this instance would include major military experts. According to John Spencer, who is the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point, Israel has implemented more precautions than any army in history, including the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. These measures include precision guided munitions (PGM), using satellite imagery and scanning mobile phones to collect pre-strike intelligence, and pre-strike warnings. 

An amicus curiae brief filed at the International Criminal Court by 11 senior military officers from seven NATO member countries similarly did NOT believe that the "actual operational practice in any way corroborates accusation of policies...to intentionally attack civilians." You can also read this research paper from the Naval War College Review on how Israel has a history of minimizing civilian harm in addition to the IDF's documentation of its efforts. 

The remaining points to refute Amnesty International's nonsense will be covered in Part III.

TCJA Income Tax Extension Debate Reminds Us Tax Cuts Generally Do Not Pay for Themselves

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has been the single largest example of U.S. tax reform in the 21st century. Part of this Act was lowering the individual income tax. I bring this up because many of the tax provisions in the TCJA are set to expire in 2025, including that of lower income taxes. One of the major Republican talking points for the TCJA was that the tax cuts would pay for themselves, even though every major analysis at the time concluded it would add to the deficit, including that from the Right-leaning Tax Foundation. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, there is no such thing as a free lunch; there are only tradeoffs.  

What would have the Republicans think that cutting taxes would increase revenue to the point where the revenues from expanded economic activity spurred by the tax cuts would cover 100 percent of the revenue that would have otherwise been gained by the higher tax rate? This argument is based on the Laffer Curve, which postulates that there is an optimal tax rate that maximizes tax revenue. As the Curve shows (see below), there is a point where taxes end up being so high that they disincentivize economic activity, thereby reducing government revenue. In this model, there is a scenario in which cutting taxes can actually increase government revenue. 

Last week, Right-leaning think-tank Manhattan Institute released an issue brief entitled Correcting the Top 10 Tax Myths. The first myth they address is "Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves." They find this myth so problematic that Manhattan Institute labels it "the most common and harmful conservative tax fallacy." Why? Because it is sold as a free lunch that will come at zero cost. 

While well-designed tax cuts can boost savings, investment, and overall economic development, it is a whole different claim to assert that the economic feedback revenues will generate 100 percent of the static revenue loss of the tax cut. With regards to the TCJA individual tax cuts, a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released earlier this month concluded that extending the individual income tax cuts would be outweighed by more government debt. The bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) confirmed this conclusion in its analysis of the TCJA individual tax extensions that all major analyses of the tax extensions would not pay for themselves. Why is this happening? 

• Yes, near-term demand and incentive to work would increase. However, the increased debt would eventually crowd out and reduce investment, thereby limiting the economic benefits (CRFB). 
• In its report, the Manhattan Institute brings up another valid point about tax rates. The peak on the Laffer Curve for income tax is somewhere between 55 and 73 percent, which is well above current rates. 
• To quote the Manhattan Institute (MI), "For a tax cut to pay for itself, tax revenues would have to match that would have been raised even without the tax cut." Once adjusting for inflation, MI found that 2018-24 revenue came in $665 billion below the levels projected by the CBO before the TCJA. 
• The CBO projected in 2018 that the TCJA would create $2 trillion in debt over 10 years. Per CRFB calculations, actual income and corporate tax revenues since 2017 have remained close to the CBO's projections. 
• While TCJA managed to pay for a modest portion of itself, it is nowhere the 100 percent to say that "TCJA paid for itself."  
• This 2017 report from CRFB entitled Tax Cuts Don't Pay for Themselves provides great insight.
• There would need to $5-6 dollars of economic growth for every dollar in tax cuts to make the tax cut self-financing.
• The Tax Foundation would have the most optimistic assumptions in its forecasting. In 2017, the Tax Foundation estimated in a report covering tax code reform alternatives that a 10-percent across-the-board income tax cut would pay for an eighth of the cost. As for a 10-point cut in the corporate tax, the economic dynamism would pay for three-fifths of its cost. 
• The tax cuts of 1981 and 2001/2003 resulted in lower cyclically-adjusted revenue, which is to say that past major tax cuts in the past half-century have not resulted in increased tax revenue. 

The Cato Institute refutes with two points. One is that when you factor in extending the business tax cuts in addition to the individual income tax cuts, then the GDP growth is larger. Conversely, the CRFB brings up that the business taxes would relatively do more to boost the economy, but not enough for the all the tax cuts in the TCJA to be self-financing. However, a separate CBO analysis shows that extending the 100 percent bonus depreciation and reversal of R&D amortization could offset the drag of the income tax cut extension. This would suggest a point I brought up in 2017, which is that tax reform needs to be more comprehensive than treating tax cuts as if they were the silver bullet that can solve all fiscal woes.  

Second, the Cato Institute brings up that the federal debt is a policy choice. That much I agree with because it is the ballooning spending that is exacerbating the U.S.' debt issues. The problem is that neither the U.S. Congress nor President-Elect Trump have the political will to want to cut government largesse in a way Argentinean President Javier Milei has successfully done in his first year in office. If there were corresponding spending cuts to help offset the tax cuts, I would be the first to advocate for the extensions. 

On its fifth anniversary, I concluded that the TCJA caused more good than harm. But as I said earlier, we have to factor in tradeoffs. Cutting taxes can increase economic growth. As a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows, a one percent cut in income taxes in the TCJA resulted in GDP growth of 1.5 percent and job growth of 1.2 percent (Kumar, 2023). Is the increased federal debt worth the economic growth? Is it worth people being able to keep more of their hard earned money instead of having it go to government coffers? Can we pass other policies to make the fiscal impact less harmful when U.S. debt is climbing, as I mentioned two paragraphs ago? 

I believe in lower taxes, but I also strongly believe that there needs to be significantly lower government spending. With a lack of fiscal discipline in the U.S. federal government, I have to agree with the libertarian Reason Magazine and its conclusion that cutting taxes without reducing spending is bad news for the national debt. Since increasing federal debt has significant spillover effects for the American people, I question whether the U.S. government could adequately offset the fiscal costs of extending the income tax cuts. 

President Javier Milei Improved Argentina in His First Year as Planet's First Libertarian President

As much as I love Argentina culturally, its economy has been ruined by nearly eight decades of Peronist government largesse, including gargantuan government redistribution programs, protectionism, an exceptionally interventionist monetary policy in which the central bank printed money like it grew on trees, and general disregard for property rights (not to mention the civil rights abuses throughout Argentina's modern history, especially in the 1970s). Argentinians were so dissatisfied with the rampant inflation, eroding purchasing power, and pervasive poverty that in 2023, they elected the first self-identifying libertarian head of state, Javier Milei. It is more than Milei's eccentric personality, which included waving a chainsaw at political rallies promising how he was going to cut government spending. Milei had an established career as an economist, author, and professor prior to becoming President. 

This week commemorates the one-year anniversary that he assumed his role as head of state for Argentina. So-called conventional wisdom predicted that Milei's "shock therapy" would make matters worse for Argentina. While I was thrilled to see a libertarian head of state that could potentially be an inspiration to other world leaders to cut back on regulations, taxation, and government spending, I knew he had to contend with a lot. Plus, Argentina had been ranked as a repressed economy by Heritage Foundations' Economic Freedom Index prior to Milei's election. It turns out that in spite of the political and economic obstacles had to face, Milei had a successful first year. 

• Within the first few months, he was able to cut enough government spending where Argentina had a budget surplus for the first time in over a decade. Milei has continued to generate a budget in subsequent months (IARAF). When you compare Milei's surpluses to previous deficits, the difference is astounding. It is even more so when you consider that Argentina has spent the last 113 out of 123 years running up deficits. 

 

• Milei's elimination of rent control was so effective that it lowered housing prices while expanding the housing supply. 
• Milei has also passed a daily average of 1.8 deregulations since he entered office, which is significant because Argentina is one of the most regulated countries on the planet and its economic growth is thus stifled by regulations. This does not even include trimming the government from 19 ministries to nine ministries. 
• In October 2024, monthly inflation dropped to 2.7 percent, which was about 30 percent a year ago. While that level of inflation seems unfathomable for the Western world, monthly inflation in Argentina has not been this low since November 2021, according to government officials at the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC). For a country that has gone through literal hyperinflation, this is a great accomplishment. 

• Argentina's central bank, Banco Central de la República Argentina (BCRA), has lowered the interest rate from 133 percent in December 2023 to 33 percent in December 2024. While this is still among the highest in the world, this move on BCRA's part will lower costs of borrowing money ought to increase investment, consumer spending, and job creation. 
•  Fitch Ratings upgraded Argentina's credit rating to "CCC" last month because of an ability to pay foreign-currency bond payments without issue. 
• Argentina's Emerging Market Bond Index (EMBI), which is JPMorgan's index for measuring debt risk, dropped to a five-year low in October. 
• December 16, 2024 Addendum: I had to add this because this milestone made me excited: Argentina's economy exited a severe recession in the third quarter of this year. 
• If Gallup polling that came out this week is indicative of anything, it is that Argentineans are more hopeful of the state of the economy. 

Postscript. Not everything has been smooth sailing for Milei. In addition to such political obstacles as trade unions and Peronist politicians who prefer the status quo, there has been an increase of the poverty rate, which has reached over 50 percent under Milei. This could very well be part of the short-term pain the Argentineans have to endure to untangle the disaster of Peronist economic policy. If the calculations from the Universidad Católica Argentina are correct, then the poverty in Argentina is already decreasing (see below).

Whether the citizens of Argentina can hang on long enough will have sway over the political feasibility over Milei's plans for the second year. Hopefully for Argentina, Trump's political affinity with Milei could accelerate negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and result in a more generous support package, thereby making the short-term poverty spike more tolerable.

That being said, I think it has been a good first year for Argentina. Milei inherited rampant government debt, a high poverty rate, and an annual inflation rate exceeding 200 percent. Milei is getting a handle on government spending, which was one of his major campaign promises. Improved monetary and fiscal policy have lowered inflation, at least by standards in recent Argentinean history. In spite of the increased poverty, wages are beginning to rebound and Milei still remains popular in Argentina. 

Would I like to see Milei do something about dollarization or capital controls? Yes. Furthermore, it is also true that Argentina's tariff rates and overall taxation rate remain high, not to mention Milei being unable to privatize any of the state-owned businesses. It will be more difficult for Milei to achieve his plans for Argentina to become an economic powerhouse once more if he does not address some of these fundamentals soon. But I also know that Rome was not built in a day and that we should not make perfect the enemy of good. I think that if Milei is able to stay on course, 2025 will look even better for Argentina than 2024. If successful, he can provide a mighty case study for how much of a positive impact deregulation, lower taxes, and less government can have on millions of lives. 

¡Viva la libertad, carajo!

Why Amnesty International Accusing Israel of Genocide Is Pure Rubbish (Pt. I)

October 7, 2023 was a horrific day not only for the state of Israel, but the entire Jewish world. It was the day that Hamas terrorists entered Israel to kidnap, torture, murder, and decapitate civilians. These brutes did not hide their barbarism; they posted it on social media. You would think that any decent human being would speak out against such atrocities. Instead, anti-Semitism exploded worldwide in a way we have not seen since Nazi Germany. Hating on Jews in the guise of anti-Semitism has become en vogue, especially on the Far Left. There have been a litany of fallacious attacks on the credibility of Israel. 

One such recent attack was Amnesty International (AI) releasing a 296-page report accusing Israel of genocide. Sadly, mainstream media outlets published it as if it were fact because it comes from a "human rights" organization. The report is nearly 300 pages long, so I am not going to sit here and refute the report point-by-point. It helps that I refuted this accusation of genocide last year. What I am going to do instead is provide a list of reasons why Amnesty International's charges are bogus so that you, the reader, have a concise list at the ready.

Israel does not have the intent or objective to commit genocide. From the beginning of the current war, the Israeli government has made it clear that aside from achieving the goal of rescuing the hostages, its target is not the Palestinian people, but eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas. On the occasion when an Israeli official made a callous remark, such as using nuclear weapons against Gazans, they were summarily disciplined. 

As I explained last year, for the action to be considered genocide under international law, there needs to be intent to destroy the group as a group. That means genocide accusers would need to prove "Israel is killing Gazan civilians intentionally and simply because they're Palestinian, rather than as an unfortunate consequence of Israel's efforts to legally exercise its right of self-defense against Hamas." None of these genocide accusers can prove that Israel is willfully targeting civilians, which is the standard used in international law. AI is so frustrated that it cannot meet the standard laid out in the Genocide Convention of 1948 that it has the following to say in its report (AI, p. 101): 

"...rulings on inferring intent can be read extremely narrowly, in a manner that would potentially preclude a state from having genocidal intent alongside one or more additional motives or goals in relation to the conduct of its military operations. As outlined below, Amnesty International considers this an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict." 

In other words, AI knows that it does not have a legal leg to stand on when accusing Israel of genocide, particularly with proving intent beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Former President of the International Court of Justice Joan Donoghue confirmed that the Court decided Israel's war against Gaza could not plausibly be considered genocide. That has not stopped AI from using this report as a guise to create its own definition of genocide to make Israel look like the bad guy. But let us continue with the exploration of the plausibility behind the genocide argument. 

Israel has been and continues to be surrounded by Arab entities that want to wipe out Israel. AI states in its report (p. 202) that historical context is important. Let us examine that context for a moment. The Arab world's animus towards Israel predates the settlements or the Six-Day War of 1967. What happened in 1948 when Israel declared its independence? Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon pounced on Israel in the hopes of eliminating the nascent Jewish state. This has been an ongoing pattern since 1948: Arabs attack Israel with the hopes of eliminating Israel; Israel fights back; Israel subsequently wins the war; Arabs play victim; Rinse and repeat. 

The latest war in Gaza is no exception. Since 1988, Hamas has been clear on its genocidal intent of wiping out the Zionist state (see original Hamas charter here). Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza in 2005. The only reason Israel implemented an economic blockade, which by the way the United Nations declared as legitimate self-defense, was to prevent an attack like October 7 from happening. But Israel was only able to hold off such carnage off for so long. Hamas carried out a mass attack with genocidal intent on October 7, 2023. This pogrom, which was the worst attack on Jews since World War II, is what instigated this current war. What is worst that Hamas leadership stated that it would like to carry out attacks similar to October 7 again until Hamas completes its goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. Historically speaking, genocidal regimes have made their genocidal intents crystal clear. Hamas is no exception.  

Given the genocidal threat to Israel's very existence, Israel is well within its right to eliminate Hamas and use military force to target military installations and players. As I detailed a couple of weeks ago, part of what makes this moral inversion more distasteful is that it is the Arab side that has projected its most perverse desires onto Israel, whether that is ethnic cleansing, colonization, and apartheid. Sadly, genocide is not an exception to that list. AI does not bother to examine Palestine's genocidal intent with a 300-page report. It opines that the only reasonable inference is that Israel's actions constitute genocide (AI, p. 204-5) when in fact Israel is acting in self-defense to ensure that Hamas never repeats the butchery it unleashed on October 7, 2023.

Israel is under great international scrutiny. The international community applies mythical double standards to Israel that it would not dare apply to other nation-states. Israel's actions are under a microscope. There have been 12 military conflicts between Israel and Hamas since 2005. There is no plausible way that anyone could hide a genocide that long, especially under such scrutiny. That brings me to my next point....

The Gazan population has been growing. To reiterate, if there were an actual genocide taking place in Gaza, Israel could not hide it. You would be able to tell from population statistics whether genocide were taking place. Looking at data from the United Nations and World Bank, the population of West Bank and Gaza has been growing since the 1950s. More recently, the CIA calculated that since the October 7 pogrom, the population in Gaza has grown over 2 percent. Even the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has acknowledged that the number of Palestinians has grown by ninefold since 1948. 

Whether it was the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, or the Armenian genocide, or the Cambodian genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge, one constant in genocides is that there is notable population decline of the target demographic. Part of genocide is systematically wiping out a group of people. The sheer ruthlessness and efficiency of genocide attributes to its abhorrence. Yet no such population decline among the Gazans is happening here, which would imply no genocide in Gaza. 

Do not worry. There are more arguments to come in Part II. 

Obamacare Still Hasn't Delivered On Its Promises: Quelle Surprise!

While President-Elect Trump's stance on tariffs and immigration remain unambiguous, Trump's viewpoint on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially known as Obamacare, is more tenuous. In November 2023, Trump wrote on his social platform Truth Social that "we should not give up" on repealing Obamacare. In the 2023 presidential debate last September, he said that he has concepts of an idea to replace Obamacare, but "until then, I'd run it as good as it can be run." This is in contrast to his first term where he tried to repeal it but failed. Repealing Obamacare did not even make its way into the official 2024 Republican platform. 

Given that healthcare accounted for 17.3 percent of the U.S. GDP, I think Obamacare is absolutely something worth considering. As this October 2024 report from the Paragon Health Institute illustrates, at least a dozen significant Obamacare-related promises were broken. Here are a few broken promises to make the point more salient:

The ACA would create savings of $2,500 per family. This ended up being such a large faux pas of Obama's that FactCheck.org called this promise one of "Obama's Whoppers." It turns out that average premiums increased from $232 in 2013 to $476 in 2017, according to HHS' Office of the Assistance Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE). This ASPE finding is similar to that of a March 2021 Heritage Foundation report that found that the average premium increased by 129 percent from 2013 to 2019. 

It should not be a surprise that a demand-side subsidy would drive up healthcare costs: it's Econ 101. Obamacare made healthcare costly when it first started. Even now, about half of Americans have difficulty paying for healthcare (KFF). Not exactly what I would call affordable. 

The ACA would save lives. Obama promised that it would reduce injuries in addition to saving lives. Democrats touting ACA were citing a Harvard study (Wilper et al., 2009) saying that 45,000 excess deaths were caused by lack of insurance. Given that there were 2.6 million annual deaths at the time, a reduction of 45,000 excess deaths would have resulted in an increased average lifespan of 0.4 years. 

The life expectancy decreased by 0.3 years from 2014 to 2017, which is a net difference of 0.7 years of what it would have been had the Harvard study been accurate. Average life expectancy increased slightly in 2019, only to drop again due to the pandemic. Average life expectancy went from 78.3 years to 77.4 years in 2023 (World Bank). This promise became so obviously and patently false I wrote a separate piece on this myth in July 2017. And if that were not enough, life expectancy worsened for the states that adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion versus those that did not (Blase and Balat, 2020). 

 

The ACA would increase economic growth. Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Jason Furman, promised that the ACA would create "healthier, more productive workers," "reduced 'job lock'", and "better macroeconomic performance." A research paper from the Journal of Human Resources found that the ACA "increased low-hours, involuntary part-time employment by 500,000-700,000 workers in retail, accommodations, and food services (Dillinder et al., 2020). The authors contributed this trend to the ACA's penalty to large employers who did not want to provide insurance being incentivized to reduce employment and shift full-time workers to part-time workers. The Congressional Budget Office recognized this disincentive in its 2014 report.

The employer mandate would collect a ton of revenue for the government. The Congressional Budget Office and Internal Revenue Service was predicting all this revenue. The White House's Council of Economic Advisors concluded that 11 years after the ACA passed, only 1 percent of what was projected was actually collected. 

If you like your plan, you can keep it. This was a promise made by Obama in 2009 since he believed that the ACA would not take away anyone's plan. This one ended up being such a bold-faced lie that Politifact called it the Lie of the Year in 2013 since at least 7 million consumers saw their plans disappear.

The ACA would decrease emergency room use. Obama's logic on this promise was that taxpayers were subsidizing the uninsured because a lack of insurance was incentivizing them to seek healthcare only when the situation became dire enough to use an emergency room. 

I will look at this from the angle of Medicaid expansion since the ACA expanded Medicaid enrollment by 16 million more than the Congressional Budget Office initially calculated (Butler, 2016). The Brookings Institution concluded that the ACA's Medicaid expansion increased emergency room visits by 20 percent, primarily due to emergency room visits that could have been treated outside the emergency department (Garthwaite et al., 2020). Scholars from the University of Iowa similarly found that Medicaid expansion in California as a result of ACA increased emergency room use and cost (Ellis and Esson, 2018).

Postscript. Not much good has changed about the ACA since I wrote my scathing piece in 2017 on 15 reasons why we should dislike Obamacare. If anything, repealing the main cost-containing provisions, the Cadillac tax and the health insurance tax, since the creation of the ACA made matters worse. The false promises of Obamacare resulted in higher healthcare costs, increased deficit spending, and significant disruptions to insurance coverage and healthcare access. 

The ACA did little, if anything, to improve healthcare in this country, as is illustrated by this September 2024 report from the Paragon Health Institute on how the ACA reduced healthcare quality. Meanwhile, the ACA guaranteed that health insurance companies are guaranteed profits. We do need something to reform healthcare in the United States. Building an extra room on an already rickety house does not help anyone. It simply means reforming healthcare becomes that much more difficult when policy decision-makers reach that painful fork in the road, much like they eventually will with Social Security. Whether the Trump 47 administration is up for the task remains to be seen. But if the first Trump term is indicative of anything, we are likely to see more of a preservation of the status quo than we are reforms of any significance. 

The U.S. Political Left Is Neither Liberal Nor Progressive: What to Call the Political Left?

A trend I have noticed over time and has been particularly notable during since the pandemic is that the political Left in the United States has been veering further and further to the Left. It got me thinking of how the Left has self-identified. Two terms that the Left has used in recent political history to describe itself are liberal and progressive. By examining the etymology of these words along with how the U.S. political Left has evolved, we will see that it does not make sense to use either of these terms. 

The word "liberal" comes from the Latin liber, which means free(man). A secondary meaning in premodern times pertained to being generous. The word liberal first became used in a political context in the 1770s. Adam Smith used "liberal" for the term to describe a market-based economy based on free trade, voluntarism, and mutually beneficial exchange. Classical liberalism advocated for the free market, laissez-faire economics (including property rights), civil liberties, limited government, and political and economic freedoms. In the United States, classical liberalism is most commonly associated with someone who is "fiscally conservative and socially liberal," or a libertarian. 

Using the word "liberal" suggests that the U.S. political Left cares about people being free. There are some issues for which the Left cares about freedom, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and marijuana. However, as I pointed out when criticizing the usage of the label "pro-choice," their application of pro-choice is quite inconsistent. They are more likely to be against freedom when it comes to owning a firearm or appliances and vehicles it deems harmful to its crusade against climate change. It surely does not apply when they advocate for high rates of taxation and do not allow for citizens to be free to do what they want with their money. 

The Left has also been veering away from freedom of speech. Per Pew Research survey data, Democrats are much more likely to want to use the government to restrict what it perceives as misinformation, or in other words, increased support for censorship. As I illustrated last week, those who adhere to the framework of DEI initiatives are more likely to be authoritarian and want to punish those disagree with their ideology. Wanting to cancel those with alternative views and embracing cancel culture is not exactly one of tolerance. Then there is the Left's obsession with collective rights over individual rights, which is another radical departure from classical liberalism. And then there's trying to pack the Supreme Court or getting rid of the Electoral College because it doesn't work in the Democrats' favor. 

The word progress comes from the Latin progressus, an advance. This comes from the verb progredi (pro, which means forward; and gradi, which means to walk). The Left conveniently takes on this label because it suggests that their platform means that we as a society move forward. When you examine much of their policy prescriptions, it is anything but. 

I do not want to paint with such a broad stroke because people on the Left exist on a political spectrum, much like those of other political persuasions. However, on an economic level, there has been a greater call for more tax and spend. Kamala Harris called for eliminating the fossil fuels and private health insurance markets. There are very few politicians on the Left that are concerned with addressing the U.S. federal debt or shrinking the overall size of government. The inflation during the Biden Administration and diminishing the purchasing power of everyday Americans is not progress. 

Then there is the cultural aspect, which has become more identity-obsessed and zero-sum for the Left. Regarding DEI and race relations, abandoning colorblindness and obsessing over race to the point where "anti-racism" is its own racism is setting race relations back at least half a century, if not more. For the political Left, diversity is only skin-deep. Then I would argue that the political Left has learned something from the political Right, which is using fear as a weapon. They did it with COVID when advocating for lockdowns, face mask mandates, and school closures. They have done so with climate change. Calling Trump a fascist was also Harris' closing argument during the last presidential election, thereby stoking the fear of an authoritarian dystopia if Trump were elected. 

I feel like I can go on and on, but much of what constitutes as the mainstream U.S. political Left's agenda in neither liberating nor is it progress. If the terms liberal or progressive are inadequate, what should we call those who are on the Left? I generally refer to the entity as the "political Left" in attempts to cover anyone who is "left of center," regardless if they are woke or not. There is the term "leftist." On the one hand, the Right has pejoratively used the term "leftist." On the other hand, the same could be said about the term "liberal" starting in the 1970s. It might not be as endearing to the Left, but at least it is a more objective term. That would also mean that we would need to call those on the right "Rightists" because how much of the status quo are they actually trying to conserve these days? After all, the Spanish language makes this distinction with the terms izquierdista and derechista. 

Realistically, I would not expect this to catch on because the Left prefers the terms that put them in a more positive light. While I do not expect a linguistic shift in U.S. political discourse, I write this to illustrate the importance of how political labels can be used to deceive more than accurately describe. 

Study Unsurprisingly Shows DEI Initiatives Increase Hostility, Racial Tensions, and Authoritarian Tendencies

While diversity training has existed in some form since the 1960s, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) really took off in 2020 with the George Floyd protests and subsequent conversations about racial justice. Whether it was through the use of lectures, trainings, or educational materials, DEI was supposed to have such lofty goals as creating awareness of diversity, reducing bias, fostering a culture of respect, and empower individuals from historically underrepresented groups. 

It turns out that the theory behind DEI does not play out in practice. Earlier this month, a study released from the Network Contagion Research Institutes and Rutgers University (Jagdeep et al., 2024) found that DEI practices increased the likelihood of participants to be irrationally confrontational and antagonistic. This new study focused specifically on training that that emphasizes awareness of and opposition to "systemic oppression," which is a common topic from such lecturers as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The themes that run common in the anti-racist work that the researchers analyzed are as follows:

1. White supremacy and racism are a systemic and nearly universal norm, mindset, or worldview. 
2. Normal institutions and Western ideologies are secretly enforcing racist agendas. White people are the intended beneficiaries. 
3. The universality of white supremacy agonizes people of color by virtue of endless hostile encounters. 
4. Western countries are compromised by virtue of their racist ideology and past. 
5. Anti-racist discrimination is the only solution to racist discrimination. 

What did the authors find? Across all groupings, the researchers found that instead of reducing bias, it engendered a "hostile attribution bias." This bias amplifies perceptions of bias where none existed, particularly when there is no evidence whatsoever of racism or discrimination (see below). This makes sense when you are told that racism lurks around every corner and is baked into our institutions. It explains why woke people cannot distinguish between correlation and causation when it comes to disparity. 

Not only did participants experience increased hostility, but they were more likely to punish perceived perpetrators (see below), whether that came in the form of protesting people, demanding public apologies, or calling for people to relocate. 

DEI training does not provide enhanced interracial interactions or camaraderie. There are baseless suspicions that encouraged punitive attitudes. What is even more alarming is that participants' levels of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) predicted an increased willingness to punish and higher hostile attributions. 

As the authors point out, this left-wing authoritarianism "may further create a culture of fear and rigidity instead of constructive change." No kidding! The negative effects of DEI do not surprise me. I first pointed this out in 2018 when analyzing the empirical literature on diversity training and how diversity training frequently backfires because focusing on race that much reinforces stereotypes rather than mitigates them. 

When I recently praised Matt Walsh for exposing the DEI scam in his documentary Am I Racist? (see here and here), I pointed out how DEI uses identity politics to emphasize differences over similarities of our common humanity. Even worse, DEI focuses on assigning blame rather than constructive solutions, as is the case with reparations. 

The anti-oppressive themes, elements, frameworks commonly used in modern-day mainstream DEI training that focus on victimhood and oppression are a scourge on society. As co-author Joel Finkelstein pointed out, they are bad ideas because they hurt people. Not only that, but they are prevalent, thereby exacerbating the effects. They create an unwarranted suspicion on our institutions, as is the case with the criminal justice system when there in fact is no systemic racism in criminal sentencing. 

It keeps society obsessed with race rather than create a colorblind, post-racial society. It is divisive as can be with having people focused on race, gender, sexual orientation, or another aspect of identity politics rather than learning to get along with those who are different. Thankfully, such major companies as Wal-Mart, Lowes, and Boeing are realizing its negative effects and I hope more people wake up to its harms. Research on the effects of DEI is important and we need more research like it because DEI lacks empirical support. At that same time, it illustrates something so obvious that I do not need research to discern, which is that DEI is a plague on society that needs to be excised posthaste. 

Palestine and Its Supporters Project Their Most Perverse Proclivities Onto Israel

As if the politics of the Israel-Hamas War did not have enough zaniness, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes. Forget for a moment that the ICC actually carrying out the arrest would trigger the Hague Invasion Act, thereby giving the U.S. the ability to release the captors and even shut down the kangaroo court. It is the moral inversion with which the ICC issues the arrest warrants. In the twisted world of woke identity politics that has permeated through out multiple international institutions, Jews end up being the aggressors, even as they were being raped, kidnapped, murdered, or decapitated on October 7, 2023. The ICC was created as a "court of last resort" (their words, not mine) to prosecute crimes that de facto have no infrastructure to do so, not take political potshots by going after the leaders of a democratic country that are simply trying to protect its citizens from barbarism. 

The warped sense of morality goes beyond the ICC trying to persecute Israel for the "crime" of defending itself against racist, genocidal terrorists or making a moral equivalence between Hamas' belligerence and Israel defending itself from such barbarism. There is a classic case of projection here. In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism in which one consciously or unconsciously attributes their traits, thoughts, or feelings onto others. You are probably wondering what psychology has to do with Middle Eastern geopolitics. The answer? What those on the pro-Palestine side accuse Israel of are acts that Arab nations or the entity known as Palestine have either committed already or would like to commit against Israel and the Jewish people.

Colonizer. Israel is not a settler colonizer. Israel gained its land fair and square, whether it was through international law with the West Bank or a legitimate case of casus belli, as was the case with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War. It is also worth pointing out that Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt in the 1970s to make peace. 

There is only one Jewish state on the planet and it is about the size of New Jersey. Since Israel is the indigenous land of the Jewish people, Israel is a textbook example of decolonization. You cannot colonize your own land. Colonization comes from an outside force. If you want a lesson on true colonizers, look at how much land the Muslim caliphs conquered since the 7th century and the fifty-plus Muslim-majority nations that currently exist. And if "from the river to sea, Palestine will be free" does not make it clear enough, they always wanted all the land and still do because the "grievance" is not about peace. If they cared about peace, they would not have rejected the numerous opportunities presented. Much like has been the case in Islamic history, the goal of the "Palestinian people" is domination, plain and simple. 

Genocide. As I pointed out last year in my critique of the genocide accusation, Israel is by definition not committing genocide and is doing what it can to minimize civilian casualties, which is a tall order in urban warfare. Let us ignore a fact that Gazan civilians have been receiving the food aid equivalent of 3,000 calories a day (Fliss-Isakov et al., 2024)....that is when Hamas is not busy stealing the food and starving its people. I hate to break it to the ICC, but starvation and suffering are common in war: "Normalcy ends [in war], things run out, people go hungry, people suffer, people die. It is dreadful. It is why, ideally, wars should not be started." 

Hamas losing a war that it started is not genocide. But Hamas does not care about the suffering of its civilians. For Hamas, maximizing casualties and human suffering while garnering international sympathy is a military tactic, much like its calls for a ceasefire are. It is why Hamas stores military munitions in civilian infrastructure and uses its own citizens as human shields. More to the point, Gaza's population has grown nearly fivefold since 1950, according to United Nations data. It has also grown 2.02 percent since the October 7 attacks. If this were an actual genocide, Gaza's population would not be growing the way it has. 

Finally, Hamas has wanted to wipe Israel off the map since its founding in 1988. You can read Hamas' original charter for yourself, especially the Introduction and Article VII. On October 7, 2023, it committed an act against Israel, the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, with genocidal intent. After the October 7 attacks, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad vowed to repeat the October 7 attacks until Israel is annihilated. With all the wars, the intifadas, and suicide bombing, Hamas and other Palestinian organizations have made it crystal clear that they would wipe out Israel and the Jews if they had the military advantage. 

Oppressor/Apartheid State. I have refuted the apartheid claim in 2023, 2016, and 2012, which is why I will not go into too much detail today. I will say that all citizens are equal under Israeli law and Arabs hold influential positions in Israel, whether as members of Israeli Parliament, diplomats, police officers, doctors, or the Israeli Supreme Court. Jews and Arabs can take the same public transit and have access to universities, theaters, cinemas, beaches, and other places. Israel is nowhere near the definition of apartheid that is under the 1998 Rome Statute, which would be defined as a system of legalized segregation in which one racial group is deprived of civil rights. 

I would accuse Palestine of being an apartheid state, except for two main issues. First, there has never been a sovereign Arab nation-state known as Palestine. Two, prior to the current war with Hamas, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. There is not a single Jew for the Gazan government to oppress. And if you want to see who is oppressing its citizens, look at Freedom House's analysis of how Hamas oppresses its own people by curtailing political rights and civil liberties in Gaza. Israel ranks significantly better on Freedom House ranking, which is another signal that the ICC's arrest warrants are politics masquerading as legal proceeding.

Ethnic cleansing. Israel has accepted Muslims into its country and has a Muslim population of about 1.8 million. Contrast that to the 10,000 Jews that live in Arab countries. In the mid-1940s, there was anywhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews in the Arab world. Guess what happened to most of them? In response to Israel becoming a nation-state in 1948, Arab nations ethnically cleansed their countries of their Jews. Many of those refugees moved to Israel where their descendants live today. The fact that there are more Muslim Arabs in Israel than there are Jews in Arab countries is a reality that should speak volumes. 

And in terms of ethnic cleansing, it is not as if Mahmoud Abbas is all that much better than the genocidal Hamas. Abbas already stated that a future Palestinian state would not have a single Jew in it, which is not surprising for a man who blamed the Holocaust on the Jews. Given the current demographics in the Middle East, you cannot actualize that type of nation-state without ethnically cleansing Jews. "From the river to the sea" is a call for ethnic cleansing, if not downright genocide. 

Conclusion. This is not solely about a war in the Middle East, as important as that outcome is for geopolitical purposes. This is about moral clarity. I am not here to say that every last thing the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) does has been or will be perfect. At the same time, there is a distinction as clear as night and day who the good guys and the bad guys are. It should be unambiguous by now that what the pro-Palestine side accuses Israel of are things that the entity known as Palestine would like to do to Israelis, whether that is to colonize, oppress, ethnically cleanse, or systematically erase Jews from the planet. To support Hamas and its ilk is to support genocide, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, human rights violations, and an assault on moral decency, which is ironic given that the Left has historically advocated against these maladies and yet increasingly comes out on the side supporting the terrorist organization known as Hamas.  

The issue with Palestine is not a matter of a "few bad apples" in their governmental bodies and institutions, but an entire society that generally and fundamentally despises Jews. If Hamas, Fatah, and indeed the majority of the people known as Palestinians had their way, Jews would either not exist in the Middle East or, even more likely, would be wiped off the planet. It is lamentable as it is true that Jew-hatred amongst the Palestinian people is a norm rather than an exception. In an age where moral relativism reigns supreme, we need to find the directness and cojones to call a spade a spade and a Jew-hating terrorist a Jew-hating terrorist.

Should The U.S. Department of Education Be Abolished? And Can It Be?

Now that Donald Trump is President-Elect once more, there is a lot of analysis, speculation, and predicting of what Trump will do during his second term. If Trump is serious about implementing his proposed tariff plan, for example, it will be the biggest coup to U.S. trade since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that compounded the effects the Great Depression. Another place of particular interest is that of education. 

Trump wants to end wokeness in education, which is a sentiment I appreciate given how much critical race theory and social justice have permeated the education system. From the looks of it, he wants to forbid Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) offices in public schools; forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and "structural racism;" keep male-to-female transgender individuals out of girl's sports; and go after colleges that have allowed anti-semitism to fester on its campuses. 

While Trump wants to reform education, his plan entails more than pulling certain levers around federal funding for public education. One thing this election cycle did, particularly with the Project 2025 controversy, was revive the debate about the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Project 2025 is technically separate from Trump's Agenda 47, but one thing they both have in common is a call to abolish ED, as did the Republican Party's 2024 Platform. I can see there being appeal to the idea:

• Abolishing ED would lower education costs. When thinking about college education, it is ED and its federal student aid that hands-down is the single largest factor as to why college tuition has skyrocketed in the past four decades. 
• Education should be localized, not coming top-down from politicians in DC. Forget for a moment that the federal government has no constitutional authority to govern education. A federal agency is ill-equipped to determine what education priorities are best. To quote the Cato Institute, "A decentralized education system is much better able to reflect and respond to the diverse needs and preferences of a pluralistic society than one controlled from the top."  
• Academic achievement has remained largely unchanged since ED's founding. Math and reading performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has remained stagnant. This was the case before the pandemic and the subsequent declines in standardized testing that ensued because of school closures. Furthermore, the achievement gap on the National Assessment of Progress (NAEP) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) have failed to budge (Hanushek et al., 2019). Average scores for NAEP have only been declining since the pandemic. Since academic achievement has not improved the education of children since the creation of ED, what purpose does ED serve?
•  ED is riddled with operational problems. Look at this report from the government's oversight agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). ED was missing key monitoring documents in grant applications (GAO, p. 4), which means ED is not paying attention to where its money is going. ED does not independently assess the accuracy of program data (p. 4), which is poor data quality assurance. Because of data management and poor human capital management, ED has had ongoing issues with performing proper evaluations (p. 7).  

As compelling as this case is, I have to ask how viable of an endeavor abolishing ED would be. The Republican pledges to eliminate ED date back to Ronald Reagan's first time in the early 1980s. When Trump began his first term and had both chambers of the legislative branch, he did nothing, even in spite of there being legislative proposals to abolish it. 

On top of the historical intransigence, there is the issue of political feasibility. On the one hand, Pew Research survey data indicate how Americans feel about ED has a partisan divide, i.e., most Democrats like ED (62 percent) and Republicans dislike ED (at 65 percent). On the other hand, about two-thirds of Americans believe that too little is being spent on education (AP-NORC). Yes, Republicans in Congress and White House could make it more likely, although they lack a large enough majority to get past the filibuster. Conversely, it would be difficult for the U.S. government to spend more on education without ED or at least other U.S. federal agencies fulfilling that role in education. 

Even if ED itself is abolished, there is the question of whether its functions and duties would disappear or simply be transferred to other government agencies or cabinet departments. For example, federal student aid would most likely go to the Department of Treasury's Federal Financing Bank. Plus, few politicians would be inclined to slash or end funding for low-income students (Title I) or IDEA funding for students with special needs. 

So why should the U.S. taxpayers continue to fund an agency that received $228 billion in funding last fiscal year? It was not as if the American people received zero education prior to 1979 and that education magically appeared in 1979 with the creation of ED. The United States was successful without one and I am sure we could be successful if it were eliminated, especially given the cost and inefficacy of ED. 

At the same time, "Eliminate ED" needs to be more than a fancy slogan. In addition to getting past the political hurdles, proponents would need a solid plan of how to revert the role of education to state and local governments because it would take a lot of effort to modify the statutes, regulations, and bureaucracy surrounding ED. Otherwise, "Eliminate ED" is as hollow of a pledge as when the Republicans called to eliminate Obamacare last decade.

Public Health "Experts" Did Not "Follow the Science" During the Pandemic: 2024 Edition (Part II)

Misinformation was abound during the COVID pandemic. It did not come from the skeptics, but from the so-called public health "experts," as well as governments purportedly fighting misinformation to deflect from its own misinformation campaign. Speaking of which, the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations recently released a report criticizing "We Can Do This," which was a $900 million HHS advertising campaign aimed at promoting various pandemic measures. Whereas Part I of this blog series focused on the scientific aspects that had public policy implications (e.g., natural immunity), this Part will cover the misinformation from the U.S. federal government that was masquerading as science. More specifically, I will use the aforementioned House report to illustrate the misinformation.

Vaccine misinformation. It is true that the Pfizer vaccines were shown to be 95 percent effective at preventing disease. However, the Food and Drug Administration made clear in its December 2020 emergency use authorization announcement that they did not know how long the vaccines last nor that it would prevent COVID transmission (House, p. 8). As I pointed out in October 2022, the Pfizer CEO did not know either. This misinformation is significant because the CDC was pushing vaccines to get back to "a pre-pandemic normal," even saying that "you will not get COVID if you get vaccinated" or that "vaccinated people do not carry the virus." This argumentation was the basis for COVID vaccine passports and vaccine mandates, and yet it turned out to be unsubstantiated.

Face mask flip-flopping. At the beginning of the pandemic, the Surgeon General, the World Health Organization, and even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who claims that he represents science, were against the use of face masks (House, p. 10). In April 2020, the CDC did an about face and campaigned for mask wearing, even though there was zero scientific rationale for the about face. 

This reversal set the scene for other inconsistencies in messaging, a topic I covered as early as May 2021. By the end of 2020, the WHO had limited and inconsistent evidence on face masks for healthy individuals, which is hardly "following the science." Although the data were becoming clearer in 2021 about face masks' ineffectiveness at preventing COVID transmission, it took until January 2022 for the CDC to admit that cloth masks and face coverings do not work. It was not until December 2022 until Biden's former COVID coordinator Ashish Jha to finally admit that "there is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well." Yet CDC Director Rochelle Walensky showed that she does not care about scientific evidence or rigor by continuing to advocate for face masks in February 2023. 

Mask mandate on domestic and international travel. Shortly after entering the White House, Biden imposed a face mask for most forms of international and domestic travel (House, p. 13). You can read my December 2021 analysis on why face masks on airplanes was especially ridiculous. 

School closures. Children were not at an elevated risk of transmitting COVID, a reality I pointed out as early as July 2020. Yet school closures were an integral part to the CDC's response to the COVID pandemic. Not only that, the American Federation of Teachers' President, Randi Weingarten, worked with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to prolong school closures (House, p. 14-15). Not only did the school closures do nothing to help with COVID transmission, but it harmed children in terms of educational attainment, lower future earnings, and shorter life expectancy.  

Conclusion. If you are a taxpayer in the United States, you should be livid. Taxpayers coughed up nearly $1 billion for the government to spread COVID misinformation that ended up harming Americans and upending millions of lives. There was no discussion about the balances between the costs and benefits or a proper risk assessment conducted. There was only fear-mongering in the name of public health. This merits repeating. The government did not have our best interest at heart during the pandemic. 

If we want the American people to have trust in public health officials, an inquiry asking tough questions and holding actors responsible would be a good start. There should also be better oversight over evaluating the safety of vaccines, as well as better data collection on adverse vaccine reactions. Transparency and accountability would be great hallmarks, as well. Finally, the government should not be in the business silence dissenting opinions, especially given how off-base the government was on a myriad of pandemic-related topics. It will take a lot of work to reform HHS in such a manner, but it beats not learning from this pandemic and having the government make the same stupid mistakes during the next pandemic.

Why Do Jews Traditionally Perform a Ritual Immersion for Kitchen Dishes?

This past Monday, I had a day off work for Veterans Day. What did I do for my day off? I went to the mikveh, a bath used for ritual immersion in Judaism. Normally, the mikveh is used for immersing people, whether for such moments as marriage, Yom Kippur, conversion, or in the case of a woman, having completed a menstrual cycle [also known as a niddah]. The thing is that the mikveh is not only used for immersing people. 

This past Monday, I did not go to immerse myself. I went to immerse my new dishes in a process called tevilat keilim (טבילת כלים; alternatively, toiveling). Although I had some Jewish friends hand down dishes to me, I had not bought new dishes for myself in over a decade. Before and after the immersion, I had been asking myself why Jews ritually immerse dishes. The most basic explanation is that the practice of tevilat keilim is based on Numbers 31:22-23:  

"Whether it be the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the tin, and the lead, everything that may abide the fire, you shall make to go through the fire, and it shall be clean. Nevertheless, it shall be purified with the water of sprinklings. And whatever is not used in fire, you shall pass through water."

This ritual purification in the Book of Numbers took place after the Israelites defeated the Midianites in battle. This incident took place in the context of having acquired dishes from a particularly idolatrous people. As such, I could argue that such ritual immersion is no longer applicable in our time, much like the Conservative Movement had done in its responsum. There is that part of me that felt that it was too demanding, cumbersome, irrational, or the notion that ritual purity is out of touch with a modern understanding of the world. There is another part of me that took joy in the practice, which is why I would like to explore a few reasons why tevilat keilim can till have spiritual meaning for Jewish practice in the 21st century.

• Spiritual purification. R. Samson Raphel Hirsch brought up a reason why the Torah mandated the immersion specifically for metal utensils. Animals are incapable of producing metal objects. But both animals and men can and do eat. For Hirsch, metal utensils represented the intellectual and spiritual side of man, whereas eating represented the primal, physical side of man. It is not enough to simply use kitchen utensils. Immersing the utensils is supposed to act as a reminder of how we elevate our everyday, mundane activities by using our intellectual and spiritual sides. It is an integration of making the physical a manifestation of holiness. 
• Renewal. Much like when a person goes through immersion in the mikveh, a kitchen utensil goes through a symbolic transformation. It is not that the object was prima facie impure. It needed to be re-contextualized and re-calibrated into a life of holiness. And if we are able to renew and transform something as seemingly mundane as kitchen objects, then we should be able to a fortiori renew ourselves and start anew. 
• Aspirations in Life. Technically speaking, food in a non-toiveled dish is still kosher. Yet we are supposed to immerse the dishes. The metaphor here is that we are meant to aim high and do our best in our spiritual lives. Spirituality is not an automatic, passive process. It is something that is meant to be intentionally cultivated and pursued to the max. 
• Aligning Your Values. The idols that people in the 21st century are not statues made of stone or wood or such celestial beings as the moon or sun. Plenty of people worship money, fame, or status. Since the initial tevilat keilim was in response to idolatry, I would content that immersing utensils can be an action-based meditation to help us realign our values and ask ourselves what is important to us. 
• Mindfulness. When we take the time and effort to immerse utensils, we remind ourselves that something as small as utensils can have major spiritual significance. Bringing awareness to cooking and eating signals that any objects we may own and use should be done with awareness of their spiritual potential. It means that all items can be a reflection of Jewish values. 
• Jewish distinction. While I found ritual immersion practices in other religions (e.g., Islam Hinduism), there was no religion that had a formalized ritual process for dishes like Judaism has. As such, the practice of tevilat keilim maintains a distinction between a Jewish and non-Jewish way of living. It also helps maintain connection and continuity with Jewish heritage, especially in a predominantly non-Jewish environment.