We find ourselves as of the People, by the People, and against the People.
I once read a story from an old-time sportscaster. He related how sports writers and athletes would travel on the same train as a team, like the Yankees went to play away from home. He noted that at the time, players and those who covered them in the press made more or less the same amount of money. They often were neighbors and friends. Since the dawn of free agency in baseball and supersized salaries in professional sports, there are very few sportscasters who make anywhere near the amount of the folks they cover. The minimum annual salary for a guy called up to the Big Leagues was $760,000 in 2025. Henry Aaron was the highest-paid player in the mid-1970s at around $240,000 a year. Last year’s equivalent was Juan Soto, who pocketed over $121 million.
While government workers do not generally make millions of dollars a year, somehow at some time, they became separated from their neighbors and friends. While individuals who work in government generally seem like normal people, their institutions behave as if they exist in some type of adversarial relationship with Joe Citizen. On paper, the government works for us. We pay our taxes, which fund departments and workers. Yet, the actions of governmental bodies often seem to make them adversarial. I am not talking about someone who violates the law; rather, I am referring to the guy who does everything according to the rules, yet still finds himself fighting the very government he funds.
There were a lot of weird side events related to the suicide bombing in which our son and I were injured. One feature involved my returning my salary for the month of the bombing, as by law the government pays that amount—only after I sent confirmation that I wired my salary back to the company. Another episode had me sitting in a room with a couple of doctors. They looked at my arm, poked around and asked me to do some activities. “Okay, you have 10% disability for the rest of your life.” I was kind of surprised. “I estimate that from my elbow to my wrist is less than 10% of my body. How did we get to that number?” “It’s 10%. That’s it.”
I didn’t understand them at the time, but in Israel, from 10 percent disability and up, one gets some benefits. From 40 percent and up, one may get a monthly stipend. So, public transportation is half price. And there is a 2/3 discount on property tax. Property tax, or “arnona” in Hebrew, is the main source of income for city governments. Jerusalem is building 36 towers at the entrance to the city, primarily to generate recurring income from the property tax of every unit created. We are grateful for the discount we receive, but something strange happened this year. The actual tax went up around $30, but our discount dropped by $250. I couldn’t figure it out. So I called the city and a very nice woman there said that they had reduced the size of our home for their calculations. I hadn’t noticed that a room had gone missing or that we had one less bathroom. She said that she would pass along a request to return the square footage. After three more phone calls, the problem was resolved and the full discount was returned.
I thought to myself: this could have been a small error, or what if they do this to everyone who has some type of discount? It’s not just terror victims, but also people with low incomes or army veterans. What if they cut the corners on all of them, and say 10 percent call to ask what happened. They would still end up with a nice, tidy sum of additional capital for the city’s coffers. I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but there is a pattern to such behavior. Everyone has to pay National Insurance monthly. For someone working, his or her company takes it out of salary; everyone else has to pay on their own. My company is still in a frozen state due to my friend and company CEO being in the army from October 7, 2023, until today. So, he told me that National Insurance would go from the company back to me. Fine. Every month, I checked to see how much I owed and the government website said zero. Until they sent me a letter and said that I was six months in arrears, with fines. This is another method they use. In the past, they would send in January a complete list of payments and dates, but they stopped. Their goal is for people to forget to pay and add fines. It is disgusting but not accidental.
Israel and other democracies have their underbelly. We as kids always assumed that those lousy commies would bundle people into a Lada, never to be seen again. The Western democracies were the good guys. There were laws, there were courts. Well, we grew up and we realized that whatever they did in Moscow could be small potatoes compared to what could be done in a Western country. Israel had its second “security prisoner” die recently. His name finally came out in the press: Tomer Eiges, age 24. As in such cases, details are thin. He was a young genius who belonged to the top IDF SIGINT unit, but somehow, he found himself arrested, and while in jail, he died. He follows a certain Prisoner X, Ben Zygier, who supposedly committed suicide while in solitary confinement. His exact crime is still unknown. Was the CIA involved in JFK’s assassination? Were they involved in the attempts on Donald Trump’s life? We know that 51 former intelligence officials lied about Hunter Biden's laptop in order to prevent Trump’s reelection. We know that the FBI hounded the president without any basis, after a sitting president, Barack Obama, invented a “Russian collusion” finding in order to sideline Trump.
One would like to go back to believing that the government works for him, but the more he learns, the more he thinks that they are not on his team. Companies are much the same. If the top people at a pharmaceutical company sit with scientists to discuss potential medications, what would they do? Two top researchers present the results of different compounds and their effects on a disease. One cures the disease in three months. The other candidate suppresses the effects of the illness, but a person needs to take the drug forever so as to prevent a relapse. Which drug is more interesting to the executives? I can’t answer, but clearly the second option would keep their patients paying forever and not just for a few months. Every older person who has a box with pills in the morning and pills in the evening never seems to get off those pills. One for the heart, one for blood pressure, another one for glucose levels, etc. Our personal space on planes has shrunk so that the companies can sell “Economy Plus” seats. We’ve been on a couple of relatively empty flights in which my wife asked if she could move into one of the empty seats well after takeoff. The flight attendants vigorously refused, as others had paid for similar seats and would have had a fit.
We’d like to believe that our governments work for us, and in truth, I have had both in the US and Israel certain employees who have gone beyond the call of duty to help us. But often, the impersonal offices or departments behave as if the average citizen is a suspect, not to be trusted. This behavior cannot stand.