The Green Leaf – New Liberal Movement Party, known mainly for its support of
legalizing marijuana, is a natural coalition partner for Likud Beytenu, the
party’s economic adviser said in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
During a press
conference presenting the party’s economic platform, Omer Moab, a Hebrew
University economics professor and a former top adviser to Finance Minister
Yuval Steinitz, said he sees the party as a natural partner for Netanyahu, who
“will be much more comfortable with us in the coalition.”
Moab criticized
Netanyahu for enlarging the deficit to pay for social programs, saying he “is
heading in the opposite direction from his world view; he has raised taxes
rather than lower them and has carried out no changes to the foundation of the
Israeli market.”
Moab said that calls to redistribute spending to help
the middle class will not work because the middle class is too large to be
helped by spending. He said that while such spending could work to help bail out
small minorities of the public, “if all of us in the middle class pay a shekel
to the government in order to get a shekel back – first off, half of that shekel
will get lost on the way, and what will we be left with?”
The plan Moab
presented, which he also put together for the party, is devoted to freeing up
the Israeli market and making the job market more flexible, according to Moab.
The plan also calls for efforts to break the influence of “pressure groups” such
as the labor unions, the agricultural industry, security establishment workers,
haredi parties and others that, in the Green Leaf Party’s words, have taken over
the Israeli market.
The party says that overreaching government influence
of the market warps and corrupts it, and that the country needs to take efforts
to reduce the national deficit burden on individual households.
Moab also
lashed out at the Israel Lands Authority, and called for the country to rapidly
free up land for development, and abandon the idea of rent control, which he
said has failed miserably everywhere it was tried. He also called on the country
to end the monopolies enjoyed by Israeli producers and allow more imports, which
he said will bring down prices for Israeli consumers.
The latest
incarnation of the Green Leaf Party is a close Israeli equivalent to American
libertarian parties. They call for lower taxes and for a hands-off government
approach to the free market and the economy, as well as less government
incursion into the private lives of citizens, as embodied by the pro-marijuana
legalization platform of the party.
Towards the end of his statements on
Sunday, Moab summed up the party’s economics, saying: “We’re not saying there
are any magical solutions, but our experience shows us that the old socialist
way of expecting the state to take care of you doesn’t work.”