The Lottery Farce

An unfair system is made even worse

A lottery is a way to remove human control from a decision by randomizing it. According to Tanach, it’s never truly random - “[When] the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God” (Proverbs 16:33). Still, human decision has been removed.

When it comes to allocating resources, there are different ways of doing it. You can allocate them all equally and fairly, as best as you can. Or you can decide to distribute them inequally and unfairly, but to make the decision as to who will be the recipient by way of a lottery, which at least gives everyone an equal and fair chance of being the unequal and unfair recipient.

In general, governments should allocate resources equally and fairly. Yet Israel has a government-sponsored lottery, which massively subsidizes an apartment for people lucky enough to win it. Apparently there are reasons for implementing a lottery system, to do with solving the housing crisis. And there are certain criteria to be accepted for it, to ensure that it is not for people who merely want to buy a more luxurious home. I’m not convinced that this is true, but for the purposes of this post, let’s take it as a given.

But if you’re going to isolate a group of people that are worthy of being given the opportunity for amazing extra help, then surely this is an opportunity to make sure that the most worthy of people are given this opportunity. Right?

20% of these apartments are indeed reserved for those that have served in the IDF. But these are actually the only people that should be eligible. Why give these huge benefits to someone who doesn’t contribute to the country, when you can give it to someone who has contributed immensely? And if you’re going to give out huge rewards via a lottery, it should be to those who the government requires to participate in another lottery: the lottery of life. Combat soldiers are not only contributing and sacrificing for the country, they are also risking everything - their jobs, their family relationships, their health, and of course their very lives.

Meanwhile, Michael Eisenberg has demonstrated on X that the exact opposite is happening. The Minister of Housing, Yitzchok Goldknopf of UTJ, has been manipulating the lottery to ensure that charedim (who, generally speaking, don’t serve in the army and don’t contribute to the economy) get far more of the apartments that are part of the lottery than do anyone else. Goldknopf has seen to it that a massively disproportionate number of the apartments allocated to the lottery are in charedi cities. That ends up being a $200 million gift for those who avoid serving the country, paid for by those who do. Of course, this is over and above the billions of dollars transferred by non-charedi taxpayers to the charedi community every year.

It’s yet another example of how the charedi communities are gaming the system to take advantage of everyone else. And the only way it will stop is if people make it clear to their politicians that they will not support them if they join forces with the charedi political parties.

Meanwhile, if you’re an Israeli taxpayer, and people representing the interests of the charedi community ask you for a donation, you can say, “Sorry, I already gave.”