Coasean Bargains

David Bernstein proposes an eminently sensible Coasean bargain to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Noting that the Netanyahu government has indicated a willingness to cede 90% of the West Bank to the Palestinians and that the Palestinians are demanding 98.4% plus land swaps, Bernstein suggests:

How about if Israel simply “buys” (without necessarily conceding lack of current ownership) the extra land from the Palestinians?  And not by giving the money to the Palestinian government, but by giving every man, woman, and child in the West Bank $5,000, payable over a five-year period.  The total cost: approximately $10 billion.  Make the offer, and let the Palestinians decide in a referendum whether they’d rather continue the conflict, or would rather have more money than most of them have ever seen (GDP per capita $1,000), plus their own state, plus peace.

I think this proposal is brilliant, perhaps in large part because it so closely resembles an idea of mine about how to end the impasse over affirmative action. Way back in 2003 I wrote that “I would be willing to consider sympathetically something as difficult to justify as reparations for slavery if they could be limited in amount, in duration, and be paired with abandoning all forms of racial preference.”

I still think that’s worth discussing. As I concluded here last fall, after documenting only some of the astronomical amounts we spend on various affirmative action projects, “Outright reparations might be cheaper, in fact much cheaper, than our current ‘diversity’ ransoms.”

Say What? (7)

  1. Pugnacious February 20, 2012 at 9:17 am | | Reply

    Since the majority of the interlopers in Palestine are Zionist Jews from Khazari, and since their ancestors never laid eyes on The Promised Land, why not re-route the annual $16,000,000,000 in US foreign aid from the Israel government to individual Zionists so that they can return with a bundle of money to their ancestral homes in the Caucasus, LA, Chicago, NYC and Miami?

  2. Pugnacious February 20, 2012 at 9:25 am | | Reply

    BTW, President Lincoln had tried to buy the Southern slave’s freedom with congressional appropriated money, but the abolitionists and Radical Republicans wanted war, not a peaceful solution to the slavery issue. Just like today with the President and his Radical Republican allies wanting war with Iran, not a sitdown eyeball-to-eyeball conference and a tour of the country’s nuclear facilities.

    Lincoln’s bailout plan to the Southern slaveowners can be found in Nathaniel Stephenson’s book, Abraham Lincoln and the Union.

  3. Pugnacious February 20, 2012 at 9:52 am | | Reply

    The terms of Mississippi’s Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek– the removal of the Choctaw Nation to Oklahoma, or become US citizens– were ten-thousand fold more generous to the native Americans than Mr. Bernstein proposes for the indigenous peoples of Palestine.

    A mural depicting the treaty signing can be found at the Noxubee County, Mississippi courthouse in Macon.. A “Treaty” festival is held there every Fall.

    Our former Governor, Haley Barbour, claims lineage to Greenwood LeFlore, a prominent leader of the Choctaw Nation.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Dancing_Rabbit_Creek

  4. bob sykes February 20, 2012 at 9:55 am | | Reply

    The Palestinians don’t want 98.4% of the West Bank. They want all of it. And they want all of Israel. And they want the Jews to leave or die. The Palestinians actually want the Jews to die. And they are vehement about it.

    There is no Coasean bargain to be had. There can be only continual war until one side or the other is eliminated. Almost certainly, the Jews will be eliminated. They only have to lose once. Hopefully, the Jews will disappear by emigration and not by genocide. Again, the Palestinians prefer genocide.

    The US would greatly benefit by the immigration of all of Israel’s Jews and the Jews of Europe and Russia.

  5. Pugnacious February 20, 2012 at 10:37 am | | Reply

    The US would greatly benefit by the immigration of all of Israel’s Jews and the Jews of Europe and Russia.bob sykes

    I agree that it is the ONLY longterm solution to the problem in Palestine. And any Brighton Beachhead racketeering that might sprout up in the US could be interdicted by the attorneys general of individual States.

    While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.~Unknown author

  6. Pugnacious February 20, 2012 at 9:23 pm | | Reply

    Macon, Mississippi mural depicting the signing of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/auvet/866704465/

  7. James A. Donald February 23, 2012 at 6:54 am | | Reply

    You cannot make Coasean bargains for peace. If you pay the other side to give you peace, they will, as Kipling explained, take the payment and give you war.

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