Reply To: Taxes in Eretz Yisroel

The sheer stupidity of assuming that 6 million yidden in EY would be better off living under a Palestinian or some other Arab overnment is both laughable and depressing. ANY governing authority would need to tax residents to raise the revenues needed for providing basic public services. I doubt R’ Chaim had really thought through how to maintain basic infrastructure and public services absent some form of taxation. Perhaps he was assuming that imposing “user fees” instead of calling the revenues “taxes” was somehow a way of circumventing the halachic concerns but that obviously would be a highly regressive form of taxation.