Minimum Income Standards Israel: A Recent History Economic and Humanistic Discourses

Recent years have seen a growing interest the creation of Minimum Income Standards (MIS). The impetus for this is the belief that governments that do not employ MIS to set income support can ultimately be persuaded to do so. Even as scholars recognize the many hurdles the way of an MIS's acceptance, they nonetheless hope, and seem to expect, that the hurdles can be overcome and the political will be created to adopt empirical MIS that would allow a decent standard of living. This article, a case study analyzing the setting of income support levels Israel over more than seven decades, questions this assumption. The analyses, anchored Veit-Wilson's notion of discourses, show that the absence of governmental MIS Israel has not been incidental, but the outcome of repeated conscious decisions, anchored the primacy of the asocial economistic discourse. This discourse, it shows, served as a strong disincentive to the adoption of governmental MIS, which would have required the government to justify its choice to set income support below that which was needed for a minimum standard of living.