The tax reform in Israel began in 2003 when the tax system was converted from one of personal taxation to one of global taxation. Since this time, Israeli residents are taxed on their worldwide income. After this reform, on 1 January 2006, the Taxation of Trusts Law (the ‘Law’) came into force. The main purpose of this law is to legislate the use of trusts by Israeli residents which has not been governed by law prior to 2006. The Law imposes obligations based on one's role in connection with a trust (i.e. trustee, settler and beneficiary). Regulations have also been published, which further clarify these obligations under the Law. The publication of these Regulations was much awaited by professionals in Israel and abroad. Their publication was postponed and these were finally published in 2008. However, as the reporting obligation is imposed, among other positions, on trustees, many of whom are...
To link morals with politics might be thought to be yoking together an ox and an ass ? morality is one thing, poUtical action another. Not so. MoraUty covers the area of prizing of the human personality, in the self and in others, and its province is as wide as all action bearing on man's worth ? which is to say, as wide as all man does. PoUtical morality is not a matter only of bribery and corruption, fraud and venaUty, or their absence. It is not a private possession making from time to time a public appearance when the private citizen holds pubUc office. It is intrinsic to all poUcy whose decisions significantly affect the value placed on things human. PubUc moraUty is the morality of public policy. In what foUows, I try to sketch an experimental basis for this moraUty. While insisting on the historical importance for Amer ican democracy of reUgious doctrines and the metaphysics of natural rights, I reject the widespread assumptions that without such transcendent faiths the belief in democracy is untenable, and that the future of democracy therefore rests on a spiritual revival. On the contrary, I am persuaded that the divorce of the spirit from the matter of daily experience itself endangers moral values. It is in this duaUsm of transcendent ideals and earthly experiences that I localize the degradation of our poUtical Ufe. What is needed, as I see it, is not more ideaUsm, but more reaUstic ideals; not exhorta tions to an abstract virtue, but support of concrete measures for the betterment of specific situations. In this perspective, I also criticize moral absolutism ? that pre tense that the right and good are unequivocal and certain, and that they are realizable in every case by unswerving adherence to high principle. Yet, the rejection of absolutism still allows, as I hope, a place for principled action, and even for moral heroism. Only, I have urged that it is not principles themselves on which moraUty requires a firm stand, but rather the concrete values to which moral principles are instrumental. Our democracy, I am convinced, has assumed too defensive a posture. Because we are determined not to take the offensive in a miUtary sense, we tend to withdraw from
LET ME first raise a question that will immediately be recognized as philosophical: What are we doing here? How does it come about that the category of the normal has been so much neglected in psychiatry, that we are here at a conference on new directions in research on normal behavior, as though we stand at the frontier of a new territory which one might expect to have been explored long ago? One answer that immediately presents itself is that this neglect of the normal is a result of training, to which Strauss1has already directed attention. What is produced by training is not only a set of skills and intellectual resources, but also something very well designated astrained incapacity. There are some things that we cannot do well, just because of the other things that we have been trained to
