Reflection on The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

               This is a very interesting book about new tax ideas that would raise public income and try to fight inequality that has emerged in the economy of the United States since the 1970s. I really liked it but I’m not too motivated to write long posts lately. I am fighting through over a thousand pages of the last Winston Churchill book and it’s tough. I’m just gonna put some interesting facts below. One interesting thing though that I learned about is “economic substance doctrine,” which is a legal concept that makes “illegal any transaction that has no other purpose than a reduction of tax liability.” I think that is a really important and good idea that should be forcefully applied.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• 20% of shares of US corporations are owned by foreigners.
• Every income group in the USA funnels between 25 and 30 percent of their income into tax coffers except for the ultra-wealthy, who pay 20%.
• Massachusetts implemented a property tax in 1640.
• Apparently economists used to believe that the shares of national income that came from capital and labor were a constant 25 and 75 percent. However, from 1980 to 2018, they have changed to 30 and 70 percent.
• Today about 60% pf profits made by US multinational companies are booked in low-tax countries like Ireland and Bermuda.

Reflection on History of the Jews Volume Five by Heinrich Graetz

               This book, published in 1891, is the oldest book I think I’ve read in a long time (besides the Tanakh). It was a good history though a little heavy at points going into specific persecutions. I would have liked a more holistic history and more information on the development of Reform Judaism. Graetz hates Kabbalah and mysticism and loves rationality. He is definitely very biased in that aspect, but his biases are clear since he makes no effort to hide them.

He has a really great and dramatic type of writing, like when he talks about Mendelssohn rescuing Ashkenazi Jews from the ignorance that they held. I think that his interpretations of what the religion was about were really interesting. He writes that, “Judaism recognizes the freedom of religious convictions. Original, pure Judaism, therefore, contains no binding articles of belief, no symbolical books, by which the faithful were compelled to swear and affirm their incumbent duty. Judaism prescribes not faith, but knowledge, and it urges that its doctrines be taken to heart. In this despised religion everyone may think, opine, and err as he pleases, without incurring the guilt of heresy. Its right of inflicting punishment begins only when evil thoughts become acts. Why? Because Judaism is not revealed religion, but revealed legislation. Its first precept is not, ‘thou shalt believe or not believe,’ but, ‘thou shalt do or abstain from doing.’” Another great passage is the following: “a nation actually did arise from the darkness of the tomb, the only example chronicled in the annals of man. This resuscitated people, the Jewish race, endeavored at its resurrection to collect its thoughts and memories, and recall a vision of its glorious past; feeling itself to be at once old and young, rich in memories and lacking in experience, chained to the hoary antiquity by a perfect sequence of events, yet seeming as if of yesterday. I think that the best thing about the book is how Graetz’s love of Judaism and the Jewish people shines through his writing.

I noticed a few really interesting things that I want to point out. One is that after their conquest by Napoleon, many German states reacted against the Jews, blaming them for the German defeat. This is very similar to the “stabbed in the back” theory that gained popularity among anti-Semitic Germans after World War One. Another is that Polish Judaism had become totally about the Talmud. Young Jewish scholars knew nothing of the Jewish writings or khetuvim, and only really knew the Talmud. It is so bizarre to think that the Talmud was studied more than the Tanakh but that’s the way it was. I was also shocked at how long discrimination of Jews went on for. Jews were not considered citizens of the countries they lived in until the French Revolution, after which we were slowly emancipated in Europe, ending with Romania in 1922. Even in Great Britain, Baron Lionel de Rothschild couldn’t enter the House of Commons because he was Jewish when he attempted from 1847 to 1851.

Reflection on Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? By Graham Allison

               This excellent book has got to be one of the best I’ve read in a while. It is an extremely detailed and thorough look at the likelihood of war between China and the United States and its analysis of possible conflict between the two countries is very clear. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Churchill biographies, but modern China keeps reminding me of Germany in the 1930’s. There are the feats of engineering. China produced and used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the entire 20^th century. China built the equivalent of all the housing in Europe in just 15 years. The list goes on and on. There is also the repression of minority groups, as China attempts to wipe Muslim Uyghurs off the map. One criticism of the book and the Thucydides’s Trap project is that it is very Eurocentric. I think that the fundamental idea of a rising power and an established power fighting does not just have to be applied to the most powerful of states but could also be applied to any number of conflicts. They chose to only cover the last 500 years, which is a choice that will favor Europe. I am also not sure that the list is so comprehensive since it doesn’t explain the decline of some powers. For example, Spain and Portugal have the first conflict of their “big 16,” and they come to an understanding, yet there is no explanation of Spain’s later decline.

               Allison has lots of good lessons for policymakers. For example, he writes that, “when states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision.” This reflects the fundamental truth that a state is a body of people who often disagree. The overwhelming interest of 90% of the people can definitely be stopped by a powerful or motivated 10%. This happens often in domestic policy as the wealthy, special interest groups, and lobbying organizations exert outsized policymaking. In the international sphere it can threaten the very existence of the state.

               Allison is extremely clear in his discussion of Chinese goals and motivations. I found his explanation of Xi Jinping’s views on Gorbachev even more clear than Kerry Brown’s or Francois Bougon’s. Allison boils down Xi’s thoughts to this: “Gorbachev made three fatal errors. He relaxed political control of society before he had reformed his country’s economy. He and his predecessors allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and ultimately hollow. And he ‘nationalized’ the Soviet military, requiring commanders to swear allegiance to the nation, not the Party and its leader.” In terms of maintaining control over the country, I think that these three errors would just about sum it up.

               In a conflict between the two countries, China will not have the naval strength to strike at the United States’ mainland. Even hitting Hawaii would be very difficult. It will be almost as difficult for the Americans to hit China. Allison writes that, “Today, China’s arsenal of more than one thousand antiship missiles based on the mainland and its coastal fleet make it impossible for any US warship to operate safely within a thousand miles of China’s coast. Sixty-two submarines patrol adjacent waters armed with torpedoes and missiles that can attack surface ships. An array of antisatellite weapons gives China the capacity to jam or even destroy US intelligence, surveillance, and communication satellites over this area.” He says that the US would have to keep carriers behind the first major East Asian island chain and, according to the Pentagon doctrine of “Air-Sea Battle,” would send long-range bombers to destroy Chinese anti-ship missiles based on the mainland to allow carriers to safely move closer.

               One of the most shocking things about the book is how closely two predictions of potential war causes mirror real-life events in 2019, two years after Allison wrote the book. One is the situation in Hong Kong. Allison posits that severe repression in Hong Kong could trigger a movement for international recognition of Taiwan’s independence. The United States is obligated to defend Hong Kong and that defense could cause war, as almost happened in 1996. Another is the escalation of a trade war into a shooting war; a trade war has of course begun under the Trump administration.

               One of the most important ideas of the book is that “There is no ‘solution’ for the dramatic resurgence of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.4 billion people. It is a condition, a chronic condition that must be managed over a generation. Constructing a strategy proportionate to this challenge will require a multiyear, multiminded effort.” There are many paths to take, and US policymakers must balance the fact that Chinese supremacy in Asia will cause harm to the United States, yet most Americans are probably not willing to sacrifice their family members’ lives for naval supremacy in the western Pacific. Unless the US pays the blood price for it, that region will have to pass out of US hegemony. My thoughts as I finished the book are that the USA should avoid war with China. We have to acknowledge that we are entering a bipolar century and bide our time. We have to have faith that our system of liberty and democracy is better than Communism and tyranny. Ideally, US policymakers will bide their time and slowly withdraw from East Asia, especially on land. However, in the cyber and economic arenas, the United States will continue to undermine the CCP and try to develop fissures to crack China. The US must keep Taiwan separate and try to get the Chinese out of Xinjiang and Tibet. However, the real prize is the division of the Chinese heartland itself. The United States cannot remain a world power when a single country has over four times the USA’s population. While the British failed to protect the CSA in the American Civil War and divide the nation that would eventually displace them, the USA should not fail to miss this opportunity, as it will not likely come more than once if it comes at all. Until then, the United States should focus on its own prosperity. In sports and in war the best victories are not planned perfectly in advance but go to the side that can capitalize on its rival’s errors. We should not seek to positively go on the offensive against China; instead we should convert on all the turnovers they give us and keep control of the air and seas. On any map it is clear that the United States has the advantage and that China, with land powers on three sides and Japan and the United States at sea, is at a long-term disadvantage.

Miscellaneous Stuff:

• Each chapter starts with a quote from Thucydides and then a quote or two by other people. One chapter starts with two quotes. Churchill said in 1914 that, “They build navies so as to play a part in the world’s affairs. It is sport to them. It is life and death to us.” He must not have realized that German Admiral Alfred Tirpitz said to Kaiser Wilhelm II that, “Since Germany is particularly backward in sea power, it is a life-and-death question for her, as a World Power and great cultural state, to make up the lost ground.”

Reflection on Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping by Francois Bougon

               Now here’s a great book for understanding the basics of modern China. It is very similar to CEO China by Kerry Brown. While CEO is a more historically-minded book, Inside is more about the present and future. One of the fundamental facts about Xi that both books agree on is that he is authoritarian. He is most opposed to “ideological confusion,” which is a funny way of saying freedom of thought. He sees the end of the Soviet Union as the result of the relaxing of central controls and will fight to avoid anything like that in China. He also points out that army control is critical—that the army is not the tool of the state or the people but rather the tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite himself having suffered under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xi does not want to de-Maoize China as Russia was se-Stalinized. Xi wants to centralize his and the Party’s power by preventing the emergence of an independent judiciary and rehabilitating the image of Mao. His vision is of the continued growth of China into a worldwide superpower in 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the successful communist revolution. This national rejuvenation will be dependent on the party, though many scholars now think that as  result of this greater centralization and party control that China’s institutions will get much weaker.

Reflection on Bossypants by Tina Fey

               This was a pretty cool book that I think is good for a fan of 30 Rock though it’s not spectacular. Tina Fey is definitely funny though it feels a little bit like she was trying too hard in this book. I liked it but didn’t love it. It’s kind of like a memoir about her experiences in comedy, though I would’ve liked for about 30 Rock.

Reflection on Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds by Joel L. Kraemer

               Honestly, I don’t feel like writing a big reflection. I read the book and got some info from it but it was written in a very boring way. I’m not gonna bother with this one.

Reflection on The Last Lion Volume 2: Alone 1932-1940 by William Manchester

               Another great entry in the Last Lion trilogy, this book confirmed for me that William Manchester is a great author and I will need to find more of his books. This book covers 1932 to 1940, essentially Churchill’s time in the political wilderness, which corresponds pretty neatly with the rise of Hitler and the beginning of World War Two through the invasion of France. It is pretty good timing that just as France is defeated and England is at its most vulnerable, the nation turns to Churchill, the only prominent politician of whom it can be said had always seen Hitler for what he was and who never doubted that England must defeat him.

               The writing in this book is spectacular and I think that Manchester’s skill in imagery and metaphor is as good as it gets in a biographer. I’ll quote him a few times, so you get the picture.

• “All who were close to him agree that [Churchill] was weakly sexed, even in youth, and in his sixties his volcano was virtually extinct. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. ‘It makes no difference,’ Winston replied wryly. ‘The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.’”
• “Here [Neville Chamberlain] made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that ‘Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.’ This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller.”
• “The German generals, who had been sweating blood, could scarcely believe their good luck.”
• “It was 5:10 P.M. when the Speaker recognized Churchill, and as Winston rose the mood of the House resembled that of Spaniards when the bull lunges into the arena.”

This book explores Winston a lot as a person rather than a politician since he held no government post in the cabinet until 1939. He was just a backbencher “though a very important one.” To relax, Winston painted, and professional painters were known to comment that his works were “of real merit” and that he was skilled in painting. He painted like he thought, focusing on one object above all others and using his concentration to bring that object to the fore. Winston also dedicated significant time in this period to laying bricks for his retirement home and fixing up the mansion that he would later give to his son when he and his wife Clementine moved into the smaller house. The mansion was Chartwell and Winston loved it tremendously, adopting animals to populate its grounds and building ponds for fish and swimming. He spent his free time painting, laying bricks, and engaging in major works of construction to keep himself busy.

               Churchill bore a very different relationship to power than other politicians that I’ve read about. He had very little political skill and in this sense differed a lot from Lyndon Johnson. Churchill was really a man with an idea who in normal circumstances would probably not have risen to the heights he did. He knew nothing of bringing votes together in Parliament. He rose to power for the sole reason that he was consistent and consistently right in his admonition of Hitler. His best “political” moves were the manners in which he obtained facts and information while out of power. Because he was so trusted, he was able to get civil service employees to send him information that he wanted that he was not really supposed to have. Because he was so prominent, people from outside the government who had information about German armaments came to him because they trusted him more than the appeasing Prime Ministers MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain. Finally, he was able to get official government figures because MacDonald authorized him almost a decade before the war and everybody forgot that he had that access. Manchester writes, “Reading the transcriptions of those parliamentary debates today, one can only imagine the ministers’ astonishment as Churchill rose to face them and reel off facts and figures that seemed to have come from nowhere — but were always confirmed afterward. Had Simon, say, or Hoare done his homework, they would have realized that Churchill had access to documents stamped ‘Most Secret.’”

               It is astonishing how unready and unwilling Britain and France were to face the Nazi threat in hindsight. The psychological phenomenon is fascinating. Having won the last war, neither could bear to imagine another war, having seen a generation of their best men slaughtered. During the German buildup, popular opinion in Britain supported appeasement and the men who led the charge saw themselves as the protectors of peace. By avoiding antagonizing Germany, they thought that they did the world a service. They fundamentally did not understand who Hitler was. Churchill could understand him better, I think, because they were somewhat similar people. Both saw the world in terms of good and evil with their respective nations as the great good. Both also saw themselves as tremendously important and shapers of the world. It was easier for Churchill to understand where Hitler was headed and why letting him have the Rhineland or the Saarland or all of Czechoslovakia would not sate his appetite but only increase his hunger. Churchill saw things others could not. For example, when Britain decided to allow Germany to build up its fleet, Churchill saw the threat this would pose. Although Britain only allowed a buildup to a fraction of its own power, Germany had no overseas possessions. While the entire English fleet, if together, would easily defeat Germany, that could never happen since they had to protect possessions as disparate as the Falklands and India. It was only with the seizure of Prague that British public opinion started to turn against Hitler, and it would be longer among the Parliamentary leaders of the appeasement movement. In France, politicians would beg their generals to invade the weakly defended German border when Hitler invaded Poland but were rebuffed.

               When Germany did invade, they were using tactics that were totally innovative. For example, in Poland, Nazis who knew Polish simulated Polish news programs telling Poles to flee down the very roads that the Polish army needed for their maneuvers. They attached sirens to dive bombers to stoke maximum fear amongst the populace. The French and British, on the other hand, were convinced that air power would not play a major part in war and the French also limited their tanks, not giving them radios so that they couldn’t coordinate attacks and counterattacks. The French R-35 was better than any German model according to Manchester, yet France sold 235 of the last 500 produced to other countries and had only 90 on the front when the Germans struck. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Poland and France had 130 divisions to Germany’s 98 (of which 36 were totally untrained, so really 62). There was no challenge at all to the French and they could have probably defeated Nazi Germany right then and there. The political situation in France was even worse than in Britain: their chief general resigned just hours before the Nazis invaded and France was without a government.

               The book made me think a lot about modern parallels with China. Will we see in our lifetimes a repetition of these themes as China grows in power and Americans try to keep the peace? How far will China go to assert its power? As I write this, the Communist Party of China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang and crushing the liberty of Hong Kong. For most Americans it is shocking how Chin can even crush the criticisms of an NBA GM who tweeted about Hong Kong. I don’t think that this is the conflict that will cause a war, but I do think that we might be at the beginning of a cold war. I hope that we have a Churchill somewhere who can guide us through it.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Churchill was a Zionist and opposed the Chamberlain government’s policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, which occurred nine weeks after Nazis stormed into Prague.
• This is not really a fact, but I think it’s interesting how FDR is to Churchill as Reagan is to Margaret Thatcher. The two most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20^th century both had the support of an American counterpart.
• When he was reinstated as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939, Churchill carried around a pistol and a suicide pill in his pen.
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