Book Review: New Zealand (Country Profiles)

Posted on May 13, 2024 by nathanalbright

New Zealand (Country Profiles), by Alicia Klepeis

While this is not the sort of book that is difficult to read–it is made for those between Grades 1 and 3 as an introduction to the countries of the world, after all–it is the sort of book that can help people figure out what they view as most important about nations. When we encourage others to be knowledgeable of and interested in the rest of the world, it can be worth seeing what other people think of as the most important qualities of a nation to share with new readers. And though there can be a lot of options to focus on that are less than immensely important, and sometimes even areas that are deeply troublesome to focus on, I think this book in general does a good job at showing useful areas of life in New Zealand to show to young readers. Those readers who want to learn more will be able to read more detailed books later on, if they wish. A book for young readers should reach them where they are and then give them accurate but an age-appropriate understanding of the area that will hopefully encourage more reading and more study later on.

How does this book succeed by that standard? I think, personally, that it succeeds very well. Unlike some books on the subject that I have read, the authors do not focus on the glorification of heathen religious standards or double standards in general that seem to attack the legitimacy of the perspective that readers will bring from their own personal and family backgrounds. Instead, the book focuses on areas that are broadly of interest to young readers in such a way that they can gain real understanding and also a framework of aspects of life that are worth knowing in general about other countries. That this sort of approach is not more common is a bit to be regretted, as there is a real need for books like this which can introduce the reader into a better understanding of the world without at the same time trying to indoctrinate them into a certain perspective of the world that would make them an insufferable young Progressive in the way that so many contemporary books seek to do. This is a book, therefore, that I can recommend, and one that is enjoyable to read even outside of one’s youth in the sense of how it can help present profiles of a somewhat obscure and isolated country that can give useful basic knowledge, leaving the political discussion to those of age to engage in such matters.

In terms of its contents, this book is 32 pages (a pretty common length for children’s books for young readers), and the unnumbered chapters of this book deal with the following subjects: Rotorua, the location of New Zealand, landscape and climate, wildlife, people, communities, customs, school and work, play, food, and celebrations. There is a timeline that helps ground the book in the chronology of New Zealand’s existence, which is fairly short as far as people are concerned. The book also provides facts about New Zealand, a glossary, sources where the interested reader can learn more, and an index of materials. The book contains numerous well-labeled photos that certainly would encourage many readers to want to take a trip to New Zealand, and to push their parents to do so, which is a reflection of the natural beauty of the country, it must be admitted.

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Book Review: The Penguin State Of The World Atlas

Posted on May 12, 2024 by nathanalbright

The Penguin State Of The World Atlas, by Dan Smith

Now, I happen to like Penguin as a publisher, mainly because they do a good job making inexpensive and easily accessible books from works in the public domain that I have enjoyed reading for decades now, at least since I was a broke university student. That said, calling this book an atlas is a considerable stretch of the term. If one has certain expectations of an atlas, it is that it has helpful and useful maps that help to better explain and understand the world. Geography has many forms, but all of those forms involve spatial connections of some kind. This book is, at best, a lot of tedious lectures about the state of the world from people whose perspectives are not particularly trustworthy (given their leftist perspectives and general whining, Progressive, tone). Most of the issues discussed in this book are not the sort that are well-suited to a broad-brush and nearly contextless discussion, as is provided here, and without sufficient context what few maps are provided are not as helpful as they could have been. For example, Japan is shown as being a heavily indebted nation, but its debt is mainly to its own citizens whose savings accounts fund the bonds that keep Japan running, which is in stark contrast to those nations whose sovereign debt is held by outsiders. Yet this context is not shown. Similarly, the authors of this book seem to think that the death penalty is a bad thing, and this assumption is worded into the language used to discuss those nations that have it.

In general, this book comes awfully close if it does not entirely cross into the line of lying by statistics. For example, the book cites (42) an alternative view of quality of life that was released by noted happy nation North Korea that demonstrated the biased nature of a great many of the rankings that are used by the book, without apparent self-knowledge. Even where the data included is not badly in need of explanations that are not provided, a lot of the book’s space is wasted by ugly graphics, including a citation of relative human development that shows green, orange, red, and yellow colored lines connecting nations in a way that does not even look complete, and certainly is a waste of space, especially when the map next to it shows the same information in a much more appealing fashion. Perhaps the author of this book and those who came up with the graphics of the book want to be praised for trying to convey data in novel forms, but as much of the data is of dubious quality (the map for assigning the share of carbon dioxide goes all the way back to 1950 and as a result grossly underestimates the share of current emissions from China and India, for example), and where the book is filled with text, the text is often misleading and of a hectoring quality, which does not make this book as good as it could have been. To be sure, no state of the world would have looked like a good one, but this one is dire for the wrong reasons.

This book is less than 150 pages long and is divided into seven parts. After information about the author, an introduction, a discussion of the problems with maps, and acknowledgements, the first part are maps that discuss who we are–looking at the nations of the world, population, life expectancy, ethnicity and diversity, religious beliefs, literacy and education, urbanization, and the diversity of cities. The second part of the book examines wealth and poverty through a look at income, inequality, the supposed quality of life, transnationals, banks, corruption, debt, tourism, and goals for development. The third part of the book examines war and peace by viewing wars in the 21st century, warlords, ganglords, and militas, military muscle, the new front line of cyberspace, casualties of war, refugees, peacekpeeping, and global peacefulness. The fourth part of the book deals with rights and respect through looking at political systems, religious rights, human rights, children’s rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. The heath of the people is the subject of part five, which examines malnutrition, obesity, smoking, cancer, HIV/AIDS, mental health, and living with disease. The health of the planet forms the subject of the sixth part of the book through looking at warning signs, biodiversity, water resources, waste, energy use, climate change, and planetary boundaries–rather vaguely defined neo-malthusian ideas, it must be admitted. The seventh and last part of the book gives tables of supposedly vital statistics, after which the book ends with notes and sources and an index.

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Book Review: The Maori

Posted on May 11, 2024 by nathanalbright

The Maori (Early Peoples), by Geoffrey M. Horn

There are a great many readers who consider books written for young people to be beneath criticism, not even worth reading, much less commenting about. One of the more striking things about children’s literature is that it can be remarkably difficult to determine the author of such books, as no author is listed on the title, and the writer’s name occurs in small text in the midst of dozens of staff people involved at the publisher (World Book), almost an afterthought. To be sure, in children’s literature, it is not so much the nature of the author but the nature of what the author writes about that is of greatest interests. To a great degree, writing directed to children is often highly propagandistic in nature, with heavy-handed and clear pedagogical aims, and that is certainly the case here. Though at some points this can be entertaining, the specific nature of this book indicates the troubling nature of a great deal of writings about peoples that occurs in the present world.

This is not to say that this book is bad. Graded on the curve, at least, this book is a fairly average and typical sort of book that is directed at children. This standard is by no means a great one, as the book focuses on aspects of Maori culture that educators want to promote rather than those which the child might be more interested in and more properly focused on. It is revealing, for example, to compare a book like this one with what one might read about the Confederate States of America on subjects where the two intersect (namely their relationship with national governments as well as slavery and law and order, to name a few areas). One can see the author straining to justify the Moari religious worldview in a way that would be unthinkable for an author to respect the biblical worldview, to argue that Maori slaves were viewed like members of the family when such arguments are considered completely unacceptable with regards to slavery in the antebellum South, and to view the paranoid security-minded nature of Maori society with sympathy in a way that is not granted to other societies under similar conditions. We can see the double standard that favors non-Western cultures in full force here, and in this the book is typical of our times.

In terms of its contents, this book is a classic 64 page children’s book that manages to pack a lot of content into those pages. The book begins with a discussion of the identity of the Maori and their origins, their skill in navigation, and how we know about their history. This is followed by a detailed discussion of Maori society, the power of chiefs, warriors, tactics and weapons, as well as gender roles and those with special skills and jobs, as well as a discussion of prisoners and slaves as well as law and order within indigenous society. The author spends a lot of time dwelling on religious beliefs, creation stories, rituals of life and death, arts and crafts, tattoos, the open communal spaces known as marae. Other chapters deal with family life, settlements (often fortified), hunting, fishing and farming as the basis of the economy, education and language, sports and games, and music and dance. Towards the end of the book the author deals with the nature of contact with Europeans (called Pakeha), the treaty of Waitangi that established British settler colony status, the decline and revival of the Maori population, and the combination of tradition and change in contemporary Maori society. The book ends with a glossary, additional resources, and index.

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Book Review: The Story Of American Freedom

Posted on May 10, 2024 by nathanalbright

The Story Of American Freedom, by Eric Foner

Sometimes grammar can make a big difference in how one is to view a book. This book would have been considerably easier to praise had it (accurately) labeled itself as “A Story of American Freedom,” thus emphasizing the author’s perspective and not presuming to privilege it. Using the definite article, invites the reader to test the author’s sincerity to balance, and the author not surprisingly comes up wanting. A useful test of a book like this one is to see how the author addresses the subject of FDR’s Four Freedoms, and this author fails terribly by viewing it as the official war aims of the United States of America during World War II as well as viewing America as having an obligation to provide to blacks (and other oppressed groups) freedom from want and freedom from fear. This is, of course, patently ridiculous and entirely impossible. Similarly, the author’s chapter on Conservative freedom completely fails to understand the nature of conservatism in America and demonstrates the author’s inability to deal with contemporary politics with any sort of balance. Fortunately, not all of the author’s varied takes on freedom throughout American history are equally braindead, but these set the tone and indicate that the author is perhaps not as competent to talk decisively about freedom as he thinks he is.

One of the more interesting and revealing aspects of this book is that the author does not really attempt directly to give a definitive meaning of freedom (which also undercuts the title of the book because of its strident postmodernism). Instead, this book treats us to fragmentary pictures of freedom that are generally divided by time but also by mindset. The author notes, as just about every commentator of freedom with brain cells has noted, that freedom has always been highly contentious and highly contradictory in its meaning. By freedom many people seek to oppress others. In the name of economic freedom, for example, paternalistic government acts just as oppressively as a plantation owner towards those it considers its property. There is in the raw material of this book the space for a fascinating story of different conceptions of freedom and how it is that the freedom promised by slavery and the freedom promised by socialism and Progressive American ideals are, in fact, not very different, and that the desire to escape from responsibility complicates moral freedoms or even a just appreciation at individuals of high moral fiber. Freedom is complicated by what it is that we want to be free from, and the author is right to note that we cannot be free from our history, though typically he mangles it to argue for something like the 1619 project rather than a more broad-based understanding of the history of freedom that we cannot escape.

This book is more than 300 pages long in terms of its contents and it is divided chronologically and thematically into thirteen chapters. The book begins with an introduction. After this, an opening chapter engages the birth of American freedom with a look at the context of the freedom that colonial Americans found and sought (1). This is followed by a chapter of the early American republic and the struggles over various visions of freedom that co-existed with slavery (2). This is followed by a discussion of the empire of liberty in the early American republic that discussed democracy in America as well as labor ideology (3). After this comes a discussion of the boundaries of American freedom, including a conception of the political community (4). A chapter on the Civil War as a new birth of freedom then follows (5), along with a chapter on the liberty of contract in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age periods and those who were not happy with it (6). The author then tackles Progressive freedom (a suitable candidate for official oxymorons) (7) as well as the birth of civil liberties in World War I (8). This is followed by the New Deal and the corruption of freedom it involved (9) as well as the author’s views of the freedoms for which America fought World War II (10). This is followed by discussions of Cold War freedom (11) and its limitations, the anarchical and decadent nature of sixties freedom (12), and the laudable but incomplete conservative freedom that followed (13). The book ends with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

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What’s So Bad About Being A Colonizer?

Posted on May 9, 2024 by nathanalbright

We live in a day and age where that which is seen as native and indigenous is celebrated and that which is seen as a settler or colonizer is disparaged. This ingrained bias is so intense and widespread that it even influences the world of rap beefs (perhaps a surprising interest of mine), where in a recent diss track Kendrick Lamar took Canadian pop-rapper Drake to task for being “not a colleague, but a colonizer,” as if that was a bad thing. Being a colonizer is, at least in the corrupt world of Academia and those worlds influenced by its social prestige, as being a sort of original sin that cannot be washed clean except through paying ransom and blackmail to supposedly oppressed subaltern colonized peoples, but is this just? Today I propose to address and at least outline the answer to the question of whether or not it is a bad thing to be a colonizer. I propose that it is not only not a bad thing, but it is inevitable, and that moreover everything that is viewed as native was originally a colonizer of some kind.

Let me say that again, because it bears repeating. Everything that we view as a native eventually, if we look at it long enough, came from something and somewhere else. Nothing is sui generis, nothing is autochronous. Everything that is happens to be a colonist, a colonizer, and a settler. This is true no matter what contemporary worldview we adopt. For though the founding myths of many peoples view themselves as springing directly from the soil, whether we look into the picture of faith, which tells us that everything was formed by the ultimate outsider (namely God) and spread–sometimes not by choice–to where it now resides, sometimes subject to exile as a judgment, or whether we look at DNA evidence which shows the evidence of migration of peoples through their genes, or whether people hold to an evolutionary perspective by which everything that exists comes from some previous life form that existed, whatever base we start with involves the admission that we all came from something else and somewhere else. We all have a history. If we have survived, we have moved beyond what we once were in some fashion and become something else. To remain stagnant in a world subject to change is to become extinct. Some level of adaptability is required to survive, and that adaptability involves colonizing something, spreading beyond what is comfortable and familiar to develop new ranges, new capabilities, and new perspectives. Growth and death are the only options we have, and to grow is to colonize.

That this is true on a cultural level is so obvious that it scarcely needs to be defended. A colony is but a mobile part of an existing culture that travels in search of a less crowded and hospitable home, whether it comes from a human civilization or a coral reef or any other group of living things. That this is true on a biological level is so trivially true that anyone who knows anything about natural history is aware of such phenomena as the spread of plants across the surface of the earth and the eventual colonization of earth’s land surface by successive animal kingdoms. The spread of human beings over the earth is similarly viewed as an article of faith whether one comes from a biblical perspective or an out-of-Africa perspective that views the Rift Valley of East Africa as the cradle of successive waves of colonizing and settling hominid species/groups. It seems cruel to point out that Africans were, in the view of evolutionists, the original colonizers, in spreading beyond Africa into first the Middle East, and then around the rest of the world, and that the colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas had disastrous effects for the megafauna in those places due to extinction or habitat destruction that left the people in those areas somewhat isolated and backwards when they met those who colonized them, namely my own ancestors from Western Europe.

There can be little serious debate, to anyone who looks at the spread of people or of anything else over time, that colonization is what brought all of us to where we are. Ultimately, no one is a native if you go back far enough. Moreover, there are similar patterns to colonization that are seen nowadays as a bad thing, to such an extent that many people who wish to privilege the place of those viewed as “natives” or “first people” or “indigenous peoples” often have to deny the unpleasant reality that their own arrival in their supposed “homelands” was marked by the destruction of the life that was there before (especially the largest animals) and often by an immense transformation of the local flora to support the preferred lifestyle of its settlers. Those who transformed an area have little cause to complain when other people come in from outside later on and transform it to their own tastes using their technology and expressing their own cultural values. What’s good for the first people is good for the more recent ones. If we are looking strictly at the justice of the deed, we all seek to recreate the world around us in our own image to make it less hostile and less alien and more familiar to us.

There is, of course, some difference between those who are viewed as natives and those who are most obviously not. The native has, over a long period of time and the development of a great deal of specific local knowledge and awareness, come to grips with the reality of the place where they have long resided. After having changed the original flora to suit their own background to create a blend between old and new and the destruction or at least near-eradication of those resources which were the easiest to obtain, a more intensive and sustainable use of the environment is required for such people to endure. It is this coming to terms with the constraints of one’s environment, with its particular qualities and patterns, is what it means to become a native of an area. The original exploitation of an area by outsiders who have discovered a land teeming with easily gathered resources changes with time into a careful stewardship of a land of limited resources whose ways and conditions are well-known and understood for the best interests of survival. We all come as colonizers, but just as we transform the land into our own image based on our own history and what we carry with us from where we come from, we are also transformed by the realities of where we go, so that we become something else with time, a blend between where we came from and what we found that represents a native synthesis, a mutual coming to terms with the realities of being planted from outside and the realities of where we have been planted.

This suggests that the antipathy towards those viewed as colonizers is merely a temporal bias that ignores the historical perspective. For a colonizer to survive, it must bring something from outside that allows it to prosper, be it new resources, social cohesion, an adaptability to fill unfilled niches, technology, proper attitudes and mindsets and superior cultural ways, and so forth. At first, colonizers tend to exaggerate the ease of life in the areas where they go, unaware of its patterns and limitations, but over time the difficulties of life in a given area lead the colonizer to better understand and appreciate the ways of their transformed land, and they learn how to adapt to its ways and preserve it so that not only may they enjoy it but that they may also pass down that enjoyment to generation after generation to follow. We have no choice but to begin as colonizers, and if we are to survive, we will have no choice but to become natives, or at least to survive and adapt enough so that our children or children’s children become natives after us, a task that occurs so easily that it takes hardly any time at all for people to feel that they have always belonged in a given place, and to deny that they were ever colonizers or settlers in the first place, but were always people who lived in harmony with the world around them. Perhaps if we can keep in mind that all people and indeed all things were once outsiders and strangers, we may be less hostile to those whom we think to be strangers and outsiders to us. To keep alive our own history of growth and change and colonizing gives us empathy to those who come after us, and will, God willing, become more like ourselves if given the time and space to do so.

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Book Review: How Rights Went Wrong

Posted on May 9, 2024 by nathanalbright

How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart, by Jamal Greene

There is, on the left, a rising sense that rights have gone wrong and that they need to be curbed in some fashion. To a large extent, this comes because in the American tradition at least, rights are inherent to people and serve as a way of preventing government from doing certain things that people like the author want to do. There is also the sense that equal protection, in preventing some people from being more equal than others in terms of rights, make it impossible to engage in the types of social engineering without the consent of the governed that the left wants as well. Similarly, the authors of these sorts of books often opine that the wrong people are getting and claiming rights–people like myself, for instance, which I find deeply offensive. In addition to this, people like the author are not looking for rights that restrain obvious racism so much as the liberty to force people to behave as they want to in order to provide positive rights for people like blacks and the disabled because of supposed and imagined systemic bias against such people based on the sort of statistical reason that (rightly) has been consistently rejected by American courts as a reasonable argument. It is hard to be overly sympathetic to people who desire to browbeat or coerce courts to change their judicial philosophy to benefit a bunch of frustrated progressives whose behavior has long sought to tear America apart for their own selfish political gain.

So given that the author has a lot of whining and complaining about the current philosophy of judges regarding rights, what would the author recommend? What the author has in mind instead of red lines and absolute conceptions of rights is the sort of balancing of rights that allows governments and especially regulators–of the kind who as Progressives regularly tend to overshoot absolute rights to the detriment of those not politically in favor of them–to engage in behavior that has to be taken as at least partly legitimate because it is done by agents of the state, even if doing so harms the well-being of those whose claims of rights would, in the American sense, stop such government behavior in its tracks. The author uses as his centerpiece argument a specific interpretation of the abortion crisis as it was judicially solved in both Germany and the United States, urging the United States to adopt Germany’s model of justice (no, this is not a joke) in place of its own. While there is a great deal I could say against the author’s conception of rights, the decisive argument for me at least is that people like the author cannot be trusted to act with the best interests of Americans in heart, and the sort of government bureaucrats whose “rights” the author wants to include in the balance include those who promogulated and enforced biased restrictions against the assembly of people of faith during the overhyped Covid crisis, tax officials who selectively hassled conservative not-for-profit groups in abusing discretionary power, and “justice” officials who have regularly targeted right-of-center people on trumped up political charges. These people deserve jail, or death, or personal bankruptcy, not to have their decisions given the undeserved dignity of any kind of legitimacy in a legal dispute.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 250 pages or so, divided into three parts and nine chapters. After a foreword by Jill Lepore and an introduction, the first part of the book looks at how rights became trumps against the behavior of others (I), with chapters on the Bill of Rights (which the author, of course, does not get right) (1), the intersection of rights and race (2), and what the author labels as rightsism in an attempt to delegitimize it (3). The second part of the book finds the author opining that without justice (in his own biased eyes) there will be no peace (II), with chapters urging utopian justice (4), discussing what happens when rights collide (5), and looking at cases where rights divide (6). The last part finds the author trying to rehabilitate rights so that they are acceptable in his own eyes (III), with chapters on disability (7), affirmative action (8), and campus speech (9), where the author finds himself immensely hostile to the speech rights of right-of-center students and public figures, predictably enough. The book ends with a conclusion, acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

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Book Review: Hebrew For Dummies

Posted on May 8, 2024 by nathanalbright

Hebrew For Dummies, by Jill Suzanne Jacobs

This book is one that desperately wants to be hip and to show that a language that had been moribund for centuries, limited to liturgical use, had been resurrected like the Messiah as a modern language can have all the accoutrements of a contemporary language, but the author forgets (if she ever knows) that not all authors would even want to point this out or celebrate these corruptions of the language. To be sure, there is a lot of what some readers would consider corruptions, be it the transliteration of telephone into its Hebrew equivalent, the expression for a female rabbi that the author’s grandmother apparently contributed to modern Hebrew, the way that the author views Jewish tradition as equal to scripture, and non-binary forms of the language that the author makes a great to-do over. It is almost as if the author thinks or fears nothing insofar as God’s judgment is concerned and wants to celebrate how cool and how Progressive Hebrew is. While there are no doubt some readers who will celebrate this, especially in light of the serious struggle that Israel faces in world opinion, perhaps trying to appeal to the progressive left was a mistake that the author realizes in time to fix for the next edition of this book. We can only hope.

Aside from general structural considerations, there is a wide degree of variety in the Dummies series. While all of the Dummies volumes contain chapters that are for sets of tens, each author has a great deal of freedom to adapt the structure of the series to suit their own tastes and preferences. I cannot say that this book, which struggles under the weight of heavy and ponderous tables of vocabulary words, especially verb conjugations, is as interesting a read as it could have been. Perhaps the fundamental disconnect for me is that I would have welcomed a book on biblical Hebrew that would have stuck more or less to the rules defined within the scriptures. To be sure, that would have cut out a great deal of those aspects of Judaism, certain progressive trendiness in certain corners, the Talmudic traditions of the rabbis, but it would have been the sort of book I would have appreciated because it would have been about the Word of God rather than about the author’s oversized pride in a language that has been changed to a great degree by the politics of the past century and a half or so. There certainly is a time and a place for addressing the return of Hebrew to a language that is spoken by millions of people and the basis of a particularly robust nationalism in the present-day, but I’m not sure that is exactly the book I would have preferred to read.

In terms of its contents, and including the appendices of the book, which are a proper part of the pages, this book sprawls to almost 400 pages in length. After an introduction the book begins with part one, which introduces the reader to Hebrew in three chapters that show the reader already knows some Hebrew (1), introduces basic Hebrew grammar (2), and then provides terms for meeting and greeting (3). This is followed by a lengthy part of the book that shows Hebrew in action in such areas as small talk (4), food (5), shopping (6), having fun (7), enjoying free time (8), talking on the phone (9), and at the office and around the house (10). After this there are four chapters of Hebrew on the go in planning and taking a trip (11), getting around by flying, driving and riding vehicles (12), money (13), and handling emergencies (14). A couple of chapters show the author delving deeper into Hebrew life by introducing the reader to Israel (15) as well as issues of war and peace (16). Three chapters deal with sacred Hebrew in the Bible (17), often understood through the Talmud, prayers (18), and sacred times and spaces (19). The part of tens shows the author telling the reader about ten books of Hebrew the reader must have (20), ten favorite Hebrew expressions (21), and ten great Israeli phrases (22). This is followed by appendices that show verb tables (a), give a mini Hebrew-English dictionary (b), and provide an answer key to questions during the text (c), as well as provide an index.

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Book Review: A Fine Mess

Posted on May 7, 2024 by nathanalbright

A Fine Mess: A Global Quest For A Simpler, Fairer, And More Efficient Tax System, by T.R. Reid

One can tell a lot about this book if one knows a little bit about the author–which admittedly, I didn’t until looking at the back sleeve. This sleeve helpfully informs the reader that the author is a longtime correspondent for the WaPo, a commentator for NPR, has been a correspondent for PBS documentaries, and has written approvingly about Europe and its bureaucratic and corrupt ways. Given this background, the rest of the book practically writes itself. It is perhaps ironic, given the author’s persistent misrepresentation of the biblical position of taxation and property rights of the Bible that the author both notes that anyone can get whatever they want from the Bible (including the author, it must be noted but is not admitted), that the author shows the most hostility towards the two forms of taxation that are ordained in Israel: a proportional tax that resembles nothing more than the flat tax that the author views with disdain, and a regressive but very modest head tax for census purposes that demonstrates the equality of people under God, and makes poor people pay correspondingly for that equality. The author seems to be in favor of just about every other tax he meets other than the corporate tax which encourages tax dodges and financial shenanigans which the author properly sees as a bad thing.

This is no hyperbole. The author takes his tour of taxes and finds taxation to be something he glories in. He bemoans the tendency of Americans to be reflexively hostile towards government expenditures to the extent that it is politically possible to support socially desirable ends through tax deductions rather than tax increases. The author bemoans the hostility of both main parties of the United States to the VAT, which the author views as some sort of heaven-sent revenue generating machine for corrupt governments that the author wants the United States to emulate. The author’s view of justice is such that he cannot see any taxation system as just unless it somehow squeezes the wealthy at every turn–with death taxes, luxury taxes, financial transaction taxes (labeled as FAT taxes), as well as punitive rates of personal taxation, and a near complete removal of all tax deductions. That the author recognizes the political challenge of this is not in any way a discouragement to the author, given that he proposed his ridiculous and completely impossible tax plans as a proposal for the tax code of 2018, a year that came and went without any tax reform of notice. Given the political gridlock of the contemporary age, it seems entirely unlikely that the author’s plans would be brought to fruition any time soon, and good riddance for that.

This book is a bit more than 250 pages, and it begins with a prologue that assumes (not correctly) that the tax code is reformed every 32 years, giving the author a deadline of 2018 to propose for his own tax code to be adopted by Congress. This is followed by a look at the United States (and other nations of the world, whose tax policies the author views too highly) as being policy laboratories (1). This is followed by several chapters that deal with the author’s discussion of various views of taxation, including America’s interest in low effort, low collection taxes (which sounds reasonably just by the world’s standards) (2), posits what increased taxes are good for (3), and encourages taxes that are broad-based but have low rates (though not low enough to meet biblical standards of less than a tithe, it must be admitted) (4). The author talks about the problem of tax dodges (5), pours scorn upon the flat tax for not providing enough revenue for leftist spendthrift governments to waste on social programs (6), seeks to provide the solution for taxation issues (7), as well as the persistent efforts of businesses and wealthy people to avoid paying ruinously high taxes (8) of the kind that the author supports. The author turns his attention to a variety of possible tax regimes that are practiced around the world (9) or that could be, devotes a whole chapter to the Panama Papers (10), urges simplification of the tax code (11), and looks at the VAT as a money machine that ought to be speedily adopted (12). The author then closes with an epilogue about his nightmarish internal revenue code of 2018, as well as thanks, notes, and an index.

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Book Review: Rights Gone Wrong

Posted on May 6, 2024 by nathanalbright

Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts The Struggle For Equality, by Richard Thompson Ford

Why is it that so many writers see rights as having gone wrong in the contemporary era? If you read books like these, you get a rather predictably and lamentably skewed perspective of why that is the case, but even though this book is deeply tainted by the author’s defective worldview and politics, there are at least a few worthwhile insights that should not be neglected even if they are rare jewels in piles of manure. One of the unexpected insights of this book is that the author reveals something that is highly damaging to those who speak loosely of structural racism, and that is the fact that African immigrants tend to succeed far more than African Americans not because they are any less black, but because they lack the oppositional attitudes that hinder success in contemporary American society. As it turns out, much (and perhaps all) of what is labeled as structural racism is in fact bad attitudes that lead to predictably negative performance in society, and that rather than deserving something from government, such people need to get over themselves and live in such a way that they may thrive with the opportunities that exist for those who are able to grasp them.

To be sure, it does not seem that the author particularly understands the seriousness of what he admits when contrasting the fate of African immigrants with African-Americans, but it undermines a big part of the author’s argument. For one, it appears that the author thinks that rights have gone wrong because the “wrong” people have been able to claim rights, and also because what the author and others like him want is not so much freedom from oppression and overt racism and the like, but rather material blessings that they view as obligated to them, and the author recognizes that the contemporary argument over rights does not suit the demand for entitlements well, given the Supreme Court’s understandably hostile view of demands for entitlements from society at large for “protected” and “vulnerable” groups. The author recognizes that the nuanced and complicated nature of our contemporary society is ill-suited to blunt weapons of lawfare, although it must be admitted that the author and others of his ilk cannot be trusted to mediate the disputes over rights any more than they can be trusted in other areas of politics. And ultimately that reality is fatal to the reasoning of the author and so many others like him. To trust in the political process requires us to trust those with whom we are dealing with, and those like the author who imagine structural racism that does not exist and claim that one cannot be racist against whites make themselves impossible to view as reasonable and trustworthy people with whom one can get along.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 250 pages or so in length, divided into a few large, sprawling, and somewhat poorly edited chapters. The book begins with a lengthy introduction that whines about the gap between the promise of rights in the 1960s and the situation today where rights have not done all that people hoped they would do. This is followed by a discussion of entitlement and advantage (1), which demonstrates the general tone-deafness of the author to properly understanding the widespread hostility to entitlements that exist in many quarters. This is followed by a chapter on discriminating tastes (2), where the author comments (accurately) that there are cases where discrimination is a good thing rather than a bad thing, something which ought to be kept in mind. This is followed by a discussion of unintended consequences of the law, such as the way that ladies’ nights have been forbidden as providing improper benefits to women, despite their intent to provide women to what would otherwise be disappointingly male-heavy social events (3). A chapter on civil rights activism as therapy (4) would be less heavy handed if the author considered that writing is also a known form of therapy that the author himself engages in. This is followed by the author’s view of how rights are to be righted (5), after which the book ends with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.

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Book Review: Religious Liberty In Crisis

Posted on May 5, 2024 by nathanalbright

Religious Liberty In Crisis: Exercising Your Faith In An Age Of Uncertainty, by Ken Starr

Is religious liberty in crisis in the United States? As recently as five years ago I would have said that it would have been premature to say that, even if the general moral tendency of the United States (and many other places around the world) was definitely on the negative swing. That said, the disastrous and unconstitutional response of leftist governments in places like California, Oregon, Michigan, and other places to the Covid-19 disease convinced me that such corrupt leftists who viewed inconsistent public health arguments as trumping religious liberty and freedom of assembly concerns were utterly unqualified to run this nation without ruining the lives of people of faith. The author, wisely, steps into the post-Covid world of religious freedom and discusses the divergence between increasingly insensitive and corrupt left-wing assaults on religion and what amounts, at least at present, to a Supreme Court that is generally solid on issues of religious freedom. Even if the Supreme Court is reasonably solid on religious claims (if by no means perfect), the increasingly partisan divide between red and blue states on issues of religious liberty bodes very ill for the general sake of religious health in the United States if it continues to be a partisan matter.

The author’s analysis, quite sensibly, comments that there have long been corrupt politicians who have sought to pass laws that unlawfully infringed on religious freedoms for what they viewed as compelling reasons without sufficient carve-outs for people of faith. There have also, historically speaking, been plenty of corrupt judges willing to trade of religious freedoms as a part of bargains with the supposed interests of the state, as well as adopt tests that would make religious freedom difficult to pursue in the courts. The author also notes that many times decisions are made because of particular fact patterns, such as whether or not the state is being viewed as seeking to promote religious belief, as government interference in religion is generally viewed as a negative sign, whether that interference is meant positively or negatively. Although the author is perhaps best known for his service to the country during the Clinton administration, the author also has broad experience in the law and education sectors and has long been a consultant for those looking for help in religious cases before the Supreme Court. The experience and perspective he brings to such matters is quite excellent and the book makes for a thoughtful if concerning read.

In terms of its contents, this book is a relatively short one at less than 200 pages of material. An introduction gives a preliminary word about the subject of religious liberty in the United States. This is followed by a chapter that points out the overreach of government power on religious matters that has existed for a long time (1). This is followed by a discussion of the faith of our fathers–which assumes for the most part that the reader comes from a Christian, probably even a Protestant, background (2). This is followed by a discussion of America’s freedom of worship (3) as well as the constitutional combat zone of the battle over school prayer that started decades ago (4). After this the author discusses religious discrimination in the schoolhouse (5), The author discusses friends of religious liberty in the White House and Capitol Hill (6) as well as the issue of school vouchers for parochial schools (7), an area where the author has considerable experience. The author tackles the questions of whether the government can provide financial aid to religious institutions (yes) (8), the problems of the Lemon test, as well as the accommodation principle (10) that seeks to lower tensions over religious rights. After this the author discusses contemporary efforts that have been hostile to faith and the response of Congress and the courts to it (11), the importance of religious liberty to the ongoing well-being of the United States (12), and the troublesome rise of cancel culture on the part of the left (13). The book then ends with an afterword, acknowledgements, and notes.

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