The Blind Spot Author: Jeffrey Winters ISBN-13: 9780241661826Publisher: Allen Lane Guideline Price: £25 This book will enrage you, confirming as it does the suspicion many of us have that rich people don’t pay taxes while the rest of us do. The Blind Spot in the title of Jeffrey Winters’s latest book is, in essence, our continued focus on taking chunks out of each other along the horizontal axis of society, while the oligarchs rob us on the vertical one.At best, we aim our ire towards the accountants, lawyers and politicians who facilitate the oligarchy in our society, but not the actual oligarchs. It is a weakness within our democracy that causes us to overlook the very obvious theft that happens every moment of every day, and which leads to deep economic inequality. The fact that it’s embedded within our society is a key part of Winters’s premise in this book; democracy is not built to combat oligarchy, but rather the democracy we are all a part of is designed to facilitate this abject inequality, with just the right tension to convince us that it’s not. “The ideal outcome balances the two so elegantly that no one is quite sure which system they live under.”This book will also thrill you. The chapters covering the incredible work of Richard Jaffe, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intelligence agent, and his covert operation, reads like a pacy political thriller. And it will school you, reaching back to the creation of the US constitution to explore how oligarchy is so deeply embedded in democracy.Agent Jaffe and his colleagues are heroes in the story of American tax justice. They made isolated but meaningful headway in holding to account oligarchs avoiding massive tax payments. Jaffe led a clandestine, but legal, undercover operation in the 1960s, using a network of local informants to expose a rolodex of wealthy clients of a Bahamian bank.[ Elites and Democracy by Hugo Drochon: Heavyweight contribution to long-running debateOpens in new window ]Despite the success of the operation, or because of it, a senior political appointment brought it to a shuddering halt and the evidence never led to any prosecutions. Not only were Jaffe’s career and reputation destroyed, the backlash meant that the capacity of key US institutions to ever again effectively deal with oligarchy was crippled. The villains that comprise the wealth defence industry similarly spring to life from the pages of The Blind Spot – brazen and aggressive lawyers and accountants who made an industry, and a lot of wealth themselves, from professionalising tax avoidance. We time-travel back to the 18th century to learn of the competing constitutions of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, which battled to set the tone of the Constitution of the United States. The Shays rebellion, the Constitutional Convention itself; vignettes of US history each worthy of a book in themselves. And fear not. Although this is an American story, all of these elements – the history, the system, the characters within – are clearly and sometimes explicitly connected to modern democracies the world over.Throughout the book, the impenetrability of tax reform is identified as a barrier to real change. The fact that most of us fall asleep at the mere mention of tax law is not an accident. It has allowed secrecy to develop as a shield for the wealth defence industry. And now complexity is in itself an even greater protection for oligarchy. [ The Irish Times view on wealth inequality: the rich are getting a lot richerOpens in new window ]The US tax code has evolved to such a state of sheer volume and byzantine intricacy, that it is virtually impenetrable. Furthermore, access to justice is thwarted as courts and juries grapple with evidence and cases that would bamboozle the best of us. There’s an urgency towards the end of The Blind Spot where proposed solutions are presented in two categories – the ongoing work of changing the system, through better employment rights and more progressive tax systems, and separately the radical system-changing reform that’s needed – ditching upper houses in parliaments, funding our agencies and institutions to actually take down oligarchs, reforming our courts and elections to protect against interference. This second category is what Winters calls The Politics of Preparation, the title of the final chapter. Essentially, we need to have these big ideas ready to go so that when an opportunity for real change presents itself, we’re ready to pounce. This is most likely to happen after a crisis. Indeed, the only real progress we’ve seen in recent decades was post 9-11, when oligarchs got caught in the net of antiterrorism legislation. In the final pages, Winters even proposes sortition, a system of government where rather than electing our politicians, they’re randomly, but representatively, pulled from a qualified pool of candidates, much like a jury. Whether it’s sortition or another big idea, systemic change is required to bring us “closer to fuller power-sharing and away from the toxic levels of economic inequality tearing at the fabric of society”.Sinéad Gibney is a Social Democrat TD for Dublin-Rathdown