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LPE Blog

A Tribute to David Graeber

The importance of Graeber’s work goes well beyond money and debt. In my view, anybody interested in building up a renewed legal realism that can stand up to not just law-and-economics but also the updated formalism of liberal analytic moral/legal theory would be well served to familiarize themselves with his writings.

The Deficit Myth: Banking Between The Lines

“Now, the rest is up to us because we are responsible for each other and to each other.  We are responsible to the future, and not to Chase Manhattan Bank.” –– James Baldwin This post is part of our symposium on Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth. You can find the full symposium here.  Several commenters have. . .

Breadth and Taxes

Emma Caterine explains why taxation does not need to be the bitter salve taken with every spoonful of sugar – it is and always has been a way to provide for the general welfare, and how C.J. Roberts in Sebelius may have unwittingly opened the door to an MMT approach to understanding taxation.

A Nightmare of Work and Care

At least since welfare reform, then, we have coexisted with a particularly monstrous work-life imbalance for low-income parents in which economic security, much less economic mobility for their children, remains forever out of reach. Americans have learned to live with punitive workfare as their only form of safety net assistance (or without it, as is. . .

Spread the Fed, Part II

From Federal Disintegration through Community QE to Central Bank Decentralization In the post immediately preceding this one, I observed that the twinned histories of American ambivalence toward centralized political governance on the one hand and central banking on the other place recent development in the realms of both pandemic response and American public. . .

Spread the Fed, Part I

Central banking and finance in the US have a curiously ‘dialectical’ history – a history mirroring, in interesting ways, that of our federal union itself. Both histories reflect ambivalence about, and hence oscillation both toward and away from, collective agency and its political manifestation in centralized governance. Tracing these parallel trajectories. . .

Policing as Unequal Protection

Black Americans have endured police violence since the nation’s founding. The origins of American policing have been traced to slave patrols. Today, Blacks are more likely than whites to encounter police, to be stopped by police, and to be fatally wounded by police. In recognition of this history and ongoing experience. . .

An Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare

This post is part of a series on Black Lives Matters. The COVID-19 pandemic and police killings of George Floyd and other Black men and women have starkly revealed society’s race and class-based inequality and brought unprecedented attention to the excesses of the carceral state. One arm of punitive state regulation, however, has gone largely undiscussed:…

Carceral Feminism at a Crossroad

In this watershed moment when policymakers feel liberated to embrace noncarceral responses to the behaviors that laws label crimes, one question rings out: “What about rape and domestic violence?” The pro-policing contingent intends this as a rhetorical “gotcha.” But many progressives open to meaningful reform genuinely worry about the demise of. . .

Weekly Roundup: July 31, 2020

This week at the blog…

Noah Zatz analyzed the ways in which the CARES Act does and (mostly) does not support care work. He argues that the prioritization of supporting the formal employment market makes the support for care work maddeningly indirect and even perverse, especially as the pressure builds for returning kids to school.

The. . .