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Essay

Coordination Rights Beyond Nation States

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Conversations about progressive possibilities for economic policy and political economy often undertheorize or ignore international trade. The international economy is often seen as a free-for-all between countries, a space where powerful multinational firms are able to play governments off one another, resulting in a race to the bottom of domestic laws. . .
Symposium

Countering the Neoliberal Structural Constitution

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This post is part of our symposium on socialist constitutionalism. The Federalist Society leverages right-wing legal change by promoting constitutional originalism as a seemingly noble and neutral foundation for neoliberal political economy.  Without a comparably accessible and compelling contrary first principle, left and centrist law and politics. . .
Essay

A Tribute to David Graeber

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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.
Symposium

The Deficit Myth: Banking Between The Lines

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“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. . .
Symposium

Breadth and Taxes

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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.
Essay

A Nightmare of Work and Care

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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. . .
Essay

Spread the Fed, Part II

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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. . .
Essay

Spread the Fed, Part I

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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. . .
Essay

Policing as Unequal Protection

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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. . .