In their essence, monetary systems are all very simple. But that essence can be buried and hidden from view by accretions of practices over time. Money systems give rise to additional, ‘emergent’ properties as the groups that develop them grow in size and complexity.
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Like most advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I didn’t embrace the paradigm because I dig late-night chats about accounting identities. Rather, I found it while pursuing economic justice (following the lead of Angela Harris, Emma Coleman…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Basic legal ideas about taxation stand in the way of proposals for ambitious fiscal policies to address pervasive economic insecurity among both middle class and lower income households. The conventional legal framework posits two primary functions for…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Even amongst critical scholars, there is a tendency to treat international regulation of money and finance as “strictly economic”, distinct from the “social” domains of labor, the environment, and socio-economic rights. This conceptual separation cedes the realm…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Money and property law are mutually constitutive. Property rights are defined and valued in terms of their relationship to monetary instruments, while whether something counts as a monetary instrument for this or that purpose is itself a…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Legal realists and their heirs made it into a truism: law is constantly entangled in value judgment. The statement is typically aimed at undermining one sense of the claim that law and legal judgment are or even…
This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a comic book on the origins of money. The story, called “Once Upon a Dime,” unspools sweetly. Far far away, on the planet Novus, a community of good-willed…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Luke Herrine — This blog has already hosted several examples of re-thinkings of the nature of money and its relationship to law and power, most recently in a symposium on LPE Contributor Mehrsa Baradaran’s book on money…