Economists tend to characterize the scope of regulation as a simple matter of expanding or contracting state power. But a political economy perspective emphasizes that social relations abhor a power vacuum. When state authority contracts, private parties fill the gap. That power can feel just as oppressive, and have effects just as pervasive, as garden…
Over the weekend, CVS announced a proposal to acquire Aetna. The $69 billion merger would be the biggest deal ever in the health insurance industry, consolidating in a single entity the role of insurer, pharmacy, and pharmacy benefit manager. There’s good reason to think the deal—if approved by the Justice Department—would harm the public. To…
If the details of the House and Senate tax bills under consideration in Washington make your eyes glaze over, it’s because they’re supposed to. The tax-writers, as they often do, are using the technicalities of the tax law to mask major changes in national economic policy. It’s fairly well-known that both bills are stacked in…
Entrepreneurship and innovation are not good in themselves. The toxic assets at the core of the financial crisis were innovative in many ways, but ultimately posed unacceptable risks. Entrepreneurial arms dealers could easily provide massively destructive weapons to terrorists. Many less troubling products and services have shadow sides that outweigh their ostensible benefits. Until law and economics places such concerns at the core of its inquiry—rather than relegating them to backwater arenas of externality correction and transfers—it will fail to account for core economic dynamics. Law and political economy addresses these issues directly, as an intersecting realm of monetary value and social values.
In September of 2017, I attended the First International Conference of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Subtitled “Economics for a New Progressive Era,” the conference displaced the university’s annual Post-Keynesian Conference, signaling a growing enthusiasm for MMT among academics, advocates, students, and regular people. Reporters from Bloomberg and the…
