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LPE Originals

Have You Heard the Good News About Consumer Protection?

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Recent years have witnessed a sea change in consumer protection, ushered in by a new generation of enforcers who reject many of the basic premises from the neoliberal era. They aim not merely to ensure that consumers have the information necessary to discipline firms through choice, but to prevent businesses from using their power to shape markets in ways that take advantage of consumers.
LPE Originals

The Role of Coercion in the Neoliberal Economy

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As neoliberal attacks on progressive taxation emptied public coffers, states and municipalities increasingly turned to fines and fees to generate revenue. More fundamentally, criminal punishment became a necessary correlate to a state that must enforce property rights against an ever-growing multitude.
LPE Originals

Octavia Butler and Afrofuturist Legal Critique

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Butler’s speculative fiction uses the freedom dreams of Black Americans to show how the structure of a political economy not only reflects but also shapes legal concepts. By challenging the perceived permanence of existing power structures, Afrofuturism creates space for envisioning new, emancipatory futures.
LPE Originals

The Unlikely Victors

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The intellectuals of the neoliberal movement are best understood as the losers of societal change — rearguard protectionists who decided that rather than concede to democracy, they would subvert and delegitimize it.
LPE Originals

The Chamber of Commerce’s Moral Panic

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Soon after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the news filled with panicked complaints about “retail theft.” This manufactured crisis replicates the longstanding strategy of the Chamber of Commerce in nurturing a conservative backlash to social movements.
LPE Originals

Making Families Great Again

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In the resurgence of family fortunes in recent decades, regressive tax cuts tell only half the story. Just as important were trust law reforms that helped family dynasts protect their new gains in ways previously thought impossible.
LPE Originals

The Rise of Neoliberal Public Finance

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How did the American state come to be so extravagant in its recourse to public debt issuance, yet so selectively austere in its public spending choices? To answer this question, we need to understand how two rival schools of thought — Virginia school public choice and supply side economics — converged around the imperative to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending.
LPE Originals

The Re-Risking State: The Limits of Property Insurance in Florida

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In Florida, insurers increasingly rely on external capital to prepare for the possibility of high loss climate events. Sophisticated financial tools such as insurance-linked securities provide a temporary solution to growing climate risk in coastal regions, but in the long run, they do not address the fundamental causes of the insurability crisis.
LPE Originals

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition

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Since the late 20th century, free trade has been defended primarily by neoliberals who cared little about social justice or democracy. However, a longer examination of free trade’s relationship to left-wing politics paints a very different picture. Recovering the history of those who defended free trade from the left may help us envision an alternative to the escalating economic nationalism we see today.
LPE Originals

The Political Effects of Neoliberalism

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Why have less-educated Americans, long the base of the Democratic Party, flocked to Republicans in recent decades? New research shows that much of this change can be explained by the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy, as the party gradually moved away from its traditional emphasis on “predistribution policies” (favored by less-educated Americans), instead embracing redistributive tax-and-transfer policies (favored by more-educated Americans).
LPE Originals

The Vicious Spiral of Political and Economic Inequality

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Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, which slashed the highest marginal tax rate from 50 to 28 percent, was one of the largest and most regressive tax cuts in the history of the United States. New research shows that it also caused an increase in campaign contributions among the wealthy – demonstrating how rising economic and political inequality reinforce one another through public policy.