Statistics as a Form of Knowledge
An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau’s States and the Masters of Capital
An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau's States and the Masters of Capital...
Read More
History Rhymes
As history’s pendulum swings back, the problems and promises of globalization’s fragmented frameworks become almost too evident
The neoliberal thinking that has defined globalization in the West since the eighties decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten-but that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins....
Read More
The Car Rental Sales Tax Swap Scam
Car rental corporate consolidation, funded by you
Big car rental corporations did a very good job sweeping across the country collecting what is a massive backdoor tax subsidy on the purchase of their main business asset....
Read More
“The Commonwealth of Amazon”
Amazon Web Services holds about 40 percent of the cloud computing market
As one Virginia resident put it, “Northern Virginia is being overwhelmed by these things. … We may as well start calling ourselves the Commonwealth of Amazon.”...
Read More
Non-Competes, Banned
The FTC took the first step, now states need to follow up
Getting rid of non-competes is a big deal and is a big win for economic freedom for all workers...
Read More
How Sanctions Contributed to Venezuela’s Economic Collapse
Despite claims that they targeted the Maduro regime, sanctions had indiscriminate effects on the country
This essay was originally published by The Global Americans and is reprinted with permission
During the past decade, Venezuela lived through the largest economic contraction documented in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The implosion took place at the same time as the U.S. government barred oil purchases, froze government bank ...
Read More
Why We Should Worry about Inequality
And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill
Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...
Read More
Austerity, Then and Now
An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...
Read More
Election Day 2022: Good (and Some Bad) News for State Corporate Power Politics
Big tech antagonists did well, but so did megadeal boosters
Big Tech antagonists won big in attorneys general races. So did all of the governors who have been promoting major corporate subsidy deals in recent months won their reelection races, lending more evidence to the already existing heap of it that massive corporate handouts can be potent political tools....
Read More
An Ethics of Refusal
Beyond “The Great Resignation”
In the United States, we live in a country where someone who works for a law firm that services Big Oil is by and large considered intelligent and successful, maybe even ethical due to their pro bono representation, no matter that such a firm, for instance, did not represent foreclosure ...
Read More
The Rat Race of Prestige and Boredom
W. David Marx on how status affects human behavior
The whole idea of cultural capital is knowing what objects to buy, how to arrange them, how to behave—all of these things go together. Just because you can purchase an object does not mean you can get into the group....
Read More
The “Transferable” Subsidy Scam
Meet a big, under-the-radar problem
It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. But making a corporate subsidy transferable is an easy thing to do under the radar, without folks knowing what it means or realizing what their state is in for when such a policy is actually implemented. ...
Read More
