Print Archive
The notion of a universal basic income, or UBI, has captivated academics, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and ordinary citizens in recent years. Across the globe, countries ranging from Brazil to Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, Kenya, Uganda, and Canada are conducting or have recently concluded pilot studies of a UBI.
The Chicago School, said to have influenced antitrust analysis inescapably, is associated today with a set of ideas and arguments about the goal of antitrust law. In particular, the Chicago School is known for asserting that economic efficiency is and should be the only purpose of antitrust law and that the neoclassical price theory model offers the best policy tool for maximizing economic efficiency in the real world; that corporate actions, including various vertical restraints, are efficient and welfare-increasing; that markets are self-correcting and monopoly is merely an occasional, unstable, and transitory outcome of the competitive process; and that governmental cures for the rare cases where markets fail to self-correct tend to be “worse than the disease.”
Open, competitive markets are a foundation of economic liberty. A lack of competition, meanwhile, can enable dominant firms to exercise their market power in harmful ways.
High tech industries are not only lucrative, but also highly innovative and dynamic. Large firms are not their sole source of innovation, however.
The Supreme Court ushered in a dramatic shift in Second Amendment jurisprudence in District of Columbia v Heller, holding that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms for “the core lawful purpose of self-defense.” This decision made clear that possession of a firearm need not be tethered to service in a militia. But the Court left open significant questions regarding what exactly that newly defined right entails.
In early 2017, a newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump tried to force policy change through a flurry of written orders. While some opponents took to the streets to protest, others identified a different forum for resistance: the federal courts. Lawyers, mobilizing at a breakneck pace, sued the President in name to enjoin the implementation of several of his signature orders, including his first travel ban and an executive order involving sanctuary cities.
In search of an accessible epithet, newspapers across the country have christened debt that is barred by the statute of limitations “zombie debt.” This “funny term” for time-barred debt reflects its tendency to come back to life and attack when, like the first victims in a horror movie, consumers “seal their [ ] fate” by their own heedless approaches to debt collectors.
Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have attracted controversy for their growing influence on our social, political, and commercial activities. Some commentators worry that these companies’ ability to gather data and control who accesses it threatens the competitive health of the digital economy. This trend could harm consumers by stifling innovation in online products and by producing a digital economy with fewer choices and fewer competitors determined to win consumers’ business.
In 2016, Mississippi passed the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, a law exempting Mississippians with “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” that marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples from the state’s antidiscrimination laws.