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The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt

The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion.

Prison Rape and the Government by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow Sexual Victimization Reported by Adult Correctional Authorities, 2007–2008 by Allen J. Beck and Paul Guerino National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by the United States Department of Justice Initial Regulatory Impact Analysis for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Proposed National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape Under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008–09 by Allen J. Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” These are a few of the reasons why prisoners fear reporting rape. How many people are really victimized every year? The department divides sexual abuse in detention into four categories. He missed that deadline.

Quiet Politics and Business Power Corporate Control in Europe and Japan Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute, Florence Publication date:January 2011 248pages 17 b/w illus. 19 tables Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm Weight: 0.48kg In stock Welcome, Nato, to Chicago's police state | Bernard Harcourt With Nato delegates arriving Saturday night, the City of Chicago has been turned into a police state. Courtesy of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who several months ago began implementing new draconian anti-protest measures, Chicago has gone on security lockdown. Starting early Friday night, 18 May 2012, the Chicago Police Department began shutting down – prohibiting cars, bikes, and pedestrians – miles and miles of highways and roads in the heart of Chicago to create a security perimeter around downtown and McCormick Place (where the Nato summit is being held). Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready. So, welcome, Nato, to the Chicago police state 2012. A few further points are worth mentioning.

Navigating Neoliberalism: Political Aesthetics in an Age of Crisis (Nick Srnicek) Navigating Neoliberalism3 the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” In charting through a loose set of historical periods from national to imperialist to globalised capitalism, Jameson arguesthat at one time the nature of capitalism was such that one could potentially establish acorrespondence between our local phenomenological experiences and the economicstructure that determined it. We could, in other words, establish a cognitive map of oureconomic space, thereby making intelligible the world around us. With therise of globalisation, however, Jameson claims that this is no longer the case. With globalised capitalism havingbecome unbound from anyphenomenological coordinates, this possibility for a socialist politics has becomeincreasingly difficult.At the heart of the problem is that “the economy is not found as anempirical object among other worldly things[.] Like many other objects of science, the economy evades any sort of directperception. Jameson,

Against Law, For Order It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state. Conservative leaders like Grover Norquist have said that mass incarceration violates the principles of “fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government,” while GOP darlings like Mitch Daniels have tried to take the lead in state reform. The next question is what to do about it, and here the answers are harder. What all of these approaches take for granted is that government policy runs downhill. An alternative account holds that our policy of mass incarceration reconfigures both the idea of the state and the way it carries out its duties. Neoconservative When neoconservatives say that they are the party of “law and order,” it is important to remember that they care less for the rule of law than they do for the rule of order. Neoliberalism

Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. "This path-breaking book is among the most ambitious, innovative, sweeping, and rigorous scholarly efforts in comparative political economy and political development. "This tour de force combines brilliant theoretical imagination and historical breadth to shine new light on issues that have long been central in social science. "Sociologists are given a new template about class interactions in the political sphere, one that suggests both new tests and new ideas. "This book is an immense achievement. "…brilliant in its parsimony of means and power of explanation. "…there is much [here] to admire.

Bernard E. Harcourt | University of Chicago Law School Website: Professor Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at The University of Chicago. Professor Harcourt's scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author of the book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (in French 2012 here at PUL and in English forthcoming at the University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of Against Prediction: Punishing and Policing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Education: AB ,1984, Princeton University; JD, 1989, and PhD, 2000, Harvard University

Logical Fallacies Welcome Welcome to an official mirror site of The point of an argument is to give reasons in support of some conclusion. An argument commits a fallacy when the reasons offered do not support the conclusion. See How To Use This Guide. If you can think of more fallacies that you'd really like to see, please send me a note. In the long run, this site will become a complete discussion of logic. Matt Stoller: Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison? Matt Stoller is a current fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is @matthewstoller. More than a third of all states allow debtors “who can’t or won’t pay their debts” to be jailed. In 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal, judges have issued 5,000 such warrants. What is behind the increased pressure to incarcerate people with debts? Is it a desire to force debt payment? Consider a different example that has nothing to do with debts. Welcome to the for-profit prison industry. Privatized prisons are marketed to international investors as “social infrastructure”, and they are part of a wave of privatization washing over the globe. Here’s the 2010 10k of the Corrections Corporation of America (PDF), the largest operator of private prisons in the country. CCA offers an assessment of risks to the company, which include ending the war on drugs or curbing the incarceration of undocumented immigrants. But there are more risks.

The Conditions of Democracy in Europe 1919-39 Between 1918 and 1945 there were many changes in European politics - old empires disappeared and new independent political systems emerged. Over the same period most countries faced similar problems - the world economic crisis and the rise of new ideologies and new political movements. But the political effects of these varied, and this study looks at the following key questions: why did democracy survive in some countries but not in others? How were some political institutions able to contain or manage the crises they faced but others collapsed or underwent radical transformation? This book outlines a new approach to this problem through the systematic analysis of eighteen polities within a common analytical framework. What is innovative is the weight given to economic, social and cultural factors in explaining the survival of democracy and the origins of fascism as well as the systematic incorporation of a range of political factors.

Drug War Clock Researchers examining the effectiveness of ONDCP's anti-drug media campaign reported: "The NSPY [National Survey of Parents and Youth] did not find significant reductions in marijuana use either leading up to or after the Marijuana campaign for youth 12 to 18 years old between 2002 and 2003. Indeed there was evidence for an increase in past month and past year use among the target audience of 14- to 16-year-olds, although it appears that the increase was already in place in the last half of 2002, before the launch of the Marijuana Initiative. It will be worthwhile to track whether the nonsignificant decline from the second half of 2002 through the first half of 2003 is the beginning of a true trend.

The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy. There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past. However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books: 1.) RELATED: Why Can’t You Smoke Pot? To receive stories and investigations about political corruption, sign up for our daily digest here. Share and Enjoy Filed under: Lobbying

The Primacy of Politics Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. "In this fascinating book, Sheri Berman rewrites the ideological balance sheet of the twentieth century, making a powerful case that history ended with the triumph not of free market liberalism but social democracy.

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