Martha T. McCluskey (SUNY-Buffalo; Google Scholar), Rethinking Economics for Tax Law and Political Economy, 83 Ohio St. L.J. Online 94 (2022): 

This essay responds to the groundbreaking article, Taxation and Law and Political Economy, by Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Ari Glogower, Ariel Jurow Kleiman, and Clinton G. Wallace, 83 Ohio St. L.J. 471 (2022) ((reviewed by Hayes Holderness (Richmond) here and Neil Buchanan (George Washington) here): ). That article presents tax law as a model for supporting a “pluralist” approach to LPE that balances economic concern for market efficiency with core law and political economy (LPE) goals of democracy, equality, and governing power. Taking a different view, I argue that tax law shows LPE goals require changing economic theory and policy, not balancing it.

Using the example of climate change, I reframe taxation from a system for redistributing or improving private market gains to a system for shaping the economy’s core values by governing the public power of money. Current U.S. tax policy operates to incentivize and legitimate investment in fossil fuel dependence, treating it as economic production, or at best as an occasional market failure or political distortion. An LPE frame instead shows that tax policy distributes the power of liquidity to a few global banks and fossil fuel industries insulated from the costs of profiting from mass destruction, while squeezing the power of liquidity from the households and local governments likely to bear the costs of climate disaster. That structural inequality constructs and depoliticizes economic pressures to balance a survivable future against current human needs. Rather than accommodating or supplementing destructive incentives, LPE should reframe taxation as a democratic means to transform both politics and economy to make equality, environment, and justice fundamental to economic productivity.