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Now synonymous with the striking down of economic legislation, the Lochner Era’s namesake case dates to 1905. In Lochner vs. New York, a baker challenged a state statute that set the limit on working hours at 10 per day. The state legislature enacted the law, the New York Bakeshop Act, in response to widespread strikes by workers condemning the poor conditions of bakeries. In the same way that the court in Cedar Point nullified decades of mass labor organizing, the court in Lochner erased a key protection — the 10-hour day — for workers in the state. The decision was just the tip of the iceberg. In the three decades after Lochner, much like the period of Cedar Point, the Supreme Court ruled a number of basic labor regulations unconstitutional.

Adair v. United States (1908) ruled that bans on employers’ contracts forbidding employees from joining a union were unconstitutional. Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) invalidated a Congressional law regulating child labor. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) struck down a minimum wage law for women. The omnipotence of the Supreme Court had created a Dickensian reality in America, where even working conditions for children could not be regulated. These decisions would be convenient to dismiss as the relic of a bygone time if their rationale weren’t making a comeback.

Now, in the wake of the court’s momentous rulings overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and restricting the reach of administrative agencies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the foundation has been laid for, if not an outright resurrection of Lochner, at least a serious reappraisal.

Such a notion may seem far-fetched. After all, Lochner is cited eight times in the various Dobbs opinions — each time as an example of the kind of decision that should be reversed or ignored because it substituted the court’s judgment for that of a duly elected legislature.

Ergo, Libertarians that still insist on enforcing a liberty to contract may run aground when confronted with age-old questions of employee bargaining power, just as universal healthcare advocates who campaign for a constitutional “right to life” ~ doctrine would risk exposing themselves to charges of hypocrisy on the abortion ~ front. Some Rehabilitationists seem willing to concede this loss and have proactively sought to re-brand its arguments. Sandefur, for example, has long crusaded for the “right to earn a living” as the modern standard for economic liberty,’*® while Bernstein recently unveiled the more wonkish “right to pursue a lawful ~ occupation.”™”

These slogans are packaged as sensible solutions to the oppressive licensing laws currently at issue—the “specific injustices” belying the “categorical abstractions.”?® But, they are mere vessels for the goal of the last thirty years of Lochner revisionism. This is the Trojan Horse through which economic due process enters the city, and it is why Colby and Smith predict that “conservative legal thought will soon gravitate to the view that the Constitution requires judicial protection for economic liberty.”?’ Whether it is initially advanced by the modest proposal of the “rational basis with a bite” concept adopted in the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits,** or eventually by the more robust approach of installing Lochner-esque strict scrutiny review for all economic regulation, "[t]he stage is now set for new originalist defenses of economic liberties."

For many years now, law students have been taught that Lochner died in the New Deal. Centrists and progressives regard the Lochner era as a time when conservative judges overreached—taking it on themselves to block democratic efforts to improve the condition of workers. Perhaps more surprisingly, many modern conservatives have criticized Lochner in similar terms—though they have done so in support of an argument that the courts are making the same overreaching error as Lochner when they protect women’s reproductive rights or the rights of Americans based on sexual orientation. Some libertarian conservatives have sought to revive Lochner’s doctrine of constitutional freedom of contract, but their position remains a minority one.

This picture, though, focuses on the rarefied precincts of constitutional law. When we look at the doctrine of labor and employment law, we find something very different. As courts apply the worker protections adopted in the New Deal and later, they continue to be driven by Lochner-ist premises. They continue to disregard the imbalance of bargaining power between (many) employers and (many) workers. And as a result, they have adopted and applied a number of doctrines that have severely undercut the protections that legislatures have sought to give workers. The misguided assumption of equal power undermines constitutional, statutory, and common law protections in the workplace.

Now, in the wake of the court’s momentous rulings overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and restricting the reach of administrative agencies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the foundation has been laid for, if not an outright resurrection of Lochner, at least a serious reappraisal.

Such a notion may seem far-fetched. After all, Lochner is cited eight times in the various Dobbs opinions — each time as an example of the kind of decision that should be reversed or ignored because it substituted the court’s judgment for that of a duly elected legislature.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed a victory to business interests in a labor dispute, but the win was more of a whimper than a roar.

By an 8-to-1 vote, the high court ruled against unionized truck drivers who walked off the job, leaving their trucks loaded with wet concrete, but it preserved the rights of workers to time their strikes for maximum effect.

As one of the countless millions of people who were freed or protected from totalitarianism by the United States of America, it is easy for me to talk about the past. To talk about the belief of the American people and their leaders that this country was exceptional, and had special responsibilities to match its tremendous power. That a nation founded on freedom was bound to defend freedom everywhere. I could talk about the bipartisan legacy of this most American principle, from the Founding Fathers, to Democrats like Harry Truman, to Republicans like Ronald Reagan. I could talk about how the American people used to care deeply about human rights and dissidents in far-off places, and how this is what made America a beacon of hope, a shining city on a hill. America led by example and set a high standard, a standard that exposed the hypocrisy and cruelty of dictatorships around the world. But there is no time for nostalgia. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, Americans, and America, have retreated from those principles, and the world has become much worse off as a result. American skepticism about America’s role in the world deepened in the long, painful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their aftermaths. Instead of applying the lessons learned about how to do better, lessons about faulty intelligence and working with native populations, the main outcome was to stop trying. This result has been a tragedy for the billions of people still living under authoritarian regimes around the world, and it is based on faulty analysis. You can never guarantee a positive outcome— not in chess, not in war, and certainly not in politics. The best you can do is to do what you know is right and to try your best. I speak from experience when I say that the citizens of unfree states do not expect guarantees. They want a reason to hope and a fighting chance. People living under dictatorships want the opportunity for freedom, the opportunity to live in peace and to follow their dreams. From the Iraq War to the Arab Spring to the current battles for liberty from Venezuela to Eastern Ukraine, people are fighting for that opportunity, giving up their lives for freedom. The United States must not abandon them. The United States and the rest of the free world has an unprecedented advantage in economic and military strength today. What is lacking is the will. The will to make the case to the American people, the will to take risks and invest in the long-term security of the country, and the world. This will require investments in aid, in education, in security that allow countries to attain the stability their people so badly need. Such investment is far more moral and far cheaper than the cycle of terror, war, refugees, and military intervention that results when America leaves a vacuum of power. The best way to help refugees is to prevent them from becoming refugees in the first place. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, and this focused the attention of the world, and the American people. There existential threat today is not found on a map, but it is very real. The forces of the past are making steady progress against the modern world order. Terrorist movements in the Middle East, extremist parties across Europe, a paranoid tyrant in North Korea threatening nuclear blackmail, and, at the center of the web, an aggressive KGB dictator in Russia. They all want to turn the world back to a dark past because their survival is threatened by the values of the free world, epitomized by the United States. And they are thriving as the U.S. has retreated. The global freedom index has declined for ten consecutive years. No one like to talk about the United States as a global policeman, but this is what happens when there is no cop on the beat. American leadership begins at home, right here. America cannot lead the world on democracy and human rights if there is no unity on the meaning and importance of these things. Leadership is required to make that case clearly and powerfully. Right now, Americans are engaged in politics at a level not seen in decades. It is an opportunity for them to rediscover that making America great begins with believing America can be great. The Cold War was won on American values that were shared by both parties and nearly every American. Institutions that were created by a Democrat, Truman, were triumphant forty years later thanks to the courage of a Republican, Reagan. This bipartisan consistency created the decades of strategic stability that is the great strength of democracies. Strong institutions that outlast politicians allow for long-range planning. In contrast, dictators can operate only tactically, not strategically, because they are not constrained by the balance of powers, but cannot afford to think beyond their own survival. This is why a dictator like Putin has an advantage in chaos, the ability to move quickly. This can only be met by strategy, by long-term goals that are based on shared values, not on polls and cable news. The fear of making things worse has paralyzed the United States from trying to make things better. There will always be setbacks, but the United States cannot quit. The spread of democracy is the only proven remedy for nearly every crisis that plagues the world today. War, famine, poverty, terrorism–all are generated and exacerbated by authoritarian regimes. A policy of America First inevitably puts American security last. American leadership is required because there is no one else, and because it is good for America. There is no weapon or wall that is more powerful for security than America being envied, imitated, and admired around the world. Admired not for being perfect, but for having the exceptional courage to always try to be better. Thank you.

Aprolonged global democratic recession has, in recent years, morphed into something even more troubling: the “third reverse wave” of democratic breakdowns that the political scientist Samuel Huntington warned could follow the remarkable burst of “third wave” democratic progress in the 1980s and the 1990s. Every year for the past 15 years, according to Freedom House, significantly more countries have seen declines in political rights and civil liberties than have seen gains. But since 2015, that already ominous trend has turned sharply worse: 2015–19 was the first five-year period since the beginning of the third wave in 1974 when more countries abandoned democracy—twelve—than transitioned to it—seven. And the trend continues. Illiberal populist leaders are degrading democracy in countries including Brazil, India, Mexico, and Poland, and creeping authoritarianism has already moved Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Venezuela out of the category of democracies altogether. In Georgia, the dominance of the Georgian Dream Party has led to the steady decline of electoral processes and a breakdown in the rule of law. In Myanmar, the military overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, ending an experiment in partial democracy. In El Salvador, president Nayib Bukele staged an executive coup by removing the attorney general and Supreme Court justices who were obstacles to his consolidation of power. In Peru, democracy hangs from a thread as the right-wing autocrat Keiko Fujimori advances vague claims of election fraud in a bid to overturn her narrow electoral defeat to left-wing opponent Pedro Castillo. What is especially striking about this last case is that Fujimori’s gambit bears a grim resemblance to the lie perpetuated by former U.S. President Donald Trump and his followers about the 2020 presidential election. This is no coincidence. As the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has observed, fictitious claims of fraud and “stop the steal” tactics are becoming a common means by which autocratic populists try to obstruct democracy. Such tactics have long been a source of instability in countries struggling to develop democracy. But the fact that the most recent iteration of the antidemocrat’s playbook draws heavily on precedents in the world’s most important and powerful democracy marks the start of a dangerous new era. Today, the United States confronts a growing antidemocratic movement, not just from the ranks of fringe extremists but also from a substantial group of officeholders—a movement that is challenging the very foundations of electoral democracy. Should this effort succeed, the United States could become the first ever advanced industrial democracy to fail—that is, to no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections as political scientists and other scholars of democracy define them. The failure of American democracy would be catastrophic not only for the United States; it would also have profound global consequences at a time when freedom and democracy are already under siege. As Huntington noted, the diffusion of democratic movements and ideas from one country to another has helped drive positive democratic change. Antidemocratic norms and practices can spread in a similar fashion—especially when they emanate from powerful countries. That is why the acceleration of a democratic recession into a democratic depression happened largely on Trump’s watch. And it is why no development would more gravely damage the global democratic cause than the democratic backsliding of its most important champion.

Beyond the musings of Thiel and Hoppe, libertarian legal scholars are pushing to use the courts to limit democratic sovereignty over the economy. As Brian Beutler reported in the New Republic last year, conservative legal theory is increasingly being influenced by the work of Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett, a radical libertarian who wants to revive the legal tradition found in cases like Lochner v. New York (1905), which would render much government welfare policy since the late 1930s as unconstitutional.

Lochnerism is a fundamentally anti-democratic legal doctrine rooted in the idea that property rights should override laws made by democratically elected officials. As University of Michigan legal scholar Sam Bagenstos notes, a full embrace of Lochnerism would scuttle Obamacare and much more: “Laws guaranteeing workers the right to join a union without being fired, and the right to earn a minimum wage and receive overtime if working more than 40 hours a week, laws protecting worker safety, and laws protecting workers and customers against discrimination based on race or other protected statuses, just for starters.” Just for starters.

At this point, let us consider another aspect of the debate, one that should pose awkward questions for those espousing a “job guarantee” or workfare strategy. It concerns the ancient idea of the right to practise, the right to work in activities of one’s choice and capabilities. The claim is that everybody should be allowed to practise the sort of work that they wish to do or feel capable of doing, and that nobody should be allowed to block them from doing so without demonstrated good reason. This is close to being the libertarian position.

In the USA, libertarians like to hark back to the Lochner era, when in their view the right to practise was fully respected. In their more enthusiastic moments, they go back to the Magna Carta of 1215, which affirmed a right to buy and sell unhindered, to support their claim that “the right to practise” means there should be no impediments to anybody practising any form of work they wish. Sometimes, they add “as long as it does no deliberate harm to others”. The Lochner era began in 1905, with a legal ruling in New York that any law or action by a third party, such as a trade union or government agency, intervening to set conditions or standards for a labour relationship was a contravention of “liberty of contract”, or the right to practise, which is often taken as synonymous with “the right to work”.

Senate Rules and Administration Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar is proposing a change to expedite the process for confirming certain presidential nominees and reduce the backlog waiting for approval.

Klobuchar, D-Minn., introduced the resolution last week that would allow the majority leader to call up to 10 nominees advanced out of the same committee to be considered at the same time for a vote, excluding certain positions like circuit court judges, Supreme Court justices and Cabinet secretaries. Sens. Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., and Angus King, I-Maine, are co-sponsors.

Petitioner's primary argument, reduced to its essentials, is that the section 964 regulations supply a freestanding, self-contained, and comprehensive system for determining the E & P of a foreign corporation, without any need to refer to or incorporate the rules set forth in section 312 and the regulations thereunder. As discussed earlier section 1.964-1(a)(1), Income Tax Regs., states that a foreign corporation's E & P shall be computed “substantially as if such corporation were a domestic corporation by” doing three things: taking the foreign corporation's P & L statement and making U.S. accounting and tax adjustments to it. Petitioner interprets the preposition “by” in an extremely narrow sense, to mean “by doing these three things and nothing else.”

Petitioner contends that the upper tier CFC partners did the three required things by making the adjustments specified in paragraphs (b) and (c) of the regulation. That having been done, petitioner says, the E & P computation was complete. Petitioner's view of section 1.964-1(a), Income Tax Regs., forecloses resort to the general rules of section 312 for determining the E & P of a foreign corporation--in particular, to the requirement that E & P shall be determined by taking into account “all items includible in gross income under section 61”. Sec. 1.312-6(b), Income Tax Regs.

Income Inequality and Government Redistribution: An Overview

We now describe our data, with a particular focus on changes since our dataset was last updated. As we have indicated, our complete 116-case dataset is available in an online appendix to our chapter.11 For ease of exposition, we begin our summary by focusing on national averages over multiple LIS waves for each of our twenty countries.

Therefore, this paper analyzes fiscal redistribution in Section III, but it should be noted that other policies could help reducing income inequality. In particular, adequate spending on education (a priority of the Bulgarian authorities) and health as well as appropriate labor-market regulations5 foster an environment for a less unequal distribution of market income in the future (Blanchet et al., 2019).

Gini Coefficient of Market and Disposable Incomes 1/

Including the most common pay allowances, the average total compensation for a Major General may range from $142,989.48 to $204,653.88 per year as of 2023.

The formation of ERC’s claims of fiscal exploitation and their degree of credibility also depend on other factors than just the existence of a fiscal deficit with the central administration. While the ‘adequate’ level of social redistribution is a political question that does not concern us here, what can be discussed from a technical perspective is whether there are major flaws in the system that might nourish discontent with concrete forms of social redistribution. Ways of looking at this include the evaluation of: overcompensation effects, considerations of efficiency and regional economic convergence, trends in taxation and public finances, and the overall evolution of the economy. A minimal definition of fiscal redistribution entails that regions should contribute in accordance with their income but receive equal per capita spending. Hence, those with a higher than average income should be net contributors and those with a lower one net recipients. Uriel and Barberan (2007, p. 412) show that, in the period 1991–2005, Catalonia’s position was in line with this assumption. Yet, there also are some overcompensation effects,6 although their precise size is unclear. Using data for 2005, Espasa and Bosch (2010) argued that Catalonia received between 12 per cent and 14 per cent less than the Spanish average. Yet, De la Fuente (2005) calculated the same amount at 6 per cent below the average for the period 1990–97. Furthermore, this has affected other contributory regions and not exclusively Catalonia (Tortella 2016, pp. 441–443). What, instead, seems to be uncontroversial is the disproportionately low amount of infrastructural investment received by Catalonia. De la Fuente – who has otherwise provided very conservative estimates of the fiscal deficit (e.g. De la Fuente 2001) – has pointed out that the Generalitat received less investment than all other autonomous communities during the 1990s. Such spending represents a small share of the deficit claimed by ERC, but it probably had a sizable negative impact on the development of the Catalan economy in recent years.

International Monetary Fund BA Berkley MA Georgetown, June 2020, HK]

Although increasing income inequality has been observed in many countries, the varying experiences across countries, with inequality even decreasing in a sizeable share of countries, suggests that public policy and institutions play and important role in determining such outcomes.2 In this respect, fiscal redistribution (i.e., the transfer of income from higher to lower income households via tax and transfer schemes) has a key role to play in addressing income inequality. For instance, evidence from studies of fiscal redistribution shows that over threequarters of the difference in average disposable income inequality between advanced and Latin American countries (with the lowest and highest average disposable income inequality, respectively) is accounted for by differences in the extent of fiscal redistribution rather than by differences in market incomes (Bastagli, Coady and Gupta, 2015)

The present redistributive policy focus is on a particular type of government redistribution that may be called direct fiscal redistribution to the poor (hereafter DFRP). Fiscal redistribution refers here to redistribution of money and in-kind income among strata of households by means of both government spending and taxing (i.e., fiscal) activities. For example, increased generosity in public assistance payment levels and reliance upon progressive income as opposed to regressive sales taxes can provide positive fiscal redistribution. Direct fiscal redistribution refers to that part of such redistribution that can be accounted for in terms of government's relatively direct and immediate give-and-take of expenditures and taxes to and from income strata of households. Current evidence suggests that such redistribution is considerable in advanced capitalist political democracies, especially vis-à-vis the poor (e.g., Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977; Hicks and Swank, 1984b). During the 1970s DFRP apparently augmented the "pre-fisc" income share of poor households in the U.S. by over 100 percent (see Reynolds and Smolensky, 1977: 74 on the U.S.; and Hicks and Swank, 1984b on advanced capitalism).

If the main objective of the evaluation of a tax reform is to give empirical content to the redistributive effects of different tax systems before and after the reforms, a formal expression of the concept of redistribution is required. Redistribution is defined here as the shift of income which occurs in the post-tax distribution from high to low incomes. Hence, it can be measured by comparing the pre-tax Lorenz curve with the post-tax concentration curve. Our measure of redistributive effect is therefore defined as: Π [ ] RS = − ∫ L p L p dp XT X − 2 0 1 () () (2) where the superscript of ΠRS refers to Reynolds and Smolensky (1977) who applied this measure to the US tax system, and L p xf x dx X y ( ) ( ) = ∫ µ 0 0 1 ≤≤ = p p Fy and ( ) (3) L p x t x f x dx t X T y − = − − ∫ ( ) ( ( )) ( ) µ( ) 1 0 0 1 ≤≤ = p p Fy and ( ) (4) are, respectively, the Lorenz curve of pre-tax income ( x ) and the concentration curve with respect to pre-tax income of after-tax income ( x tx − ( ) ), with: p : the population shares of the pre-tax distribution f x( ) : the density function of x F x( ) : the distribution function of x µ : mean income (pre tax) t x( ) : the tax liability corresponding with taxable income x t : the average tax rate.

A new study by the political economists Dr Pantelis Kammas (University of Ioannin) and Dr Vassilis Sarantides (University of Sheffield) looks at the behaviour of incumbent governments in “new democracies”.

Previous research work tends to assume that these governments behave opportunistically around elections, adopting generous and expansionary fiscal policies in order to improve their chances of staying in office.