Stephen Harper campaigned for a majority so that his government could end judges' discretion in sentencing and make criminals serve full jail terms. Even though crime rates in Canada have been steadily declining, and California and other U.S. states are concluding that filling prisons to overcrowding does little to reduce crime and is an unacceptable drain on public finances, Harper continues to insist that this is a priority of the Conservative majority.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote that nothing is certain in this world except death and taxes. That was in 1789. Mr. Franklin might be surprised to learn that today his axiom no longer holds, at least not for the rich and powerful among us. Truth be told -- as it is in British investigative journalist and author Nicholas Shaxson's meticulously researched and riveting book, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World -- taxation is only certain for the ordinary law-abiding citizen, the non-rich. The wealthy and the ultra-wealthy can quite easily get by paying little or even no tax, thanks to the shadowy spider webs of tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions that span the globe.

David Harvey is an internationally renowned social geographer, author of numerous books and a Marxist. He began his academic career in the U.K., spent decades in the U.S., and has taught in France, Korea and China.

One of the wonderful things about being away from the usual grind for a few months, is that I get to engage in this unusual activity called picking up a book and actually reading it. What a concept! It doesn't happen much in the normal day-to-day life of CAW economist, engaged citizen, and co-parent of two lovelies. But it does happen while I'm on leave (I have a "4-over-5″ deferred salary leave plan, where I work for 80 per cent of my pay but get 20 per cent of my time off. It's wonderful!)

This book has a slightly racy title (at least for an economics book) and my initial reaction was that the ‘lust' focus was a bit forced. Greed and gender are associated easily with economic ideas, but lust? Nor was I assuaged by the assertion in the introduction that ‘lust is to feminist theory what greed is to economic theory -- a marker of contested moral boundaries,' an assertion that seemed too convenient and probably not true. Isn't it usually religious ideologues that set moral boundaries with lust?

James Laxer's new book Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy pulls the curtain back to reveal the deliberately-obfuscated workings of the North American economy, and perhaps the best way for me to illustrate just how important a work I think he's wrought is by pulling back the curtain on my reviewing style: not one to mark up a book's margins with pen or pencil marks, I will sometimes opt for the subtle dog-earing of a page when I find a passage of note.

The first thing you need to do to effectively change something that's totally out of whack is to understand it. You can't debate with someone without knowing her point of view and you can't argue against something until you know why it exists in the first place. When it comes to economics and capitalism, while we know the system has left us in an incredibly unequal, unfair and unethical marketplace, it is hard to argue against it without knowing how it works exactly.

Short of taking a university-level macroeconomics course, or buying a textbook and plugging your way through it independently, learning the basics of capitalist economics (and the specifics of neoclassical schools, neoliberalism, monetarism) is tough.