Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I indicated in a late January post in this blog what I thought the Supreme Court was going to do about tariffs.  I said that it would likely affirm the decisions in the courts below striking down the tariffs, but that as to remedy it would find a way to allow the administration to avoid rebates.  I was right as to the questioning of the permissibility of the sweeping tariff powers the President sought to assign to himself here. I was wrong as to remedy.  As you surely all know by now, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 reading upheld one of the central pillars of our constitutional system, the unique role of the legislature in matters of taxation. And noted the obvious point that tariffs ARE taxation.  What did it say about remedy? Nothing, really. It left the matter open for further litigation, with the implication (I submit) that the importers who have been paying these charges since "Liberation Day" have a claim. The litigation is already underway. THAT I did not e...

 As the new year rolled in, many scholars and observers of the Supreme Court expected a quick opinion on the Trump tariff case. The courts below have held that the president does NOT have the authority he is claiming here. The oral arguments did not seem to advance the administration's cause.  So: if there is to be a decision striking down the tariffs, AND that decision would have complicated consequences in terms of working out the rebates, THEN it stands to reason SCOTUS will want to get the deed done quickly, lessening the complication.  The constant payment of these tariffs constitutes a tick-tick-tick that a court contemplating such a decision may want to shorten.  Yet as of this writing -- no tariff decision.  January's opinion days have come and gone, with no opinion on this subject.  Some are whispering that perhaps the outcome is not so clear-cut -- perhaps a court so much molded by President Trump will find a way to accommodate him.  I disagr...

  I'm writing this post well ahead of its appearance -- I'm writing on the evening of August 29, soon after the US Federal Circuit has upheld a decision in May by the Court of International Trade that the tariffs imposed by President Trump's executive orders in and since what the administration called "Liberation Day" (April 2), are without statutory mandates and so are in violation of the constitution's requirement that Congress determine taxes.  Full text of decision is freely available here: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINION.8-29-2025_2566151.pdf  The matter was heard en banc -- that is, the whole of the "bank" of the circuit, rather than the usual three-judge panel.  The whole bank broke down 7 to 4.  I of course applaud the result.  Trump has long been "liberated" from any sense of economic reality or constitutional obligation but we ought to resist when he seeks to "liberate" the rest of us.  I ha...

Tariffs have long been understood as a form of taxation -- indeed, the Trump administration brags about the revenue they are bringing in. But from whom? Not from China or Brazil -- in the first instance, from the importers, and then from whomever it is to whom the importers can raise prices. This is not a mystery. The founders/framers perfectly well understood that tariffs are taxes and they provided that Congress would have to enact just as it has to enact other revenue measures. It has the "power of the purse," while the executive has the power of the sword.  Within Congress, it is important that the chamber closest to the popular will, the House of Representatives, is supposed to take the leading role. Article one, sect. 7 speaks broadly of 'bills for raising revenue" as Congress' prerogative. Article I, section 8 turns that broad phrase into a list specifically including "duties, imposts and excises" -- i.e. tariffs.  The Trump administration seeks ...

Trump's tariffs are imbecilic.  If they ever go into effect as designed they stand to do the whole world economy an enormous amount of harm. Even if they are reversed quickly by one route or another, -- not just put off for 90 day intervals but reversed -- they stand to do harm, because these things are not simply a switch easy to turn on and off and on again.   But let us think about a simple bilateral example of this stupidity for a moment. Trump proposes to create a "reciprocal" tariff of 47% on imports from Madagascar, to go into effect when the latest "pause" comes to an end. Why? On some level (the one that justifies the word "reciprocal") he seems to want us to believe that Madagascar at present has a 47% tariff, or greater, on the US, so it is the least we can do on behalf of fairness.  You will likely not be surprised to learn that that is not the case.  About 40% of imports to Madagascar require payment of a 20% customs duty.  Not 47%. Not ev...

The US and Colombia nearly began a trade war on January 26-27. Colombia refused to take in planeloads of migrants that the Trump administration has decided belong there. Trump announced ginormous tariffs on Colombian exports to the US [the legal traffic -- chiefly this means coffee and cut flowers] and after some mutual posturing Colombia backed down.  The migrants will go 'back' to Colombia.  [I am not at all confident that is where they came from -- no vestige of due process or diligent inquiry seems to have been involved. But I'll ignore that right now.] What about those cut flowers?  There has been a fair amount of commentary about how US florists and their customers have dodged a bullet.  Prices will not skyrocket just before Valentines Day, after all. Whew.  EXCEPT.  That isn't how it works.  Prices at the retail level tend to react to risks of supply chain obstruction.  They don't wait for the reality of the obstruction to show up.  Tr...

That is a photo of a graveyard.  Included here for no reason.  Consider it an arbitrary visual.  At Quora, I was asked recently whether Democrats are "mentally incapable of understanding that the purpose of tariffs is precisely to make foreign products more expensive in order to make domestic products more competitive?" I answered for you, Democratic friends. ------------------------------------------------------------- friends.  There is room for some confusion, in part because our Dear Leader himself seems to have multiple ideas about what “THE purpose” of tariffs is. Tariffs are such wonderful things, in his view, that they can serve many purposes. In part, yes, he does seem to want to encourage what some economists call “import substitution,” where buyers in an importing nation learn to bring their own supply chain within the borders. But: no one has ever postulated that import substitution is a smooth or costless process, and Trump is not leveling with us about ...

The Trump administration is forfeiting a great US asset. The US has long been at the center of world trade, and the US dollar has become the currency-of-currencies, the numeraire.  That fact has worked in our national favor in countless ways. Now, some of my readers might say that it is "about time the US lose this privileged position." But of course the Trumpets won't say that. They're the "America First" administration after all. Yet their actions will remove American firstness in one very important respect. How? Well, one object of Chinese policy for a long time has been to rebuild the famed "Silk Road," the trade route leading from China through the Middle East, to Ottoman lands and northeastern Africa. Marco Polo tapped into it when he wasn't too busy inventing swimming pool games. China wants to revive that route, and wants it emphatically to include all of Europe this time, not just for an occasional traveler, and ideally it woul...

As I admitted two days ago, during my vacation I did some trawling in MEN'S JOURNAL for blog topics. This will be my second and last entry drawing upon that source. There's a fascinating though brief item about contemporary changes in van design. For purposes of historical perspective, the author [Jamie Lincoln Kitman, portrayed above]  mentions an action of President Johnson in 1963. The new President, unhappy that France and Germany had imposed duties on US poultry exports, retaliated with a tariff of his own, one that amounted to a 25% increase in the price of imported vans. Kitman refers to this act of retaliation as the "chicken tax." What Kitman didn't say was whether this was something Johnson did by slipping a relevant amendment into some omnibus tax bill that then became law, or whether it was something accomplished by executive order (pursuant to some earlier mandate) or ... what. He writes as if Jonson unilaterally decreed the chicken tax, which l...