Give The Gorilla The Boot

Tariffs, Deportations, Dept. of Education, &tc.

Dear Friends,

It has been some time since we’ve taken a spin around the world of current events. Now that Eastertide is in full swing and our very long, four-services weekend is behind us, I can catch my breath and squeeze in some commentary. Before I get back to prepping for our album release celebration on Friday night, that is! If you can’t make it because you don’t live locally, you could always take some time to give us a listen, follow us on our socials, and that sort of thing. Here’s a nifty page I managed to create that will take you to everything.

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Capital markets continue to vacillate wildly based purely on rumors of what the President plans to do or not do with regard to his tariff war. One day a thousand point drop in the Dow because Trump starts publicly trashing Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, calling him a “major loser.” A thousand point upswing the day after on news that Trump is considering caving on his China tariffs.

Regardless of what you think of tariff wars, the bottom line is that it is immensely destructive to economic productivity to have the marketplace reacting to the moment-by-moment whims of a President, like a dog in training staring at his master waiting for hand signals.

Jonah Golberg commented the other day that he’s always rolled his eyes when people give much credit or blame to a President for “the economy.” However, it is noteworthy how the current economic and market distress does, in this case, have a “monocausal” explanation. There is one, and exactly one, source of the damage. And that would be the President of the United States (well, and Congress, who gave him this kind of power). And after all this mayhem, all the sound and fury is going to signify nothing. The tariffs will not remain, Trump will eventually retreat to reality, and likely give us a recession in return for nothing whatsoever—well, except vastly weaker American credibility on the world stage. This isn’t—wasn’t—worth it.

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I have yet to comment on the legal wrangling over Trump’s deportation of Abrego Garcia, an alleged gang member, to an El Salvadoran prison. I am blown away at the amount of misinformation and sometimes outright lying (on all sides) that takes place regarding this issue. If you really want an in-depth treatment of all the legal ins and outs, you can do no better than to go to this page and read everything Andy McCarthy has written. I know that it is all behind a paywall, but you needed to subscribe to National Review yesterday anyway.

My own view is very, very simple. If Garcia is here illegally and has no legitimate claim to remain, and especially if it is true that he’s actually some kind of dangerous gang-banger, then it is incumbent upon the government to prove it. And it so happens that this is what the administration has been studiously trying to avoid. No hearing, no due process, just whisked the guy out of the country to a place where he had a legal immunity from being sent. They prefer to try the case in the court of public opinion, apparently. Stephanie Slade, a writer for Reason magazine—an an intrepid, presumably lonely devout Roman Catholic amongst the libertarian crowd!—summarizes the problem beautifully in a thread on X (relating to both the tariff and immigration questions):

So let's talk about what we mean when we say "rule of law." More specifically, let's talk about what the Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek wrote about it. (A thread.)

“Stripped of all technicalities,” Hayek wrote, “this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.” In other words, the key thing about rule of law is that we all know ahead of time what is legal and what is not, so that we can act accordingly. Obviously, it would be unjust to punish people for doing things that you never told them were forbidden.

Thus, laws need to be published. They need to be internally consistent. And they need to be *forward-looking* only. You can't retroactively declare something a crime and then go after people for things they already did.

They also need to bind government actors just as they do members of the public. That, really, is the crucial distinction between "rule of law" and its opposite, "arbitrary rule," or "rule of man," where the law just is whatever the guy in power says it is at any given moment.

If the law can change from moment to moment according to the mere whim of the person in charge, you don't have rule of law as Hayek defines it — because people can't "plan [their] individual affairs" on the basis of rules that are constantly in flux.

Remember, Hayek was an economist. So he was focused on the ways in which rule of law allows markets to function. Here we can really see how the Trump administration's approach to tariffs is at odds with the idea of rule of law.

If POTUS announces that a tariff of a certain amount will go into effect on a certain date against a certain country, then changes his mind a day later, then changes it again a week after that, and again in three months, and so on, he's making it impossible for anyone to plan.

This introduces a huge amount of uncertainty into the system, which will have a depressive effect on economic activity as market actors have to hedge for all the endless possibilities that might be coming.

But for me, absence of rule of law is an even bigger deal when it comes to criminal law than when it comes to economic regulation. It's one thing to get hit with a tax you weren't expecting. It's another thing to be told without warning that you face punishment in the form of arrest, imprisonment, deportation, etc.

Rule of law requires that everyone knows in advance what is allowed and what is not. When it comes to the Trump administration's deportation efforts, as the original tweet shows, that is not happening.

The government's lawyer admits the person "was lawfully admitted to the United States." But even the lawyer doesn't know whether he's currently here legally. So, as the judge asks—how is he supposed to know?

And why can't the lawyer say if the person is currently here legally? Because the Trump administration is claiming it has the right to remove an immigrant's legal status with no warning, which amounts to retroactively declaring him in violation of the law.

This is the opposite of rule of law as Hayek defined it, where laws must be predictable, known in advance, and stated as general principles, so that everyone has a fair opportunity to comply.

And this is important to all of us, immigrants or not, because if the law can change from moment to moment, we cannot be sure that our own status (natural-born citizen, naturalized citizen, green card holder, etc.) will protect us.