You can go for quite some time without hearing the term “due process,” but now I seem to hear it every day. As ICE and other government agencies gather up gang members and soccer players and Jew-haters and ship them off to their homelands or distant prisons, the howled complaint always seems to be about due process. “Don’t they get any due process? Where’s their due process? Whatever happened to due process???”
In every case, the question that needs to be asked is not “Where’s the due process?” but rather “What process is due?” Process is expensive and time-consuming, and different people are entitled to different amounts of it.
I am a citizen of the United States and I was born here. If the Philly District Attorney decides I belong in jail, I get a hell of a lot of process before he can put me there. I get an impartial judge and a jury of my peers. I get to cross-examine witnesses and see the evidence against me. I get a lawyer to present my case and make arguments for me. I probably get bail. Even before any of that happens, the DA has to get an indictment against me and a warrant to arrest me. And even if I’m convicted, I get to argue for probation, or maybe just a fine. I can appeal my conviction to a higher court. I can even ask the governor for a pardon. I am DUE a lot of process. I get process out the wazoo. I probably get more process than a guy in any other country.
The people getting kicked out of America don’t get nearly as much process as I do. That’s how the law works. They get due process too; it’s just that, for them, not much process is “due.”
For one thing, they are not being convicted of crimes and put in prison, they are merely being sent away beyond our borders. If the U.S. government grabs a guy from Syria who has been harassing Jews on a college campus and sends him back to Syria, he can step off the plane, walk into a restaurant in Damascus and get himself a nice plate of schwarma, falafel and muhammara. Yeah, he’s not in NYC anymore but he’s not in prison either. He’s free. He’s just in a different place.
How much process is he “due?” Not much. Maybe he has not been adjudicated a “criminal” and maybe he was here legally on a student visa, but he doesn’t get nearly as much process as I do. If he were arrested and the U.S. wanted to put him in prison, he would get a lot more process, but just to send him back to his homeland? Not so much.
Then there’s guys who are here illegally. They have no legal status at all in America. They may have been convicted of crimes here, or back in their home countries. Or maybe not. Regardless, they get nothing. No process is due.
The amount of process you get is based on your personal legal status and what the government wants to do to you. What is unusual at the moment is that a lot of people are being deported and the Left is screaming about what is happening to them. But the way the deportees are being treated, and the legal rights they are being afforded, is not at all unusual or troubling.
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I’ve never been a fan of the idea that Trump plays 5th dimensional chess while the rest of the world is playing checkers. He’s a player, and a strategist, and a negotiator, but he’s not an intellectual, and he’s not intellectually curious, and there are a lot of things about which he knows nothing.
The 5th-dimensional-chess theory, however, is an interesting one. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he is secretly trying to achieve completely different goals from the ones to which he pays lip service.
Let’s talk about his protectionist, tariff-based trade-war, for example. On its face, not much of it makes any sense.
Why impose a tariff/tax on bananas, for example? How does it benefit anyone if I have to pay 20% more for my bananas? Is there a banana industry here in Pennsylvania that is being strangled by those damn bananas growing all over Ecuador? Then there’s blueberries and grapes and cherries. They are all grown in the U.S., but not in January. Why have tariffs on blueberries and grapes and cherries in January? Why will I now have to pay a tax on them? What’s the point?
Then there’s all those manufacturing jobs that disappeared (for a lot of reasons) fifty years ago, but Trump now wants them back. The world of cars and international trade is complicated, I suppose, but what about sneakers? If we tax Nikes coming from Vietnam and have them made in Arkansas instead, we will be paying $500 for those Air Jordans instead of the $250 we pay now. Those poor bastards in Little Rock are just NOT going to make sneakers for $100 a week, but the guys in Hanoi will. So why not let them?
In other words, even if Trump “wins,” much of this tariff war is pointless. No one in America will benefit---not consumers and not the (mostly imaginary) US manufacturing workers.
So maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe there’s a 5th-dimensional chess game Trump is playing here and the trade war is just a means to a completely different end.
The inflation that has crippled the American economy over the past five years is the result of the attempted globalist takeover during the COVID years. The lockdowns designed to get Trump out of office necessitated the printing of trillions of dollars to create a fake economy while the attempted takeover was proceeding. The increase in the money supply, along with further wasteful spending in the Biden Administration, inflated prices across the economy (and around the world).
There are a limited number of ways to reduce inflation. One is to “grow out of it” by expanding the economy without increasing the money supply. Trump is trying to do that, primarily by expanding energy production, but the money supply has been so inflated that this method will take longer than Trump has in office.
The other tool is to remove extra dollars from the money supply through taxation, and maybe that is actually what the tariffs are for. If I have to pay $800 for a dishwasher rather than $600, and the extra $200 is simply a tax that the US government collects and then removes from the money supply, deflation occurs.
Trump has been so adamant about cutting taxes that he could never admit he is actually raising taxes, but he doesn’t have to. He claims, and has always claimed, that it is the Chinese (or the Mexicans, or whoever), that pay the tariffs. He says it so much that I sometimes think he believes it, but of course, the extra dishwasher money is coming out of my pocket. And money that comes out of my pocket and goes to the U.S. government has a name---it’s called “tax.”
Economists who don’t know much about economics will often say tariffs are “inflationary,” but what they really mean is that tariffs tend to increase prices. Everything that increases prices is not “inflationary,” however. Killing 100 million chickens quadruples the price of eggs, for example, but it is not “inflationary.” A lot of events can increase prices but are not “inflationary.” Inflation is caused by an increase in the money supply. Tariffs, since they are taxes, are a way of reducinginflation.
And maybe that’s the only purpose of them.
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I still love tariffs!
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