Wow. I hope the government loses their lawsuit here. Customs & Border Protection should have absolutely no jurisdiction over what an item is used for once it enters the country.
[0]: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/06/03/ford-transit-connect-imp...
That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.
You have to report behavior X, and if you deliberately don't do behavior X to avoid reporting it, that's a crime too!
Let's see you put that on the blockchain...
Edit: ...when successful.
Judging by how hard it is for programmers to write bug-free instructions for literal computers, I'm not sure your expectation of flawless legislation is something realistic for mere mortals.
More laws = more ways people/organisations are burdened with things they need to know (and will be punished for whether or not they know). Having canonical interpretations of laws that aren't written in the laws just makes that even more fraught with peril.
The poster I originally responded to thinks we ought to be further right along this spectrum. I think we're either in a good place or if anything we ought to move a little further left. I don't think either extreme is desirable, and the left extreme is where we get those consequences you want to ascribe to me.
The justice system is already quite intolerant of such hacks. In the Ford case, they didn't even interpret the law differently. Instead, they determined—with evidence— that Ford was actually importing cargo vans and not passenger vans.
In reality: are you a software engineer? Or do you know one? Surely you (or they) have experienced how difficult it is to write code that manages even a small number of inputs? Even 10 different yes/no inputs give you 1,024 possibilities.
Now imagine writing laws to precisely cover an effectively infinite number of possibilities, many of which don't exist at the time the law is written, and expecting the laws to cover these new situations and variables with absolute certainty and unambiguity. And unlike software, you can't just push a commit to prod to fix the problems as they pop up. It's a really long process, because democracy.
It's not happening, no more than you'd be able to handle a piece of software that took some infinite and random number and variety of inputs and did something useful with them.
We should, as you say, write "quality" laws to the best of our ability but there will always been a sizable human element to the interpretation of law.
Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who wrote the law. Lawmakers should be writing quality laws and fixing problems.
Yet almost everyone fails.
You should also try to write quality laws. But when you fail, do you want the same sort of consequences as with code? How much time, effort, and money has been lost to hacks taking advantage of errors in code?
I would love an interpreter/compiler/processor that knew that I didn't intend to allow a security vulnerability so anyone could escalate their privileges. Sounds great, truly.
Your code will fail sometimes. You’ll fix it.
In contrast, passing new laws and updating existing laws is (by design) an arduous process in a democracy. There are things that can and should be improved about the ways that we accomplish this, but it will never be (and really shouldn’t be) fast and easy.
Sometimes I just want to ignore HN entirely because of embarrassing comments like this. “Code works this way, so everything should work this way!”
I never said the law worked exactly like code. I used your code metaphor to explain my point in language you might understand.
Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law
Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)
Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.
This encompasses every possible input including "what they believe lawmakers meant to say".
Edit: To get out in front of the obvious "Well what about when a judge just decides to do whatever they want??" response, I will say: That is why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust all matter.
Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.
Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.
Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.
And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!
And thank you for providing some excellent example of why tradition, precedent, checks & balances, voting rights, and institutional trust are important.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/neil-gorsuch-and-the-case-of-...
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/gorsuch-transam-t...
Judges are there to make the boundaries clear for the greyzone on what's not written down
The world is too complex to get perfect laws written. You're always going to miss weird edge cases in both directions
Ate they following things specifically as the law said they're supposed to, or hacking some edge case that isn't explicitly called out?
Ford should only have issued a guide to independent dealers and repair centers on how to do a conversion between cargo and passenger (and made sure both were possible) but only import the passenger version into the country.
Then it's murkier, because not all dealerships would offer it and the customer isn't buying it from Ford, he's getting an independent dealer to install additional things (or remove) from the vehicle.
CBP is one of the worst infringers upon personal rights, I wouldn't defend them.
Well, no, they are dictating what taxes you owe based on intent, and using consistent patterns of behavior as evidence of ongoing intent.
This isn't Ford changing their mind about the purpose of the vehicle after importing them.
I mean, that's the whole point of the import tariff law, so if the CBP has jurisdiction to enforce tariff law, surely how the item is used (or at least how the item is intended to be used or how the item can reasonably be expected to be used) is the primary factor to consider.
The problem I have here is how easy it is to avoid the tax. CBP shouldn't have any jurisdiction over car modifications and repairs; that responsibility falls to different agencies.
If import tax on a cpu is x, and motherboard is y, should you have to pay computer import tax z if you build and sell PCs? After all, what imported cpus and motherboards aren't destined to be assembled computers?
It is a more normal way around these sorts of tariffs to import a vehicle as a kit of parts (CKD / "Complete knocked down"), and perform some level of final assembly in the end country. The sort of rules you talk about apply then, you pay the car parts import rate on the kit, not the (presumably higher) rate for a complete car[1].
[1] Or otherwise avoid whatever other protectionist measures mean you can't just import a fully built car.
Either it meets the definition of the lower taxed category or it doesn't, at time of import.
Any other way of interpreting it gets into intent and degrees modification, or worse, applying import taxes after the fact for domestic modifications.
Reverse the scenario: is an imported pc taxed at z need to be taxed at x and y if the only purpose was to get the parts and sell the cpus and graphics cards a la carte? If x and y were cheaper than z, do you think the govt would refund the difference?
The indefensible part is tying a large difference in import tariffs to how many seats are installed. Absurd outcomes such as this one highlight systematic flaws in the rules. If the basis for the tariffs were logically sound you wouldn't be able to work around them without addressing the reason the tariffs were imposed in the first place.
The phrase you’re looking for is ‘criminal conspiracy’
Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.
I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.
But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.
If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.
I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.
Yes? Basically?
(1988)
"Workers at the Stepan Co. plant, the nation’s only legal importer of cocaine, must undergo strict background checks, and agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency frequently visit, said plant manager John O’Brien.
DEA spokesman Milton Smilek in Newark said there haven’t been any security problems at the plant just west of New York City. He said it processes hundreds of tons of cocaine each year."
This is where Coca-Cola is said to get its flavoring from.
And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.
In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!
At worst, you can imagine selling a full nuclear bomb to Al kaeda, then being surprised pikachu when they use it to blow up IAD
Why SHOULD a cargo van have higher import taxes than a passenger van, other than to serve the needs of some random private company?
Even moreso, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford lobbied FOR those laws before changing its mind in where to produce a particular sku
Have you read a tariff schedule? They're full of this stuff, which seem to be protections or favors for specific industries. Anti-dumping protections seem similar.
That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.
Running for reelection and aware of the influence the U.A.W. had in Congress and in the minds of voters, President Johnson looked for a way to persuade Reuther’s union not to strike and to support his “Great Society” civil rights agenda. Johnson succeeded on both counts by agreeing to include light trucks in the Chicken Tax.
While U.S. tariffs on other Chicken Tax items have since been rescinded, lobbying efforts by the U.A.W. have kept the tariff on light trucks and utility vans alive. As a result, American-made trucks still dominate sales in the U.S., and some very desirable trucks, like the high-end Australian-made Volkswagen Amorak, are not sold in the United States.
If there was a war American industry would shut down overnight.
The EU has banned poultry meat from the US on psytosanitary grounds for more than two decades.
For some context: it is about washing chicken meat with chlorine dioxide to kill bacteria, especially salmonella, at the slaughterhouse. It may seem ridicoulous that europeans prefer salmonella to chlorine on their chickens, but european food health and safety argues that the practice is needed in the USA due to the very unsanitary, and therefor cheaper, chicken meat production, whereas europa requires high standards during production instead of washing the end product in chlorine, and is therefore more costly. Some argue this cost difference is the major driver of the ban, and it is not an actual health and safety issue.
Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.
Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.
It's the same game that SaaS companies play. Everything is free until you want SSO, then it's $30,000 a year. If you need SSO, you can afford it.
Personally, I hate this in both cases. I think we could save everyone a lot of time if every vendor you did business with just grabbed you by the ankles and flipped you upside down and took whatever money fell out of your pocket. Why tiptoe around what they really want...
I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business.
Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
why go through the hassle of voting and deal with uncertainty whether you voted a right person, when you can just buy with cash whatever law/regulation you need
I believe the more common proposal is to resolve the contradiction the other way: remove taxes on corporations, as the individuals comprising the corporations generally already pay taxes. That would be politically quite unpopular, but there is a certain logic to it and it would also make taxes easier to administer and more difficult to avoid. And it doesn't need to be as pro-rich as it sounds - you could just replace corporation taxes with other taxes targeting wealthy individuals, such as a wealth tax or higher income taxes.
Without a wealth tax that would just make tax evasion even easier for the ultrawealthy in the usual manner of borrowing against the equity of the stock they own.
So while a business doesn't pay sales on the fuel they need to deliver their goods to me, it gets paid in the end because the cost of the fuel is included in the price I pay and the sales tax is levied on the whole purchase price.
(It is a little more complicated than that. Don't sue me.)
Ford would have been fine if they had kept the seats in the car until they were sold and left it up to the customer to remove the seats. (This would not have affected the customer, tax-wise, since the import duty is paid by Ford, and by the time the customer has removed the seats, they have already paid the sales tax on the vehicle.)
The Subaru case probably violates the intent as well but maybe that would be a lot harder to prove. But the Ford case they clearly conspired to violate the intent. Which, if "intent" really is the important thing, I suppose should have lead to criminal charges too.
I suppose intent probably matters a bit more when it's the little guy on the receiving end of it.
I'm beyond tired of massive corporations sending jobs to other countries, pretending to care about their own country and lying about being made locally, and dodging taxes. Ford hit all three here.