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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

How is it extortion? They could have gotten a different deal from anybody else or no deal at all. Nobody was twisting there arm or forcing them to deal with this one company to sell their tariff claims.

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If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer? Or is there a risk and a benefit to taking the one that’s tied to the administration? (And frankly, can you even be certain either way?) This kind of conflict (even the appearance of this kind of conflict) is why we generally don’t want government officials or their families to be profiting directly off the policies they oversee. It is at best unseemly, and that’s being kind.

> If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer?

Yes, because tariffs, like all taxes in the USA, are not imposed on individual people or entities. They’re on industries and specific materials.

If a company truly thought the chance of winning was low and needed the money now, they would pick the best offer. Regardless of who is making it.

This is naive. For larger firms, targeted product and industry-specific tariffs can be a game-changer. For example, Trump created a set of exemptions related to smartphones built in China that weren't officially aimed at Apple, but since Apple sells approximately 50% of US smartphones (for a much larger slice of profit) and 80% are made in China, this disproportionately affected a single company. But there are other areas where the administration can also use Federal power: see, for example, Trump's use of Federal approval to block the Netflix/WB merger as one example.

Thank you. Yes, this is the reason to be concerned. Not because it's extortion, or anything else like that, but because having to evaluate a counterparty's degree of connection to the State before doing a deal is not the way that free enterprise or open markets are supposed to work. Lutnik Jr's involvement puts every other bidder for these contracts at a disadvantage (even if it's illusory, and he's not personally acting badly), and distorts pricing signals. It's unfair not (or not primarily / directly) to customers, but to the rest of the legitimate players within an industry.

Yes, I know this isn't the first time this has happened, and that people likewise benefit from connections to governments led by other political parties. Those instances are also bad!

This is basically the government doing a protection racket. I swear, the amount of neoliberals in here lauding the move is a recession indicator. Did we all forget what corruption is?

Corruption is so endemic now that people stop seeing it. This was the same in the former USSR, when I was there I would be utterly amazed by the degree to which everybody had normalized corruption, it was not considered anything wrong or special at all, it was just the way business was done. You could effectively buy your way into or out of anything.

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