“[The International Emergency Economic Powers Act] does not authorize the President to impose tariffs.”

That’s the single really important sentence from the US Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.

Trump’s ongoing tariff tantrums, starting with his “Liberation Day” schedule of “reciprocal” tariffs, were illegal under the law in question, and under the US Constitution, which gives Congress, and only Congress, the power to levy taxes.

Every dime taken by the US government via those tariffs is stolen money. Which is true of all taxes, but in this case, the money was stolen even according to the very political and legal systems which usually pretend otherwise.

There are four aspects of the court’s ruling which should be, but aren’t surprising.

One is that the court took months to finally just come out and say what everyone, including Trump, knew from the very beginning. The court granted certiorari for the case in September of last year. How long should it take nine justices to conclude that words mean things, and that the words in the Constitution and the IEEPA mean what they mean rather than meaning something else? This was an epic exercise in foot-dragging.

Unfortunately, foot-dragging is business as usual where SCOTUS is concerned.

A second is that the opinion wasn’t unanimous. Three  justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanagh — flushed their shared  supposed “originalism” down the toilet and then jumped in after it, holding in dissent that words don’t mean things, that history doesn’t matter, and that the powers of the presidency actually derive from the film Where The Buffalo Roam, in which Peter Boyle wanders around wearing a Nixon mask and bellowing “I’m the President of the United States and I can do anything I want.”

Unfortunately, Supreme Court justices round-filing their supposed principles in service to their political masters’ agendas is nothing new either.

The third should-be-but-ain’t surprising  aspect of the ruling is that SCOTUS kicked the can down (that is, BACK down) the road when it came to ordering a remedy.

In cases — civil or criminal — concerning theft, the most obvious remedy is restitution. It’s time for the US Treasury to start cutting refund checks to all the businesses it stole those tariff revenues from. But rather than simply so ordering, the court remanded the case back to lower courts, which will no doubt engage in protracted “struggle” over how to — and even whether — to deliver justice to the victims.

The fourth, and least surprising, outcome? After venting his spleen at the Supreme Court for daring to defy him by nixing his illegal tariff scheme, Trump immediately went to work on a new version. His next caper  will no doubt be as illegal as the previous one, and the courts will no doubt take their time addressing that one too.

The court’s ruling is correct as far as it goes, but don’t hold your breath waiting for relief, let alone recompense. To misquote the old Miller Lite commercial: Tastes great, less fulfilling.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Last November, New York City voters chose — from a uniformly awful candidate menu — “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani for mayor. They’re already starting to experience, and may even learn from, the consequences of that choice.

“Democracy,” HL Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Unfortunately, everyone else gets it good and hard, too.

The coalition that elected Mamdani consisted mainly of middle- and upper-income voters.

You know, the people who hail an Uber instead of taking the subway, and order their restaurant food via DoorDash instead of rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi at local delis, pizzerias, and Chinese take-out joints.

Mamdani lagged his main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, among lower-income voters.

You know, the folks who build those sandwiches, bake those pizzas, and stir-fry those veggies. The people who stand in line to save a buck rather than pay delivery fees atop food costs. And, of course, the people who drive for Uber and deliver for DoorDash.

In other words, the “workers” Mamdani and his ilk claim to “support.”

That “support” takes the form of all-out war on the “gig economy.”

The premise of socialism is “worker control of the means of production,” and the gig economy is far and away the most successful experiment in human history when it comes to achieving that.

Gig workers own their tools. Gig workers set their own hours. Gig workers choose who they work for, where they work, and what kind of work they do. Gig workers even set their own salaries by accepting the individual tasks that meet their pay requirements and rejecting those that don’t.

Mamdani and friends hate that worker control with a passion. To them, worker happiness and welfare only matter to the extent that they can claim credit for, and gain power from, that happiness and welfare.

It drives them crazy to see workers not punching campaign donors’ time clocks, not paying dues to politically connected “organized labor” groups, working for amounts they consider acceptable instead of for government-set “minimum wages,” and maybe even lightening their own tax burdens by working for cash or engaging in some creative accounting.

For the Zohran Mamdanis of the world, “democratic socialism” is really just a nicer-sounding term for socialism’s Mussolinist — that is, fascist — variant: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

So the new NYC regime is hell-bent on making it harder for gig workers to get work, get paid, get tipped … get BY, with everything from “minimum wage” enforcement to controlling how apps treat tipping. Because if anyone, anywhere, somehow manages to make a living without Mamdani’s permission, why, that’s “exploitation.”

No wonder they didn’t vote for him!

Mamdani’s “middle and upper class” supporters are getting it good and hard, too.

It turns out that his “democratic socialist” antics drive up prices for on-call transportation and food/grocery delivery.

Who, other than anyone with a basic grasp of economics, could have predicted THAT?

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

You probably use a computer — in fact, you’re probably reading this column on a computer.

For 72% of you, that computer is  the ubiquitous “standard” Windows PC or laptop. For 20% of you, it’s a Mac. The other 8% of you oddballs mostly use Linux or (Linux-based) ChromeOS.

I know the 92% of you who use Windows or macOS get tired of the cool kids telling you this, but it should be the other way around. Almost everyone should be using Linux almost all the time.

Instead of leading off with the technical reasons why, though, I want to hit you with the political, and personal financial, reasons for making the switch.

I’m going to start from the assumption that, like most people most of the time, you’ve had your “daily driver” computer — the one you use at home to browse the web, check email, stream YouTube videos, and maybe take a Zoom meeting every now and then — for at least a couple of years and you’re starting to feel like it’s a little slow and you might need a new one (if you just unboxed that brand new PC and got it set up, feel free to bookmark this article and come back to it in two years).

You may have noticed that new computers are suddenly getting more expensive every day. Not just top-of-the-line machines, either. I bought the “cheap” Raspberry Pi 5 kit I’m writing this column on less than a month ago. I paid $229 for it. As of this morning, the going price is $299.

There are “market” reasons for this sudden price rise trend — cryptocurrency miners have been buying up graphics cards as fast as they can be made for years, and now artificial intelligence companies are doing the same thing with RAM and storage devices.

There are also political reasons. The US regime’s desire to engage in “trade wars” with China and other countries has mucked up the supply chain connecting US consumers to cheap electronics, including computers and computer chips. It’s getting harder to get that stuff, and Donald Trump’s bizarre tariff fetish hits American consumers right in their wallets.

Which is where Linux comes in.

You probably DON’T need a new computer. Your current machine will almost certainly run faster and perform better, while doing all the things you normally do, if you’re willing to spend $0.00 and half an hour switching from Windows to Linux (or, if you have one of the old Intel-based Macs, from macOS to Linux).

Yes, $0.00. Not the $139 Microsoft wants for a Windows 11 license. Most versions (“distributions”) of Linux cost $0.00, and I don’t mean “preview” or “lite” versions.

Yes, half an hour, tops.

The dirty little secret Microsoft doesn’t want you to know: For years now, Linux has been easier to install, easier to set up, at least as easy to use, and MUCH easier to deal with updates on, than Windows.

You don’t have to buy Apple’s over-priced hardware to get the “look and feel” you associate with macOS, either. A number of Linux distributions copy that “look and feel.”

Here are two sites where you can answer a few questions and get recommendations for which flavor of Linux best fits your current machine and your personal preferences:

https://distrochooser.de/
https://www.distrowiz.com/

If you’re a normal computer user doing normal things — pretty much everyone except uber-gamers and tech people who require bespoke software — you can stick it to the cronies whose bottom lines the US regime is “protecting” with its tariff and trade war nonsense, and avoid the market bottleneck pricing on GPUs, CPUs, RAM, and storage.

Linux is good politics AND a wise financial decision.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY