From Sophie's front desk — Friday, July 24
BBC News — read the full story
Tariffs. Sixty countries. Forced labor cover. The BBC reports the US has slapped new duties on dozens of nations, citing labor standards violations after the Supreme Court gutted the administration's previous tariff power in February. This round replaces a temporary global levy and casts a wide net—potentially reshaping trade ties across the globe. The move reveals something harder to miss: tariff authority, once lost in court, gets reborn under a different doctrine. Franklin has the first word, then Seneca.
I read this morning that your Congress has clapped fresh duties on sixty nations at once — forced labor the pretext, a Court's rebuke the occasion. Sixty. In my day we quarreled with one Parliament over a handful of acts: the Hat Act, the Iron Act, the slitting-mill prohibition that forbade Pennsylvania a single nail not forged in Birmingham. We called it monopoly. You call it policy.
The shape is the same. I wrote once that Spain and Portugal, hedging in their cuckoo of gold, would have found their hoards no more valuable than lead had they succeeded. Your Supreme Court struck down the last round; the executive simply found a new statute, a new rationale, and the ships keep waiting at the wharves. The Scotch merchants in '74 did the same — Parliament denied them a linen bounty, so they boycotted English cloth and built their own looms. Manufactures spring from restriction as weeds from cracked pavement.
The young tradesman in the coffeehouse asks whether his cargo will clear. I tell him: the tariff is a tax on your own customers, collected at the border. The manufacturer works longer hours, provisions rise, and the consumer pays twice — once in price, once in scarcity. We saw it in the non-importation agreements. The empty sack cannot stand upright.
slitting mills or steel furnaces in America, that the Americans may be obliged to take all the nails for their buildings, and steel for their tools, from these artificers, under the same disadvantages. Added to these, the Americans remembered the Act authorizing the most cruel in…
[on or before March 21, 1783] Question 1: Are all the nations of Europe, including those of the North, allowed to trade freely and safely with the United States of North America, to land on their coast, to frequent their ports, harbors, etc.? Answer: Yes. Question 2: Is the impor…
London, June 30th, 1774 I hear a non-importation agreement is intended. If it is general, and the Americans agree in it, the present Ministry will certainly be knocked up, and their Act repealed; otherwise they and their measures will be continued, and the Stamp Act revived. The …
the coming winter will have a crisis again in it. In this summer season, news spreads very slowly and imperfectly, at least through London; but we shall soon get together again. However I cannot possibly tell you the obligations we have to those, who have furnished our newspapers…
Price rises. Dearnes of Provisions obliges the Manufacturer to work more Days and more Hours: thus more Work is done than equals the usual Demand; of course it becomes cheaper, and the Manufactures in Consequence. <Keeping bullion and coin at home does not promote the welfare of …
Lucilius, you ask what I make of the new vectigalia the princeps has slapped on sixty nations — forced labor the pretext, a court's rebuke the occasion. I think of Corsica. Eight years watching grain ships pass my cliffside hut, bound for Rome, their holds full and their oarsmen chained. The empire called it annona. The oarsmen called it something else. The mechanism is old. A ruler needs revenue. The law says no.
So he finds a crime — real or invented — that lets him seize what the law forbade. Yesterday it was national security. Today forced labor. Tomorrow it will be something equally unassailable. The pretext rotates; the appetite does not. I have seen provinces stripped to feed the capital's hunger. Sicily knows this. Your grain fed Rome while your farmers ate chaff.
The publicani grew rich on the spread. Now the same geometry plays at larger scale: sixty nations, a single decree, the courts sidestepped by moral cover. The wise man sees the shape beneath the words. The fool argues the words. Power does not ask permission. It manufactures permission. Write to me when the next justification arrives. I will be here, counting the cost.
material return. Thus, although we may declare that he who has received a benefit with good-will has returned the favour, yet we counsel him to return to the giver something of the same kind as that which he has received. Some part of what we have said departs from the convention…
by different people, it is hard to make them balance. X. Besides this, no day is appointed for repayment of a benefit, as there is for borrowed money; consequently he who has not yet repaid a benefit may do so hereafter: for tell me, pray, within what time a man is to be declared…
others out of court, and put an end to them at once. II. It is a question whether a benefit can be taken away from one by force. Some say that it cannot, because it is not a thing, but an act. A gift is not the same as the act of giving, any more than a sailor is the same as the …
at variance with one another; nay, it rends and destroys that union by which alone our human weakness can be supported; yet it is so absolutely universal, that even those who complain of it most are not themselves free from it. XXVIII. Consider within yourself, whether you have a…
we punish the undutiful, the malicious, the avaricious, the headstrong, and the cruel? Do you imagine that those things which are loathed are not punished, or do you suppose that any punishment is greater than the hate of all men? It is a punishment not to dare receive a benefit …
The story ran in BBC News. Sixty nations now face fresh tariffs on the pretext of forced labor enforcement — a blunt tool for what's likely a subtler policy. That's Old News for today.