On the last Friday of its term, the United States Supreme Court finally laid down the law on universal injunctions. Simply put, the Court forbids the federal trial bench – the District Court judges – to issue them. From now on, anyone seeking an injunction with nationwide import must file a class action – the old-fashioned way. Most commentators have totally missed the significance of this ruling, because everyone’s concentrating on the cases behind the consolidated Applications for Stay that President Donald J. Trump filed. This ruling – a rare instance of a full-blown Battle of Opinions on an application for stay, not a writ of certiorari – carries implications far beyond “birthright citizenship,” the subject matter of the cases at hand. The Court’s Institutionalists have finally gotten fed up with trial judges usurping their authority, and have now reasserted it. No one can properly understand the ruling, apart from that fact.

The actual makeup of the present Court

To understand what happened last Friday, remember that the Court does not have only two blocs, the conservative and the liberal. Instead, it has three:

• Originalists – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito and Neil Gorsuch (in order of seniority of service),

• Equitarians – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and

• Institutionalists – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Originalists need little introduction to understand their role and their desires in the cases they review. Equitarians try to assert equity powers that the Supreme Court does not have. (They also sympathize with trial judges, who do have equity powers, when said trial judges abuse those powers.)

Institutionalists have only one loyalty: to the institution that we call “Supreme Court of the United States of America.” To a lesser degree, they extend their loyalty to the entire national judiciary. Anything that threatens the authority or the reputation of the national judiciary, and/or the Supreme Court, is their enemy.

In the present three-bloc structure of the Court, the Institutionalists rule. Rarely do the Institutionalists split on any given case. That they side more often with the Originalists than with the Equitarians, merely reflects the confluence of interests of Institutionalists and Originalists in most cases. Sometimes – as in FCC v. Consumers’ Research, also decided Friday – the Institutionalists side the Equitarians. But not often – and definitely not in the three cases at hand.

Three universal injunctions at issue

The cases at hand are named Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, versus:

• CASA (Central American Solidarity Association),

• State of Washington, and

• State of New Jersey.

These three cases all concern the notion of “birthright citizenship.” According to it, any person born on American soil, regardless of the citizenship or residency status of mother or father, is a citizen. The Latin phrase for this principle is jus soli – the Law of the Soil. But contrary to popular belief, jus soli is not a holding of Roman law. Jus sanguinis (whereby a born person inherits the citizenship of his or her parents) is a part of Roman law.

President Donald Trump sought to abolish birthright citizenship with his Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Almost at once, CASA and the States of Washington and New Jersey sued, both on their own behalf and in behalf of several pregnant women who hoped to have citizenship extended automatically to their children as soon as they were born. These birth tourists have two interests in acquiring citizenship for their children by these means:

• Defined charitable benefits the government extends to citizens, and

• A means by which the “birth tourists” involved can obtain citizenship for themselves.

The governments of Washington and New Jersey apparently want to protect Democratic Party control of their States. Mendicants overwhelmingly vote Democratic. CASA has a conflict of interest. “Central American solidarity,” by definition, cannot square with patriotism.

Applications for partial stay of the universal injunctions

President Trump filed an application for partial stay of each of the universal injunctions in those three cases. Those cases found their way to the Supreme Court. (Docket Nos. 24A884, 24A885, 24A886.) On May 15, 2025, the Court took the unusual step of hearing oral argument on those three applications. That step was unusual because the Court does not ordinarily hear argument on applications for stay. Furthermore, the Court does not hear argument on any kind of case in the month of May.

The argument transcript should have given everyone the vital clue to Friday’s decision. In particular, Justice Thomas – who, as senior serving (and living) Justice, always opens questions at oral argument – asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer to expound on the history of universal injunctions. Mr. Sauer addressed a specific analogy upon which the lower courts relied: a bill of peace in English courts. Sauer argued – and Thomas accepted – that class actions are the modern analogs of bills of peace.

In fact, the Court has been down this road before. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ____ (2018). That was another immigration-related case, involving the barring of nationals from foreign countries that refused to provide enough information to “vet” said nationals. The Court voted 5-4 to uphold President Trump (first term) in that matter. More to the point, that case also had involved a universal injunction. Justice Thomas had warned then that the Court would have to review universal injunctions, as to their appropriateness, propriety – and authorization.

The main opinion forbids universal injunctions

Justice Amy Coney Barrett – most junior in age and second most junior in service – delivered the opinion of the Court. As plainly as she could write, she said universal injunctions have no authorization in the Judiciary Act of 1789. (This is the act that first “ordained and established” the first “inferior courts” according to Article III.) The Judiciary Act grants the equity powers the District Courts enjoy. Those powers extend only to the grant of complete relief to particular plaintiffs before the court in question. Universal relief is not a valid equity power under the Judiciary Act.

In particular, in the immediate post-colonial era, individuals brought suit against other individuals. And, like Justice Thomas before her (in his concurrence in Hawaii), she compares bills of peace to class actions.

Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure lays out what class actions are, who may file them, and how to handle them. Rule 23(a) sets out the prerequisites of all class actions:

One or more members of a class may sue or be sued as representative parties on behalf of all members only if:

(1) the class is so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable;

(2) there are questions of law or fact common to the class;

(3) the claims or defenses of the representative parties are typical of the claims or defenses of the class; and

(4) the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class.

Barrett (and her colleague Justice Kavanaugh, concurring) cite Rule 23(b)(2), which reads:

A class action may be maintained if Rule 23(a) is satisfied and if … the party opposing the class has acted or refused to act on grounds that apply generally to the class, so that final injunctive relief or corresponding declaratory relief is appropriate respecting the class as a whole.

In this case, the opposing party is President Trump, and his action – EO 14160 – applies generally to a hypothetical class. Indeed Justice Kavanaugh reminded the respondents that they can go back to their trial courts and seek class certification.

Dissenting opinions

Barrett astutely observed that the respondents were trying to work around this rule. So also did Justice Sotomayor, who breathlessly (in dissent) said,

The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.

In fact, the bulk of Sotomayor’s dissent is a defense, not of universal injunctions but of birthright citizenship itself. Neither Barrett nor either of the concurring Justices (Thomas and Kavanaugh) addressed that issue. The only matter before the Supreme Court in those cases was the idea of universal injunctions.

So why did Sotomayor (and Jackson) spend so much time defending birthright citizenship? Why did they boast that the administration did not seek a stay or vacatur of the injunctions as applied to particular pregnant women? Perhaps because they knew that a Rule 23 class will be inherently more difficult to certify. And perhaps because they know that the merits might not favor birthright citizenship nearly as much as they suppose.

Sotomayor doesn’t seem to realize how socialistic she sounds. She laments that children ultimately denied citizenship will lose “critical public services, like [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program] and Medicaid.” If that’s all that citizenship means to Justice Sotomayor, that’s all the more reason to question the wisdom of her appointment to the Court. Then she suggests American-born children would be stateless. Not so. Those children would be citizens or subjects of the nation-state of their mothers.

But here Sotomayor plumbs the depths of absurdity:

If allowed to take effect, the Order may even wrench newborns from the arms of parents lawfully in the United States, for it purports to strip citizenship from the children of parents legally present on a temporary basis… Those newborns could face deportation, even as their parents remain lawfully in the country.

No one has so alleged. All that would happen is that the children would have to go back when their parents’ visas have expired.

The Jackson dissent

Justice Jackson dismisses the analysis of English court rules in the Framing era as “a smokescreen.” All that matters to her is whether a federal court can “order the Executive to follow the law.” She insists that this is, and by right ought to be, the prerogative of any federal court at any level.

Here Jackson descends to a colloquialism totally unbecoming a judge:

As I understand the concern, in this clash over the respective powers of two coordinate branches of Government, the majority sees a power grab—but not by a presumably lawless Executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts.

Wait for it!? Social-media influencers use that expression. Judges and Justices do not – or did not until now.

In fact the usurpation of authority by lower courts lies at the heart of the matter before the Supreme Court. Again, the Institutionalists finally decided that they could no longer tolerate district courts acting like the Supreme Court they’re not.

Nor could the Institutionalists tolerate district courts bringing the entire national judiciary into disrepute. Barrett set a new record of tartness in chiding her colleague:

We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.

To demonstrate this, Barrett cites the very case that established the principle of judicial review. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803). Marbury had sought a writ of mandamus against James Madison – and the Court refused the request. They concluded that they hadn’t the authority so to act – and no Act of Congress could give them that authority. In other words, Barrett sent Jackson back, not merely to law school, but to high school, to re-learn civics.

The future of universal injunctions – and birthright citizenship

To repeat, universal injunctions have no future. No longer may judges issue injunctions out of their jurisdiction – not without first certifying an action-taking class. To do that, judges will have to take briefings and hold hearings on certification of classes, per Rule 23. (Note that Ben Weingarten of The Federalist observed that then-President Joe Biden also objected to universal injunctions. The shoe is clearly squeezing the other foot.)

Contrary to the breathless dissents on this partial stay, the question of birthright citizenship remains to decide. CNAV believes that the CASA entity will recruit and proceed to certify a class of persons born to non-citizen and non-permanent-lawful-resident parents. The various foundations in the George Soros financial empire will see to this.

The Babin Bill

As CNAV predicted, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) did introduce a bill to define specifically who is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” for purposes of citizenship by birth. His Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025 (H.R. 569) would set limits on birthright citizenship on lines similar to those on Trump’s EO 14160. His bill, now with 64 co-sponsors, is sitting in the Judiciary Committee. The list of co-sponsors reads like a Who’s Who of Republicans in the news for supporting Trump’s program. They include ten Judiciary Committee members and one freshman from Virginia (Rep. John J. McGuire of Virginia’s Fifth District).

This is the only sure method of revoking birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. It would not overrule the famous Wong case, because both it and EO 14160 carve out exceptions for children of lawful permanent residents. But CNAV sees no reason why a bill to limit even these children to lawful permanent residency status of their own would be unconstitutional. The Wong court declared that Congress had failed to act. When Congress does act, the Institutionalists are more likely to recognize such an act as valid. They might not want to recognize EO 14160 as valid, because Presidents execute law but do not make it.

H.R. 569 is the real sleeper in this drama. The minute Alex Soros (George’s son) announces a Birthright Citizenship Legal Defense Fund, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) should put H.R. 569 on the House Judiciary Committee calendar.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2025/06/29/news/universal-injunctions-forbidden/

Video:

Executive Order 14160:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/

Trump v. CASA:

Application for Partial Stay of Injunction (Docket):

https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24a884.html

Transcript of oral argument:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2024/24a884_c07d.pdf

Opinion and order:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_new_5426.pdf

FRCP Rule 23 (class actions):

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_23

H.R. 569:

Tracking page:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr569

Co-sponsorship list:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr569/cosponsors

Declarations of Truth:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

Earlier this week, the Space Exploration Company conducted yet another test-to-failure of its current signature development project, Starship. SpaceX expected to lose both stages of this two-stage rocket ship, but not so fast, and not this way. Specifically, the booster blew up, and the “ship” (second stage) burned up. Does that spell doom for Starship? Sorry to disappoint Elon Musk’s detractors, but no. Tests-to-failure are the only way to find out for certain what can go wrong, especially with a new rocket ship. But had SpaceX run its development project differently, they would be in a much better financial position. They would also be further along in overall development than they are today. They could even be helping the official American space program in ways they never gave themselves a chance to imagine.

What is Starship, and what does SpaceX want to accomplish?

Starship is, or SpaceX wants it to be, the heaviest space liner and space freighter ever built. Indeed it would be the first rocket ship to carry passengers or freight on a scale comparable to commercial aviation. Or military airlift, for that matter – because the U.S. military wants to use it to move troops and equipment halfway around the globe, before an enemy would even know what’s happening.

There’s just one catch: Starship isn’t ready, and won’t be ready for years yet. The reason it’s not ready is that SpaceX, under the obsessive-compulsive leadership of founder Elon Musk, is following a single track. That company wants a fully reusable rocket that its shipyards (now incorporated as an independent city!) can turn out orders of magnitude faster than Boeing or Airbus can turn out airliners and air freighters. But first they must make their rocket reusable. The booster they lost in the last test was on its second flight. But they haven’t achieved that with the second stage.

Why is SpaceX so obsessed and compelled with reuse, mass production, and rapid “cadence” (how often they launch their rockets)? Because Elon Musk has one dream above all, and is impatient to realize it. He wants to build a self-sustaining city on the planet Mars – not as a mining colony but as a second home for humanity. That project will require thousands of Starships carrying crew, equipment – and rocket fuel, for he wants to refuel in space.

The problem with the Starship program

SpaceX has a fundamental problem it didn’t always have. When they developed their current “workhorse” rockets – Falcon Nine and Falcon Heavy – they did offer “intermediate” services as soon as they could. Falcon Nine reuses its booster but not its second stage; Falcon Heavy has three boosters and can reuse at least two, if not all three. Falcon Nine especially has taken “market share” from nearly ever other rocket ship built. Its reusable booster lets it launch payloads at less than half the cost of its competitors.

Falcon Heavy was supposed to be retired by now; Musk hoped that Starship would take its place. But Musk knows he cannot even entrust his own payloads – Starlink® satellites – to Starship. In racing to make Starship re-usable, he has left it un-usable for any useful work! The perfect, in short, has become the enemy of the good.

The YouTube influencer “Everyday Astronaut,” in covering Integrated Flight Test Nine (the latest), pointed this out. Why, he asked, didn’t SpaceX develop an intermediate version of Starship that would reuse the booster but not the ship? They could have been putting his new, heavier Starlink® satellites into orbit by now, on a grand scale. They could also be lifting other, more ambitious payloads – modules for the VAST company’s new Haven space station. (Starship is more than twice as wide as a Haven module, even today.)

But even “Everyday Astronaut” didn’t think of everything.

What SpaceX should have done with the concept

SpaceX is, of course, running its own space program. Advantage: the company has its own goals and can pursue them, independently of often fickle government agencies. (Any organization whose headship changes hands once every eight years – or even four – is necessarily fickle.) Disadvantage: SpaceX takes on the onus of making a long-range plan, and making that plan adaptable. This they haven’t done. A vague vision of a city on Mars is not a long-term plan.

They have the bare outlines of a mission profile: lift a ship into orbit, refuel it, and send it to Mars. But even SpaceX admits that refueling a single ship for a Mars transit and landing will require ten launches of orbital “tankers.” They need “tankers” because they never thought to build a refueling station in orbit.

But consider an intermediate version of Starship with a second stage designed to carry payload but not return to Earth. Why not equip that stage with fuel and thrusters to steer it once it’s in orbit? Then the first such stage enters orbit, drops its payload, and stays in orbit. The next such stage will catch up to it and latch onto it, forming another, larger object. Other second stages do the same – creating a cluster of shells, already in orbit, waiting for the next step.

What next?

If experience with Falcon Nine and Heavy are any guide, SpaceX could launch over 200 of these second stages into orbit within five years. In that time, they would perfect the booster, which is much more valuable, with all its 33 rocket engines. More importantly, among the payloads would be the modules for a first-generation Haven space station. (VAST might even have made it larger, to fit more snugly inside a Starship second stage.)

Now the value of cooperation and collaboration becomes apparent. That new space station – or a second like it – would be the ideal construction shack for turning those 200 second stages into several much larger stations. Shipfitters could unfasten the engines and fit out those massive shells with new, interconnecting interiors. Then, after a few more heavy-lift missions, they could mount a number of ships on a giant wheel, which would spin for gravity. The wheel’s hub would provide docking, loading, and unloading services – or microgravity laboratories or factories.

Now SpaceX would have a complex, or a fleet, of stations providing Earth-normal gravity and workspace. At least one would become a scrapyard to turn millions of “space junk” objects into ballast, counterweights, or reusable metal. The rest would become a shipyard in space, to offer repair of existing satellites, or support further development of a reusable second stage.

Looking further ahead

The best immediate use of Starship with a reusable second stage would be as a suborbital space liner or freighter. Almost as important would be ferrying of passengers and freight – including fuels – into low Earth orbit. A proper space program needs permanent stations in low (or medium) Earth orbit and geostationary or geosynchronous orbit (GEO). Dedicated ships, deriving their design from the Starship second stage, would ferry passengers and freight to and from GEO, and deploy satellites at various orbital levels. Equally dedicated ships would clean up the “space junk” in a big operation to remove an ever-present hazard. An LEO or MEO station would be the perfect base for “orbital traffic control.” This function would protect cargo – and lives – in addition to keeping “space junk” to a minimum.

The next important program would be one for asteroid deflection and capture. Already NASA is tracking an asteroid longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall – Apophis. This rock will pass very close to Earth in 2029. Worse, Apophis will disappear in the Sun’s glare – and might come out of it to hit New York, or London! Had SpaceX followed this proposed program, President Trump’s vaunted Space Force would already have a base ready to divert Apophis.

Obviously the first reusable second stages could bring back those spare engines, removed from the original second stages, for refurbishment and reuse in new “ships.” Thus, out of sheer practicality, almost nothing need be lost.

The real Mars colony wagon

If SpaceX, or NASA, or a NASA/ESA/JAXA coalition, still wants to build a city on Mars, then it needs a better plan than anything anyone has suggested thus far. Sending thousands of Starships on Hohmann minimum-energy orbital transits to Mars will not accomplish the goal. Even as large a heavy lifter as Starship is not and can never be a space-borne Conestoga wagon. True, the late Wernher von Braun proposed a “wagon train to Mars” (and famously couched his proposal as a novel). But the correct metaphor for colonizing Mars is not the settlement of the American West, but the first Voyages of Discovery by Erik the Red, his son Leif, Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus), Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), Amerigo Vespucci, and the incomparable Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand Magellan).

So SpaceX should be collaborating with NASA to design a space-to-space colony wagon with nuclear thermal engines. Then they should build not only one, but a fleet of three, or preferably five. (Magellan started with five ships, of which one survived to return to Spain.) These ships would carry nuclear power plants, to power not only the new engines but also electromagnetic radiation shields. A space-to-space ship never lands, so those ships would carry Starships to serve as landing craft.

That Martian city would serve the new asteroid mining industry, plus a metallurgy industry to rival Pittsburgh. So Elon Musk’s dream would take shape – but the colonists would be there to work.

What can SpaceX do now?

SpaceX might seem to have wasted a prodigious amount of time, by not developing a heavy-lift capability along these lines. But if it starts now, then better late than never. Apophis is still on its way, and even if it doesn’t hit Earth in 2029, it could set up a collision for 2068. Nor is Apophis the only “near Earth asteroid” on record, by any means.

The Starship second stage is already at a point where it can achieve orbit and stay in orbit. Even if it can’t return to Earth, it could start carrying true payloads any time SpaceX wishes. The development program outlined here probably can’t divert Apophis by 2029 but could almost certainly divert it by 2032. Beyond that, it could lead to replacement space stations far sooner than currently envisioned – and cleaning up the “space junk” before it brings down every satellite in a cascade of collisions called the Kessler Syndrome. Along the way, the project could yield enough revenue to make it self-financing.

But without this kind of project, the perfect remains the enemy of the good. Now that Elon Musk has left his “Department of Government Efficiency” in other hands, and resumed full-time leadership of his companies, he has time to think about improving the image of SpaceX, while enabling it to do many more useful things.

Link to:

The article:

https://cnav.news/2025/06/01/editorial/talk/spacex-starship-what-might/

Video:

VAST Company Home:

https://www.vastspace.com/

Article on Apophis by NASA:

https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/apophis/

Declarations of Truth:

https://x.com/DecTruth

Declarations of Truth Locals Community:

https://declarationsoftruth.locals.com/

Conservative News and Views:

https://cnav.news/

Clixnet Media

https://clixnet.com/

Last week, a libertarian, constitutionalist, and apparent Christian preterist submitted to CNAV one of the more thoughtful objections to President Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs and trade. Objections from Democrats and their allies don’t count. After all, Democrats favored tariffs back when the Bush Dynasty controlled the Republican Party. That in itself is ironic, because Woodrow Wilson, who began decades of Democratic rule over America, eliminated all tariffs. (His replacement: the graduated income tax.) So anything Democrats have to say on trade policy is self-serving and hypocritical. But libertarians offer consistent and sincere arguments – which does not make them correct. Herewith the rebuttal to that submitted argument, which CNAV promised.

Who is Robert W. Peck?

Robert W. Peck is the chairman of the Constitution Party of Washington State and a member of the Constitution Party National Committee. He also keeps his own web site, Perspectives, and occasionally submits articles to CNAV.

He professes to be a Christian, and in his writings has left no doubt on that score. But the only thing Christians reliably agree upon is the need for, and assurance of, spiritual salvation. On how to interpret the Revelation to St. John of Jerusalem, Christians of good heart have their sharpest divide. Mr. Peck believes that John of Jerusalem was foretelling the Sack of Jerusalem and Destruction of Herod’s Temple in 70 A.D. by Titus, son of, and successor to, Emperor Vespasian. Never mind that John wrote his Revelation on the Island of Patmos in 96 A.D., twenty-six years after the Second Roman-Jerusalem War started. (Pompey the Great fought the First one as part of his campaign against Mithridates of Pontus and Tigranes of Armenia.)

Or perhaps John was prophesying the Third Roman-Jerusalem War of 135 A.D., by order of Emperor Hadrian. That War resulted in the Great Scattering (Diaspora) of the Jews.

All of which to say that Peck is a preterist, who does not accept a time of worsening moral decay. John of Jerusalem predicted this, as did Paul of Tarsus. Peck denies this, and this explains his adherence to the central flawed tenet of libertarianism: universal goodwill.

What is universal goodwill?

Universal goodwill tells us that human beings have no good reason to fight. An individual especially has no enemies but what he makes. People make enemies, says Peck, because they engage (he would say indulge) in zero-sum thinking. A zero-sum game has a winner and a loser. Or in a multi-player game, net victories exactly balance net defeats.

To which he raises two objections. First, men of goodwill should be able to arrive at an equitable distribution of scarce resources between them. Second, no such things as limited or scarce resources need exist. His idealized story of economics (literally, Laws of the Household) features infinite increase. Are we running out of land? Venture off-world and find or create more! Columbus did it, and John Cabot; why can’t we? Is someone foolish (by his lights) to reach out for land to conquer, plunder and pillage? Pull up stakes and get out of his reach! (And never, never, never lend credence to the notion of literal, geographical Promised Land! That explains why he and his friend Darrell L. Castle consistently discount the Biblical territorial claims of something called Israel.)

Libertarian foreign and trade policy assumes universal goodwill, and either infinite resources or ever more dense resource utilization. Sadly, the real world does not conform to these comfortable nostrums. That is why his recommendations on tariffs and trade must necessarily fail.

Primer on tariffs

Peck begins with some definitions, and shows a competent – but incomplete – understanding of the issues behind them. Tariffs, he says, are taxes on imports. Specifically, governments lay and collect tariffs from the importer, who must recoup them, and the costs of goods he imports. But Peck understands only one purpose of tariffs:

The idea is to tax imported goods at a rate calculated to make them as expensive to consumers, or more so, than their domestically produced counterparts. When that happens, American-made products can “compete” with imports. Consumers will then purchase U.S. products, creating a demand for production and thus preserving, or even creating, jobs.

True, but incomplete. Tariffs also are a source of revenue. Before Wilson, tariffs were the source of revenue for the federal government. Every country imposed them; that is how their governments ran. But tariffs never amounted to more than perhaps ten percent of the importer’s purchase prices. The U.S. government understood the Laffer Rule long before Arthur Laffer was born. When tariffs are too high, imports, and the revenue from tariffs, will cease.

Woodrow Wilson destroyed that understanding completely. Ostensibly he said he would build upon universal goodwill of all nations. In fact he laid the trap for the graduated income tax, and gained the confidence of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the State legislaturres to amend the Constitution to permit this kind of tax. (The confidence trick might have been more profound if someone can invalidate Ohio’s ratification of Amendment XVI.) By no accident, President Trump has proposed to replace income-tax revenues by tariff revenues. Let no one imagine that this would be unprecedented. It has more than a century of precedent behind it, that century being the pre-Wilson century.

Trade barriers other than tariffs

Peck goes on to detail other barriers to international market entry. Subsidies are direct cash payments to domestic manufacturers, or guaranteed purchase agreements. Farm Bills always feature subsidies: the government buys food in quantity, and ostensibly hands this out to needy citizens. These are the food stamps of popular political lore.

Regulation works the opposite way. Peck regards most regulations as facilitating entry of foreign goods into the U.S. market. Farmers or manufacturers in other countries don’t need to comply with American environmental, labor, or other regulations. Their goods, therefore, cost less. Correct as far as it goes – but surprisingly, Peck doesn’t carry his research any further. Robert C. O’Brien of American Global Strategies recommends the obvious adjustment: a specific tariff to recoup the costs of pollution. Or, call it a compensation for the regulations with which Americans must comply. CNAV would carry O’Brien’s idea further. Why not a tariff to cover compliance costs for all other forms of regulation?

When Peck discusses trade deficits, he blames them entirely on the removal of the gold standard. But he ignores what prompted President Richard M. Nixon to move off that standard. This is not to excuse Nixon; he should have re-instituted the pre-Wilson tariff regime. It is to remind people that trade deficits remain, even with a gold standard.

The sum of the game

Peck’s worst failing is his assumption that the sum of the Game of Life is not zero – and is never zero. For some games, the sum is zero. Land is finite. Minerals are finite. Even air and water are finite, though at least they each have a cycle of renewal. But the water cycle has a few choke points – limits on sources of water humans can tap for their use.

Must war, then, be the lot of humankind forever? Not necessarily. A civilizational state strives to acquire and defend enough land and resources for its people. But of necessarily, the aggregate of territory is finite. The Age of Discovery and Exploration is over. That of competition for scarce livable land has succeeded. (The only unsettled land now available for any kind of human settlement is Antarctica. Apart from its limited size, no one is going to try to scratch out a living on that cold, snow-blown, wind-swept continent any time soon.)

Under the circumstances, universal goodwill fails. Contrary to his glowing summation, humanity does live in a closed system of limited land, water (or at least fresh water), and minerals. And when he chastises his fellow human beings for consuming more than they produce, he contradicts himself. In an open system of unlimited resources, over-consumption would be impossible, would it not?

What the tariffs debate is not about

Finally, the debate on tariffs is not about Presidential versus Congressional power. Anything a President does, that might extend further than the law, Congress can easily codify. Peck doesn’t much want the tariff code that prevailed before Wilson, anyway. So anything he says about “not following procedure” becomes incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial.

To reply also to one other canard:

The continuation of what has been the economic status quo for decades does not constitute an emergency (“a sudden, urgent, usually unexpected occurrence”).

Oh, yes, it does. It certainly does when “the economic status quo,” for however long, is the equivalent of starvation or slow poisoning. Re-feeding and/or detoxifying a patient in that condition, on an exigent basis, is not only appropriate but imperative. That applies with greater force to a society that has suffered from a thoroughly wrongheaded fiscal policy.

The tariffs debate is about an America that is squandering its wealth, while pretending, ironically enough, to exploit other’s labor! Indeed, Democrats consistently made the same complaints Trump is now making about “free” trade. Republicans ignored them, to their detriment. But now Democrats have thrown those arguments away – and did it even before Donald Trump ran for President. Hint: Barack H. Obama is Woodrow Wilson 2.0.

A proper America first trade policy

So Donald Trump should continue his policy of aiming at tariffs that will replace income-tax revenues. Only recently he scored victories in the other purposes of tariffs: to force renegotiations of a lopsided trade regime. And apparently these tariffs have yielded significant revenues – and without a moment to lose, either.

At the same time, he must continue his campaign of territorial acquisition – where it makes sense. Greenland would serve a dual purpose: rare-earth mineral deposits, and shoreline to establish a Naval base or two, to supplement the present Space Force base. (Even Mr. Peck shouldn’t want Citizen Putin to start renaming the Arctic Nash Okean or Russkiy Okean. Arguably, Trump inadvertently tempted the Russian leader with a comparable precedent.) Trump shouldn’t try to acquire all of Canada. But Alberta Province would provide mineral resources, and the former Northwest Territories would secure the Northwest Passage.

More to the point, tariffs are a legitimate part of any civilizational, as opposed to a globalistic, policy. Globalism – even the soft globalism which libertarianism inevitably advocates – has worked against America and Americans. High time, therefore, that America abandon such policy.

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