wlxd
8d ago
Please, do the math. Get some data on how many wealthy people are there, how much you expect to get from each, multiply one figure by the other, and get surprised about how paltry it is.
As it happens, US already has the most progressive tax system of all developed countries. In US, it is disproportionately the wealthy how pay the bulk of the taxes. In contrast to that, in Europe, the bulk of the taxes is paid by the middle class. For example: in US, you only enter the 32% tax bracket once you’re above $192k/year. In France, and I shit you not, you start paying 30% tax starting from 27.5k EUR. On top of that, when you actually try to spend whatever you’re left with, you pay 20% VAT, whereas in US, the highest sales tax rarely exceeded 10-11%.
The result is that people making 60k EUR/year are the backbone of French budget, whereas in US, if you make $60k, you barely pay any tax at all, considering deductions, EITC, etc.
Seriously, just do the math.
wlxd
10d ago
No, Le Pen was convicted based on creative application of mundane campaign finance laws, not based in expanded policing powers on the street. That’s my point: if the government turns into tyranny, it’s because it wants to, not because street cops are given more powers to deal with hoodlums.
wlxd
10d ago
You are trying to imply that in that world, lives of regular innocent people would be ruined, and I just don’t think that this is the case. This is how law enforcement actually worked in US before 1960s, before Miranda, Brady etc. Crime rate back then was much lower, largely because cops harassed no-gooders in the exact way you consider scary and atrocious.
To put it simply, for me the precondition for discussing whether police power are excessive is low crime rate. I worry less about excessive police power than about excessive criminal powers. I worry less about a cop being able to intimidate and search me at will than about a hoodlum being able to intimidate and attack me at will. Only when I have nothing to fear from criminals, I will start thinking about fearing cops.
wlxd
11d ago
You are not arguing against how this law would be typically applied (because obviously police cannot search a typical person every time he steps out of his home), but against some extreme overapplication, highly unlikely in practice.
I don’t think it is a particularly strong objection, given that we already have plenty of laws today that, if applied to such extreme degree, would be just as annoying, they just are never used like that.
For an explicit example: if you operate any radio station (including CB radio, so that’s not limited to holders of amateur radio license), you are legally obligated to allow FCC employees to inspect your radio station. They don’t even need any sort of warrant. They just show up at your door, and you must let them in, under risk of penalties. Theoretically, they could reinspect you every 3 hours. In practice, this just never happens.
The point is that the government that feels that it’s fine to inspect or search you every 3 hours is not the kind of a government that would be prevented from doing so should the words on the paper said it couldn’t. Tyranny is about the government desiring and executing its abilities to keep inspecting and searching normal people continuously, not about their legal ability to do so.
wlxd
18d ago
Of course there is, just like there is a difference between donating $100M to Mar-A-Lago, and donating $100M to IRS.
wlxd
24d ago
Taleb is the most overrated intellectual alive. Tried one of his book, it was literally non stop half-coherent self-aggrandizing rambling. I guess this is a good strategy to sound intelligent to mid-wits: if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, and you’re not smart enough to see that there is nothing there, it might indeed sound like something above your head, rather than drivel.
wlxd
1mo ago
Now, if she had learned in her function as a judge that there was an investigation against her defendant and then proceeded to warn him about that, this would be a textbook case of corruption.
“Corruptly” there just means that she is doing that willfully, with improper purpose. It does not have anything to do with corruption as in misuse of the office. See eg this. This charge clearly applies given the allegations.
wlxd
1mo ago
For one, had he been given any kind of notice and chance to challenge his removal, one imagines he could have raised the issue of his procedurally-valid and as-yet-not-revoked withholding.
One could imagine a process that would have prevented the issue, but none such process was due him, and even if there was, as I keep saying, a mistake could have happened after that process was completed. For example, imagine he got a notice he is getting deported to Venezuela, tried to appeal it, failed, and then on the deportation day there is a mix up and he accidentally gets put on a bus that gets people onto a plane to El Salvador.
One can also look at someone detained and removed in the middle of the night and conclude that this is not enough process.
Sure, but in my opinion, the process is already very excessive. For example, I think that the standard procedure should be that people who never had valid immigration to begin with, should only get to appeal their deportation after already being deported.
wlxd
1mo ago
I think where we disagree is that this particular error was incompetence of such degree as to be a violation of due process (all but conceded by the government anyway)
No: this was a violation of Garcia’s right, but it was not a due process violation. Whether error is egregious or not is orthogonal to whether it’s a due process violation.
and that violations of this kind (ignorance of a duly entered legal order that they had a legal duty to know about) are the kind of things that can be prevented.
Most of them, certainly. My point is that there is a trade off here between error rate and your effectiveness. The more efforts you take to prevent any and all errors, the harder it will be to actually get the job done. Democrats understand this very well: that’s how they effectively banished almost all of death penalty in US. That’s why I oppose excessive concern for due process, because I know that it’s not principled stance, but rather instrumental, only to achieve a specific nefarious political purpose.
One doesn't need to think that every error can be prevented to believe that such a glaringly obvious one can be.
Yes, but even so, the glaringly obvious mistakes will nevertheless occasionally happen, and sometimes there will be little legal remedy available too. I’m willing to consider proposals to make errors less likely, but only if they are paired with proposals to make the whole process faster and more effective. Of course, Democrats won’t entertain deals like that.
wlxd
1mo ago
Americans are in the right to want to deport tens of millions of illegals, and excessive concern for the rights of illegals make it meaningfully more difficult to enforce the right to remove them.
wlxd
1mo ago
At the very least, the executive ought to dissolve its own order.
No, because they were not aware of that order. They should have, but they weren’t. That’s why it was a mistake. If they were aware of this this order, they would have either followed it and deported him elsewhere, or seeked dissolution before deporting him to El Salvador. Your retort only makes sense under assumption that they knew about the order but chose to ignore it nevertheless. In my previous post I explicitly assumed this to not be the case, and said that if it was the case, then the situation and the analysis is completely different.
There is no amount of due process that will prevent the government from not following its own orders?
Yes, exactly, because after following all the due legal process, someone can still make a mistake. Think about my example of sheriff looking at the calendar wrong. I’m not saying that what they did was right. It was wrong. However, it was not a wrong that could have been prevented by scheduled due process.
I feel like "there is a reliable central database run by a group half as competent as the dude responsible for delivering burritos" isn't even an amount of due process, it's a basic measure of government competence.
I actually think that the US government does not have nearly enough databases of its citizens and present non-citizens, but yes, I fully agree that what happened here was incompetence. The point is, incompetence will occasionally happen, due process cannot and will not prevent all incompetence-induced errors, and it is not possible to prevent every case of incompetence before the fact with some pre-defined process without significantly compromising effectiveness in executing basic functions.
If anything, a kick in the ass might actually help them realize that in order to execute their core function, they first need to achieve operational competence.
Maybe, but I suspect that what happened here is that they wanted to actually execute their core function before activist judges tarpit them, and rushed things so much that they missed an order that someone failed to input properly into database back in 2019, or something like that. This is not meant to imply that they didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just operating in hostile legal environment will cause mistake rate to be higher.
wlxd
1mo ago
The problem is not with the withholding order. The problem is that apparently everyone expects infinite process before you’re actually able to execute any removal.
In the Garcia case, the government made a mistake by not complying with that withholding offer (I’ll assume that it was indeed a mistake, and not deliberate flouting of the order, because otherwise the below argument doesn’t apply). Liberals, moderates, and centrists seem to believe that the outcome at hand means that the Garcia’s right to due process was not met, and district and some appellate judges seem to believe that too. There is an implication here that if Garcia’s due process rights were met, he would not have been deported to El Salvador. This is not so. There is no amount of due process that will prevent government from ever making mistakes of this sort, and excessive efforts of judiciary and activists using the judiciary to prevent mistakes meaningfully detract from the Executive’s ability to execute its core function.
The simple fact is that there is absolutely no existing process that could have prevented this mistake. Garcia had final, confirmed on appeal order to be removed. He had no further ability to appeal it. If the government removed him to a different country, that would have been it. This is how the process works, not just in immigration, but in every case.
For example, imagine you’re a tenant who stopped paying rent. Landlord goes through legal process to get you evicted, you appeal, but since you’re clearly in the wrong, ultimately you get a final eviction order. Accordingly, you get a notice from sheriff’s office that you’ll get evicted on May 1st, approved by court. However, on April 30th, the sheriff looks at the calendar wrong, and thinks that your eviction date is today, and evicts you. A clear mistake, in violation of court order to remove you on May 1st. However, is it a violation of your due process? No, there was absolutely no judicial process that you were not given access to, that would have prevented your too early eviction. What is the legal remedy that you should be accorded after the fact? I actually don’t know. I would actually be fine with no remedy or damages at all: the government does extremely detrimental things to people all the time that have no remedy whatsoever, the sovereign/qualified immunity and all that, but if you insisted on some damages, I’d accept the sheriff reimbursing you for any actual cost caused by too early eviction, like eg. one night hotel stay.
Now, imagine a judge ordering the sheriff to kick the landlord out of the freshly vacated home, and effectuate your return to the home that you were about to get evicted from anyway. It just so happens that you were also a wanted fugitive on federal charges, and as you were getting evicted by state officers, federal officers use the opportunity to arrest you and throw you in federal prison. The judge then require the state sheriff to somehow “facilitate” your release from federal prison, without specifying in any way whatsoever as to how exactly you are supposed to do it, or what that even means. Lastly, it issues a statewide injunction on any evictions unless you get one more hearing after final (already appealed) eviction order, with another ability to appeal the outcome of that hearing, to prevent additional future eviction mistakes.
Most people would see this as a mockery of justice, an excessive concern for the rights of someone who is clearly in the wrong, and meaningful making it even more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced. And yet, here we are.
wlxd
1mo ago
The problem is not with these immigration “judges”, but with actual Article III judges like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale. If every illegal gets Article III judiciary proceedings before finally getting removed, we will never be able to actually enforce the law. Imagine if military had to get a court decision before being able to kill an invading soldier.
wlxd
2mo ago
Looking at this, I wonder if it’s not some kind of reverse rug pulling, where insiders buy on the dip, knowing reversal is coming.
More seriously, I wonder how aware Trump is that this constant flip flopping is destroying his ability to make credible threats in future.
wlxd
2mo ago
What this means in practice is that if talk to the perp, and you indicate or imply in any way whatsoever that he is expected to answer your questions, the conversation is now custodial interrogation, and if you don't mirandize the guy first, your case is fucked.
wlxd
2mo ago
Oh, we can continue applying the doctrine to illegal wiretaps just fine, that's not my problem with it. My problem is things like, if you fail to recite a specific magic incantation before your suspect confesses to the crime, you must disregard that confession.
wlxd
2mo ago
Can you explain how it is a problem? It's not immediately clear to me, and it's apparently not immediately clear to most of the legal systems around the world, given that they do not subscribe to the extensive application of this doctrine.
wlxd
2mo ago
The government has no responsibility to right wrongs in general. There are some specific laws that apply to some specific contexts, for example Federal Tort Claims Act (which would not apply here), but as a general matter, government enjoys sovereign immunity, which means that unless some specific law applies, it is under no obligation to compensate you if it wrongs you.
wlxd
2mo ago
Your analogy misses some key important points (e.g. the neighbor house party should be a strict invite only event, and you only got into it because you literally snuck through the window), but more importantly, the issue is not compensation for plane ticket. I'd be happy to give that guy $1000 for him to fuck off. He can buy plane ticket to US with it, but he will not be admitted into the country, because the US government is under no obligation whatsover to admit any noncitizens into the country.
wlxd
2mo ago
The fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine as applied in the US is pretty stupid. It is beyond retarded that good faith procedural errors can allow obviously guilty men go free. Most of the rest of the world does not have it, or does not have it to the same extent as US does.
wlxd
2mo ago
We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.
wlxd
2mo ago
They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.
wlxd
2mo ago
It has only partly happened, which is even worse. We are full on papieren bitte, except where it would help deporting the illegals.
wlxd
2mo ago
Falsely claiming that you’re a US citizen to an ICE agent conducting a raid is a federal felony (18 U.S.C. § 1001). I suspect that ICE will have enough circumstantial evidence to support a reasonable belief that you’re lying, which will allow them to arrest you, and unless you help them in their investigation, you’ll be sitting in jail until they do in fact determine you lied. This is limited by detention capactity, of course.
Do you genuinely not understand it? The beauty of the lawn lies in its neatness and uniformity. Random weeds in random places break that uniformity. The result does not good even when the dandelions flower (which is a relatively small fraction of the year).
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