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Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God · I Believe

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to I Believe, where we talk about governance and philosophy in America.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining me.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: The chicken tax.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Scene.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1962.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: American farmers have cracked the code.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: We can raise chickens cheap, like really cheap.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Industrial scale factory farms efficient as hell.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: German housewives love it.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: French families love it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Half the price of local chicken.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe even tastier.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: European chicken farmers do not love it.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: They're getting destroyed.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: So France and West Germany do what countries do when their people scream loud enough.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: They slap tariffs on American chicken.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Problem solved.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Lyndon B.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Johnson is president.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: He's not amused.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: You slap our chickens, we slap back.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: In 1963, LBJ announced retaliatory tariffs.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: 25% on potato starch, dextrin, brandy.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And 25% on light trucks?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: The first three make sense.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Targeted.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Tit for tat.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: But light trucks?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was aimed at one company.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Volkswagen.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Their vans and little pickups were selling like crazy in the states.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Detroit hated it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Johnson just gave them what they wanted.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: A 25% wall against the competition.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the thing about the chicken war.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: It ended fast.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Europe backed down on chicken tariffs.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Trade negotiations happened.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: The fight over poultry faded into the history books.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the truck tariff?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: That one never came down.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sixty-two years later, it's still the law of the land.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: First, let's clear something up.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: A tariff isn't some clever penalty on foreign companies, it's a tax on us.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: American importers pay it.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then they pass it along to businesses.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Then businesses pass it along to you at the dealership, at the grocery store.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's what tariffs are, a tax on Americans buying foreign goods.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: That twenty five percent wall around light trucks was supposed to be temporary leverage, but it stuck.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: It became a hidden tax we've been paying for six decades.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: And with foreign competition locked out, American trucks transformed.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: They got bigger, heavier, more luxurious, way more expensive.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: The Ford F-150 became the profit machine that drives Detroit, not because it had to compete on price, but because it didn't.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Roll back the tape for context.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: An early 1980s F-150 had a base MSRP under$6,000, roughly$19,000 to$24,000 in today's money, depending on the exact model year and adjustment method.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: Even after inflation, trucks have leapt to a very different price tier.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Now,$70 grand for a well-equipped pickup.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: Why would Ford lower prices when the moat was there?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why would GM?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: They wouldn't.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's not how business works.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: What started as a spat over frozen chicken became the permanent business model for America's most popular vehicle.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: Harvard PhD economist Milton Friedman would have loved the chicken tax story.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: The social responsibility of a business isn't charity.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: It isn't fairness.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: It isn't doing good.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's one thing.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Increase profits.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Maximize shareholder value.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: The sacred duty of a business is to make money.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: From that view, what Ford and GM did wasn't shady.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't corruption.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was textbook.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: If consumers will pay$70,000 for a truck that costs half that to build, your duty is to keep charging$70,000.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Dropping the price voluntarily isn't noble.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's malpractice.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: You're throwing away profit that shareholders hired you to capture.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: It might even be wrong for a business to reduce prices.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Voluntarily reducing prices reduces profits.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And their duty is to maximize profits.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you can overturn a tariff in court.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: You can roll back a policy.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: You can refund the tax.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: But you can't unring the bell.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can't unteach the consumer what they're willing to pay.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can't force a company to charge less when charging more is their duty.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: The Supreme Court might rule the tariffs unconstitutional.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: They probably should.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: The president doesn't have the authority to enact sweeping tariffs.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's about whether one man can impose the largest tax hike on the American people since 1993 without Congress.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: But even if the court strikes them down, even if importers get refunds, your grocery bill isn't going back to 2024 prices.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Your furniture costs aren't dropping.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: The new floor is set.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's the lesson from the chicken tax.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: The tariffs might be temporary, but once prices go up, they don't come down.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: The damage is permanent.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: It begs the question, what's the purpose of these taxes?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why Congress and not kings?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why do we tax ourselves at all?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: For most of human history, we didn't.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Early humans lived in bands of 50, maybe a hundred.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Small enough that everyone knew everyone.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Cooperation was personal.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: You helped me hunt, I shared the meat.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: You watched my kids, I watched yours.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: No roads, no armies, no infrastructure, no need for taxes because everything was face to face.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Then came agriculture, cities.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, humans lived with thousands of strangers, tens of thousands, millions.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Our brains didn't evolve for that.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: We evolved to cooperate with people we know, people we see, people in our tribe.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: How do you get a million strangers to cooperate?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: To build roads none of us would build alone?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: To fund armies that protect people we will never meet?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: To create systems like courts, schools, and infrastructure that benefit everyone but cost everyone?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: We told stories.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stories big enough that strangers could believe them together.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nations, laws, religions.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: The story of money we all believe is that a$100 bill is worth more than the cotton paper it's printed on, that invisible numbers on a piece of plastic are worth anything at all.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Taxation is one of those stories.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: The story says we're not just strangers, we're a people, Americans.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're a people, we pool resources.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: We choose to tax ourselves, to build what none of us could build alone.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Interstates, the power grid, the military, the internet, and tariffs, they're not some foreign penalty.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're taxes on us.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: American importers pay them, then businesses pass them down, and right now Americans are paying hundreds of billions through these tariffs.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: By the time the Supreme Court rules, the total bill could top a trillion dollars.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: When one person can tax us without consent, we no longer believe the story.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're not citizens anymore.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're subjects.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: The American founders knew this.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: They'd lived it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, said Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: The British Crown taxed the colonies.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: The colonies had no representatives in Parliament.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: No voice, no vote, just the bill.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Taxation without representation.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So when the founders wrote the Constitution, they made a choice, a radical choice for 1787.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: They gave the taxing power to the American people's representatives, Congress, not the President.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Article 1, Section 8 declares Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's the philosophy of taxation in a republic.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: We don't tax because a king demands it.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: We tax because we agree, through representation, to build something together.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: The founders believed in something higher than the crown.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: They believed in natural law, rights granted by God, not kings.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Life, liberty, property.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Benjamin Franklin proposed a motto for the great seal of the United States.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: That wasn't a flourish.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was philosophy.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: If rights come from God or nature, no human has the authority to strip them away.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: So when a king taxes without consent, it isn't just unfair, it's illegitimate.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Resisting isn't rebellion, its duty.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, our choice citizen or subject, representation or tyranny, republic or monarchy.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: America owes allegiance to no king.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the matter isn't settled.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, Congress has delegated some authority to the president over trade.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: In 1977, they passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for times of genuine crises, freeze terrorist assets, sanction rogue nations, that kind of thing.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: But hundreds of billions in new taxes on American importers passed straight to American families because of trade deficits?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Is that a threat to national security?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: The courts didn't buy it, not one.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: The Court of International Trade ruled the move illegal.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: Another federal court agreed.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Then the Court of Appeals, three judges, unanimous, said the same thing.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: All concluded the law was written for emergencies, not long-standing trade policy.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: Letting the President tax unilaterally would rewrite the Constitution.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: Congress gave itself authority to tax in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution for a reason.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: If Congress wanted to give the President authority to impose hundreds of billions in new taxes, they have to say so explicitly.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: Letting presidents declare trade deficits emergencies and impose massive tariffs would essentially rewrite the Constitution.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: It would transfer the taxing power from Congress to the executive branch.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: We don't amend the Constitution through executive order and creative reading of a 1977 statute.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: So the tariffs are illegal.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Case closed, right?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hold your horses, cowboy.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: The administration appealed.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: The appeals court paused its own ruling, meaning the tariffs remain in effect while the case goes up to the Supreme Court.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The government keeps collecting the tax, you keep paying it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Even though three separate courts have ruled it's unconstitutional.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oral arguments are scheduled for November 5th, 2025.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: We'll have a decision probably by year's end, maybe early 2026.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the meantime, the government keeps collecting.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Importers keep paying.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we keep paying.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: By the time the court rules, the total tab could top a trillion dollars.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: If the court strikes them down, the companies that paid the tariffs will get refunds.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Ford, Walmart, Target, Amazon.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Every business that imported goods and paid the tax, they'll get their money back.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the consumer, we already paid.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And even if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, our prices aren't coming down.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Businesses have a solemn duty to make profits.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Once they've established that consumers will pay$70,000 for a truck, why would you drop it to$60,000 just because your costs went down?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: You'd be leaving money on the table.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Shirking your duty to shareholders.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: The market has already adjusted.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: The new price floor is set.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Consumers have demonstrated they'll pay it, so prices stay high.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: The Supreme Court can rule on constitutionality, but it can't undo the price increases.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: It can't force companies to lower prices.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: It can't give us back the purchasing power we've already lost.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a win or a loss for America?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: The court will decide whether the president has the authority to impose these tariffs.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: The answer, based on every lower court ruling, is probably no.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: If the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs, it will reaffirm a principle that stood for 237 years.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Congress controls taxation.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: The president isn't a king.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: We govern ourselves through our representatives, not by executive decree.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's a win for the Republic, but it's a hollow victory for our bank accounts.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Even if the court rules correctly and the system works exactly as Madison designed it, our grocery bills stay high.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: The damage is done.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: The constitutional principle survives, our purchasing power doesn't.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the thing tariffs don't even solve the problem they claim to address.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: China controls about 90% of the world's rare earth element processing.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: These elements are critical minerals used in everything from F-35 fighter jets to smartphones.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, China expanded restrictions on rare earth exports, and the administration threatened 100% tariffs in response.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: But raising taxes on Americans doesn't get us rare earth elements.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: It just makes America poorer while China still controls the supply.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Want to solve the rare earth problem?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Build partnerships with Denmark and Greenland, which hold substantial untapped reserves of rare earths and other critical minerals.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Work with our NATO ally to develop Greenland's mining capacity.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Invest in domestic processing facilities.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Create real alternatives to Chinese supply chains.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: That takes diplomacy, investment, strategic partnership, long-term thinking.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Tariffs?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's just taxing ourselves and calling it foreign policy.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So is it a win or a loss for America?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Jefferson already answered that question.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not rebellion with rifles, rebellion with accountability.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Rebellion by demanding our representatives actually represent us.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: We fire the ones who let presidents tax us without a vote.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: We pick someone else, even if they're from the same party.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: We insist that we tax ourselves only by agreement of the people, consent of the governed.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Taxing power stays exactly where the Constitution put it, with Congress, with us.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: The system Madison and others put in place is resilient, but only if we defend it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: America owes allegiance to no king.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.