[0]: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/06/03/ford-transit-connect-imp...
That way everyone gets what they want, and they've technically sold it with the seats still installed.
Ford should only have issued a guide to independent dealers and repair centers on how to do a conversion between cargo and passenger (and made sure both were possible) but only import the passenger version into the country.
Then it's murkier, because not all dealerships would offer it and the customer isn't buying it from Ford, he's getting an independent dealer to install additional things (or remove) from the vehicle.
CBP is one of the worst infringers upon personal rights, I wouldn't defend them.
Well, no, they are dictating what taxes you owe based on intent, and using consistent patterns of behavior as evidence of ongoing intent.
This isn't Ford changing their mind about the purpose of the vehicle after importing them.
I mean, that's the whole point of the import tariff law, so if the CBP has jurisdiction to enforce tariff law, surely how the item is used (or at least how the item is intended to be used or how the item can reasonably be expected to be used) is the primary factor to consider.
The problem I have here is how easy it is to avoid the tax. CBP shouldn't have any jurisdiction over car modifications and repairs; that responsibility falls to different agencies.
Imagine Coca-Cola getting clearance for importing coca leaves for flavoring but then instead sells it to a third party who processes it for something else.
And like many rules, it's not necessarily about stopping 100% of everything all the time, but about preventing enough of it so that we don't have some problem.
In the universe in which you agree X is fine but Y is not, and that there is some sort of proof that Coca-Cola knows what is going on, it seems really obvious that Coca-Cola is responsible!
I'm not somebody who really loves rules and regulations and I'll be the first person to say that America's "war on drugs" has been an utter disaster in multiple ways.
But, generally speaking, flooding a country with cocaine is not what most of us would call beneficial to society.
If you don't think that we should have a society and/or laws, cool, that's another discussion. But if you accept the premise that we should have laws, controlling the flow of industrial quantities of coca leaves seems like the good kind of law.
I mean, I guess we could just let Coca-Cola import metric tons of coca leaves, sell them to whoever the fuck they want, and then just... prosecute the people who do bad things with them? I think we would find that orders of magnitude more work and orders of magnitude less effective. There would be a large cost to society, and nobody wins except Coca-Cola, really.
At worst, you can imagine selling a full nuclear bomb to Al kaeda, then being surprised pikachu when they use it to blow up IAD
Why SHOULD a cargo van have higher import taxes than a passenger van, other than to serve the needs of some random private company?
Even moreso, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ford lobbied FOR those laws before changing its mind in where to produce a particular sku
It's the same game that SaaS companies play. Everything is free until you want SSO, then it's $30,000 a year. If you need SSO, you can afford it.
Personally, I hate this in both cases. I think we could save everyone a lot of time if every vendor you did business with just grabbed you by the ankles and flipped you upside down and took whatever money fell out of your pocket. Why tiptoe around what they really want...
I'm confused about this statement. Businesses are comprised of individuals, and those individuals (if citizens) can vote. So the business has a vote through the voice of its employees and representation in government through the people employees at a business.
Or are you saying the legal fiction of business personhood should give the business a ... vote? That just sounds like business owners (individuals) getting 2 or more votes then...
Have you read a tariff schedule? They're full of this stuff, which seem to be protections or favors for specific industries. Anti-dumping protections seem similar.
That's from the 'further reading' link on Wikipedia.
Its incredible to me that there's an entire political identity that borderline denies any of this happens, and instead the government itself is somehow naturally corrupt but business and the lobbying and capital owning class are all angels and saints. Everyday conservatism buys into this fallacy fairly well and this dishonesty seems to be the core of libertarianism.
Explaining this concept to some people feels like how I would imagine explaining water to fish must be. We're just so surrounded by it and it defines so much of our culture, that you can fail to see if you choose. You can just call everything government corruption from cradle to grave without asking about the source and motivation of that corruption. You can swim your whole life and never wonder why you're wet.
Ford would have been fine if they had kept the seats in the car until they were sold and left it up to the customer to remove the seats. (This would not have affected the customer, tax-wise, since the import duty is paid by Ford, and by the time the customer has removed the seats, they have already paid the sales tax on the vehicle.)
The Subaru case probably violates the intent as well but maybe that would be a lot harder to prove. But the Ford case they clearly conspired to violate the intent. Which, if "intent" really is the important thing, I suppose should have lead to criminal charges too.
I suppose intent probably matters a bit more when it's the little guy on the receiving end of it.
I'm beyond tired of massive corporations sending jobs to other countries, pretending to care about their own country and lying about being made locally, and dodging taxes. Ford hit all three here.
