Illegal trade

“ I myself should deem it to be a misfortune if we were to attempt to prescribe to the business world how honest and peaceable trade was to be carried on in a case where no such illegal elements as I have mentioned exist, or were to adopt some standard of judicial 'reasonableness' or of 'normal' prices or 'fair freights,' to which commercial adventurers, otherwise innocent, were bound to conform. ”

“ It is confusing to be told that all arrangements tending to stifle competition in national trade are direct and illegal restraints, but that, of course, a partnership that might make such competition even a fraud is, nevertheless, perfectly legal; that "unifications of interest" by complete ownership are indirect and legal, while they are also the most dangerous and illegal forms of direct restraint; that absolutely every restraint of trade is illegal, though there are many exceptions to this rule, without exception ”

“ Anyone who imports and exports the technologies of which import and export is prohibited, or imports and exports the technologies of which import and export is restricted without authorization shall be disposed of and punished in accordance with relevant laws and regulations; Where no laws or regulations are available to apply to such activities, the authority responsible for foreign trade under the State Council shall order him to make a rectification, confiscate the illegal proceeds and impose a fine from one to five times the amount of the illegal gains. ”

“ The dilemma which would necessarily arise from defining the words 'contracts in restraint of trade' so as to destroy trade by rendering illegal the contracts upon which trade depends, and yet presupposing that trade would continue, and should not be restrained, is shown by an argument advanced, and which has been compelled by the exigency of the premise upon which it is based. ”

“ The supposed inconsistency of the slave trade with the law of nature, will not alone condemn it in the view of a Court of justice, so as to authorize all nations to treat it as a crime, or to enforce its prohibition by the confiscation of the property of those engaged in it. It becomes all reflecting men to think seriously, and speak cautionsly, on the subject of the illegality of a trade, which was once universally participated in by the civilized nations of Europe and America. ”

“ The prohibition, notwithstanding all the penalties which guard it, does not prevent the exportation of wool. It is exported, it is well known, in great quantities. The great difference between the price in the home and that in the foreign market, presents such a temptation to smuggling, that all the rigor of the law cannot prevent it. This illegal exportation is advantageous to nobody but the smuggler. ”

“ Whoever illegally trades in foreign exchange in places other than the ones designated by the State for such trade and thus disrupts market order shall, if the circumstances are serious, be convicted and punished in accordance with the provisions of Article 225 of the Criminal Law. ”

“ For what, Sir, can be more glaringly absurd than to hear a merchant clamouring for the enforcement of the prohibitive laws, and the exclusion of foreign trade, at the very door of a shop filled with English goods, clandestinely imported? ”

“ Now we are running into the crimes to which strong nations are liable. Our diplomatists unblushingly moot the question of taking foreign territory by force if it cannot be purchased; our executive prevents piratical expeditions against the lands of neighboring States as feebly and slowly as if it connived at them; we pick quarrels to gain conquests; and at length, after more than half a century of public condemnation of the slave-trade, after being the first to brand it as piracy, we hear the revival of the trade advocated as a right, as a necessity. ”

“ In my own judgment, the so-called protective principle or policy of interference with commerce by imposing fines on foreign imports has retarded the progress of the specially protected arts, and has in some measure obstructed the diversity of manufactures; but the opposite policy of absolutely free trade in [Pg 770] our domestic traffic over a greater area and among a much larger number of people than have elsewhere secured their own liberty has been so much more potent in its progressive influence as to have lessened the evils of the restrictions on foreign trade. ”

“ In view of all this, it is absolutely impossible to say that he was finding that it was lawful and "sanctioned" by the States, or any of them, to deprive the country of its industrial agencies, to destroy business, stop commerce and production, that national trade might be limited and the profits of monopoly be swollen! ”

“ It naturally killed smuggling so far as duty-free articles were concerned; but this all-embracing term of “Free Trade” is altogether a mockery and a delusion. There has never been—there is not now—complete Free Trade in this so-called free-trade country. Wines and spirits, tobacco, tea and coffee, cocoa and sugar, are not they in the forefront of the articles that render regularly to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? There have been, indeed, throughout all the years of the Free Trade era, some forty articles scheduled for paying customs duty on import into the United Kingdom. ”

“ But even duties, so high that they far exceed the insurance premium of smuggling, can be of very little advantage either to industry or to the exchequer. They can only promote the smuggling trade. However, the repeal of an import prohibition or the abolition of a tariff approaching to a prohibition should be announced long enough in advance to enable the capital invested in the protected industry to be withdrawn without too heavy a loss. ”

“ The United States continues to urge trading partners to undertake more effective criminal and border enforcement to stop the manufacture, import, export, transit, and distribution of pirated and counterfeit goods. USTR engages extensively with its trading partners through bilateral consultations, trade agreements, and international organizations, to ensure that penalties are deterrent, and include significant monetary fines and meaningful sentences of imprisonment. ”

“ If tobacco were clandestinely exported direct to Spain and iron brought directly home, the ship made far greater profits than in the days before the hated laws. Moreover, the smuggled cargo paid no tariff-for-revenue dues or port charges. And it was easy to smuggle in any kind of a cargo.
In connection with this provision of a bounty on smuggling, consider the influence of the fact that the laws were intentionally unfair to the colonists. The colonists resented the injustice, and all the more because their trade previous to the enactment of the laws had been free. ”

“ Great discussion has been had as to whether the damage must be to a trader, or to one in the way of his trade, or one in matters involving national trade. This subject seems free from difficulty. We are all citizens of a common country—a wrongful act prohibited, and by proper authority, and damage promised to those who suffer from that act, must be redressed! If there be, for example, a conspiracy against national trade, there can be no reason to doubt that any one injured by anything done as part of or in pursuance of that conspiracy should recover. ”

“ The duties upon British manufactured goods, amount almost to a prohibition; they often reach one hundred per cent.; and this trade is therefore also in the hands of the smuggler, who obtains the profit which,{136} under a more wholesome system, might go into the treasury of the kingdom. The fraudulent dealer is also greatly assisted by the custom of granting a royal license to individuals to import a certain limited quantity of prohibited goods ”

“ This limitation also applies to the merchants at the ports open to foreign trade ; many of them amass wealth and enjoy the protection of the local authorities, who, some of them, have money profitably invested in native commercial enterprises. The bulk of the officials, however, while they view commerce with contempt, do not scruple to levy extortionate exactions on trade, and to accept bribes to condone offences against the law, even to the extent of permitting a criminal to procure a substitute to suffer capital punishment in his stead. ”

“ The only operation of the forfeiture is to vest the importer's color of title by the appropriate commercial term, perhaps the only term we can effectually use, to this purpose, without interfering with the rights of the states. Grant that these persons have all the rights of man: will not those rights be as valid against the United States as against the importer? And, by taking all color of title out of the importer, do we not place the United States in the best possible situation to give efficiency to the rights of man in the case of the persons imported? ”

“ Congress, in order to afford an effective remedy for the evil, and extend the same protection to French importers that France gives to our producers and merchants in her markets, has enacted that the forger of trade-marks and the dealer in forged trade-marks shall answer at the bar of criminal justice in the courts of the United States. ”

“ It is the case of a trade prohibited to American citizens under very heavy penalties, penalties which have since been aggravated to the infliction of capital punishment. It is a trade odious in our country, and carries a permanent stain upon the reputation of all who are concerned in it, and is watched by the severest vigilance of the government. ”

“ By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to promote the efficient and effective administration of United States trade laws, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy.
Importers that unlawfully evade antidumping and countervailing duties expose United States employers to unfair competition and deprive the Federal Government of lawful revenue. ”

“ Further specification is unnecessary; for the demurrers are general, and the ground of each is that the entire act is unconstitutional.
Its constitutionality in its application to the trade-marks of the subjects of foreign countries is the question presented by the indictments.
The purpose and the natural and reasonable effect of the acts are to protect the producer or the importer of foreign goods in his right of selling them in the United States, and thus carry out in good faith and enforce our treaty stipulations on the subject. The act is a regulation of foreign commerce. ”

“ Resolved, That while this House anxiously desires that the Slave Trade should be, universally, denounced as Piracy, and, as such, should be detected and punished under the law of nations, it considers that it would be highly inexpedient to enter into engagements with any foreign power, by which all the merchant vessels of the United States would be exposed to the inconveniences of any regulation of search, from which any merchant vessels of that foreign power would be exempted. ”

“ In other words, it was held not that acts which the statute prohibited could be removed from the control of its prohibitions by a finding that they were reasonable, but that the duty to interpret, which inevitably arose from the general character of the term 'restraint of trade,' required that the words 'restraint of trade' should be given a meaning which would not destroy the individual right to contract, and render difficult, if not impossible, any movement of trade in the channels of interstate commerce,-the free movement of which it was the purpose of the statute to protect. ”

“ It is, however, prudent to obstruct criminal attempts even when we cannot hope entirely to defeat them, and, therefore, I am of opinion, that no provisions ought to be exported without some method of security, by which the governours of every place may be assured that they will be conveyed to our own colonies. Such securities will easily be contrived, and may be regulated in a manner that they shall not be defeated without such hazard, as the profit that can be expected from illegal commerce, will not be able to compensate. ”

“ Is the rule hereafter to be that human characteristics and methods, universally existing and applied, are all to become the basis for a charge of crime, and that the law, in attempting to reach that equality and fairness which constitute justice, is going to allow those wishing to buy commodities produced by others to beat down the prices, whilst those who have added to the world's supply are to defend their rights in bargaining by a threatened intervention by the State that may end in their ruin as well as their loss of liberty? ”

“ While thus destroying internal trade by taxation, efforts were made to build it up by aid of restrictions on external trade; but the very fact that the former was destroyed made it necessary for thousands and tens of thousands of persons to endeavour to earn wages in the smuggling of foreign merchandise, and the country was filled with men ever ready to violate the law, because of the cheapness of labour. The laws restraining the import of foreign merchandise were easily violated, because its bulk was small and its value great ”

“ Why did we destroy that market in Jamaica which we now seize so eagerly in Brazil? The abstract principles of free trade are as manifestly violated by interference with production 238as by interference with exportation. If the doctrines of free trade are to find no exception in any suggestions of humanity or reason, then our Anti-slavery Act, and our Emancipation Act, and our vote for the African squadron, are all so many gross contradictions of a principle which we have formally sanctioned. ”

“ Beyond all room for question, the owner of a vehicle bearing smuggled merchandise runs the risk of forfeiture, subject to remission by the grace of an administrative officer, where the merchandise is medicine or wheat or dry goods or machinery, subjects of legitimate trade upon payment of the lawful duties. The argument for the interveners is that the intention of Congress was to make the risk a lighter one where the trade is wholly illegitimate, i. e., where the merchandise smuggled consists of intoxicating liquors. ”