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| Chloe Swarbrick: 'Yes, I alone will decide how much profit you will make. Or not.' |
"One of the most valuable inheritances from Roman law is the prohibition on retroactive legislation; the principle that what is lawful today cannot be declared unlawful tomorrow and punished after the fact. Civilisation depends on this. Without it, citizens cannot plan, cannot trust the law, and cannot defend themselves against the State. The rule of law collapses into rule by law — law as a weapon. ...
"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment. Their proposal to penalise 'excessive profit' or 'price gouging' sounds simple until you ask the only question that matters: excessive according to what standard?
"So far, no standard exists.
"Chlöe Swarbrick has been unable to articulate:
- how “excessive profit” would be defined,
- what baseline would be used,
- whether the metric would be tied to past behaviour,
- or how businesses could know in advance whether they were compliant.
"Without a clear, objective, forward‑looking definition, the policy becomes retroactive by default. It allows the State to declare, after the fact, that last year’s lawful profit was actually this year’s unlawful 'gouging.' That is not regulation; it is ex post facto punishment disguised as economic justice.
"This is precisely the danger Roman jurists warned about. Law must be knowable before action, not invented after action."~ Colinxy from his post 'Retroactive Law: When the Past Becomes Illegal'
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