This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

Today we're discussing Richard. This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

Today, we're discussing Richard at the Supreme Court, kind of.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is of course professor Richard Epstein.

Here at Hoover, Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow.

He's also the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, what I'd actually like to discuss today is an amicus brief you wrote with John Yu surrounding

I think a little-known tax change that was passed in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the

TCGA in 2017, it's being challenged at the Supreme Court. I know you're not a

huge fan of it. So let's talk about it. It surrounds the mandatory repatriation tax, the MRT. Here's the deal for the

uninitiated. One of the things the TCGA did was to start to move the US to a sort of

territorial tax system instead of a purely global one.

And to do that, it had to look at foreign ownership of corporations and I suppose unrealized earnings that we that money was

been saved overseas and we haven't paid taxes on.

So the MRT said all right if you own at least 10% of a controlled foreign

corporation you're gonna pay taxes on unearned income that we haven't

paid taxes on yet dating back to 1986 up to 2017. It's going to be a one-time tax that you can pay now or over eight years at a lower rate.

Now the case here Richard evolves two petitioners, Charles and Kathleen Moore, they own 11% of foreign

corporation as a result of the TCGA. they own 11% of foreign corporation.

As a result of the TCGA, they had to pay taxes

on this foreign ownership.

You and John, you have written this amicus brief

...