Amazon.com Inc. is finding that staying in the President’s good graces is an expensive hobby—and they are reportedly using your change to pay for it. A proposed class action filed in a Seattle federal court on Friday alleges that the e-commerce giant collected "hundreds of millions of dollars in unlawful tariff costs" from consumers. The lawsuit claims Amazon raised prices on imported goods following President Trump's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, only for the Supreme Court to later rule those duties illegal.

The drama lies in what happens next. The U.S. government has already begun to refund roughly $160 billion in collected duties to businesses, per The New York Times. However, the lawsuit alleges that Amazon is choosing to forgo seeking its own massive restitution from the federal government. The reason, according to the filing, is that the company "seeks to curry favor with Trump by allowing the federal government to retain the funds" rather than passing that liquidity back to the plebeians who paid the inflated prices.

"The problem is that the funds Amazon is using to stay in the President’s good graces do not belong to Amazon," the lawsuit states verbatim. For the suburban shopper who watched their imported espresso machine jump twenty percent in price, there is no federal refund coming. The U.S. Treasury is liquidating $35.46 billion for corporate claimants like Nike and Oshkosh Corp, while the average consumer is left holding an empty box.

This paper's reading of the ledger is clear. This is the era of Administrative Arbitrage, where the state’s bureaucratic failures are transformed into a tradable asset class for the Fortune 500. While the commoners absorbed the inflation at the register, the elite are busy negotiating who gets to keep the windfall. It is a magnificent display of corporate feudalism: the customer pays for the tariff, and the retailer pays for the President's favor.