That is such demonstrably false BS, but more and more becoming the "common wisdom". Guess we need to eliminate business all together and find utopia. Businesses that do not deliver for their customers or abuse their customers as a policy do not do well and usually fail. Try living in a country that protects their people from the evils of free enterprise. Consumer decisions there involve which line to stand in, the rotten bread line or the toilet paper line.
a) Enough with inventing phony rights. How about your "right" to not bear ridiculous costs associated with an out-of-control tort system.
b) Companies don't pay these costs, consumers do, all of them.
Your argument is wrong. This is not a "phony right" that I made up. Your well-being is compromised because someone decided it was cheaper to settle lawsuits and continue to let people get hurt.
"the tort system should be more than simply a method of compensating the victims of misfortune. Instead, it should be a free-market tool for preventing accidents in the first place. In the real world, this usually meant hiking the liability on manufacturers, giving them a financial incentive to improve the safety of their products. The economic theory essentially held that
the most socially efficient outcome would be achieved when the cost of the safety improvements matched the cost of being sued"
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_11/b3924601.htm
That is from this article, titled "how to fix the tort system". "Surprisingly, the excesses in America's legal system grew out of the country's commitment to free markets and individualism. Modern tort law began with the unprecedented wave of injuries spawned by the Industrial Revolution. The progressives and New Dealers who championed the expansion of tort liability "wanted to create social insurance for the many misfortunes of life, including accidental injury, disability, and unemployment.
...built into the Western European system is an even greater degree of regulation..."You can substitute for tort law by having more extensive social insurance and relying on regulators to a greater extent," says Mark Geistfeld, an expert in comparative jurisprudence at New York University School of Law. "
But it's not like the cost disappears; it just becomes part of the tax base."
The crisis is not that ambulance chasers are wrecking the economy, but that too many entrepreneurial personal-injury attorneys have found illegitimate ways to earn money. Tort reformers aren't directly attacking this problem. Instead of cracking down on exploitative lawyers, the critics often try to solve the problem by punishing their clients. For instance, the White House's main idea for reducing the cost of medical malpractice litigation is to place an arbitrary $250,000 ceiling on pain-and-suffering recoveries, which would hurt the most severely injured malpractice victims, such as those blinded or paralyzed. That would also shortchange blue-collar workers, the elderly, and others who couldn't receive big compensation for lost earnings.
Only about 2% of the people who are genuinely injured even bother to file lawsuits, according to most studies."
The tort system does have problems, but it's not out of control and not going to be solved by stripping individuals of their rights to their day in court. Proposed tort reform serves only to protect businesses and nothing to solve the actual problems. While you chuckle while watching your company's sexual harrassment prevention video, someone may have been attacked before it was necessary. Your car is safe partly because someone was injured, they sued, and something was changed to make it safer.
Also,some of your argument is that people pay unfairly for the results of lawsuits. The article above shows that the money has to come from somewhere-either taxes like in europe, or add it into the cost of your lawnmower. In the end, your statements like:
This is a very standard case profile. The pilots involved accept responsiblity (the ultimate in this case). They screwed up, they died.....
have no basis. How do you know they screwed up? Your arguments are so ridiculous that I'm done.
How's that for irony.....:insane:
In that case, whoever is more connected wins the case. This is what you are suggesting:a system in which the bigger man wins. This is where the republicans have been slowly pushing the governement, and pushing public opnion.. We have a system in which merit wins. It's not perfect, but it is among the most fair systems in the world-because the small guy has rights.
