241–250 of 279 posts
I wish there was a way to preemptive lawsuit a industry, before it even undertakes a operation. Basically, a group of people bets with lawsuits on the damages done to society by a industrial operation, forcing anyone to endeavor such operations to build a huge deposit of settlement and legalfees to cover the threat - on for example cutting down "rainforrest". As state actors have proven lousy wardens on these goods o…
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Well this is pretty much exactly what I meant when I said our political discourse is "childishly uninformed." You claim that environmental remedies should be worked out between factories and local residents. Disregarding the absurd implication that factories are the only or even the most important polluters, the only mechanism by which local residents can directly negotiate enforceable restrictions on factories is li…
Interesting response with lots of "You ..." in there. I'm also a conservative minded person (leaning more libertarian) and thought I would add a response. First off, the conservative/libertarian discourse is not "childish" or "uninformed." Libertarian thought has been in development for centuries beginning with classical liberalism. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#History ] Second, the commentor clearl…
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I don't understand what that google link is supposed to demonstrate. Is there something in the results showing that people's insurance doesn't protect them?
I don't know what people being insured or not has to do with the fact that people will sue for whiplash claims (even when they don't actually have whiplash) in order to extract some $ from the system, enriching a bunch of lawyers in the process. For all you know the guy was illegally in the United States, it still doesn't matter. In Europe the most likely response to such a minimal accident would be two parties getti…
We actually have enough of a disincentive here to not report accidents to insurance companies because of its effect on long term rates, that this tends to be the outcome of most (anecdotally) auto accidents. I've been in 4 accidents in my lifetime, half my fault, and they've been completely out of the system. Most people have bigger fish to fry like exorbitant healthcare costs, or a racist president.
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I don't know what people being insured or not has to do with the fact that people will sue for whiplash claims (even when they don't actually have whiplash) in order to extract some $ from the system, enriching a bunch of lawyers in the process. For all you know the guy was illegally in the United States, it still doesn't matter. In Europe the most likely response to such a minimal accident would be two parties getti…
> In Europe the most likely response to such a minimal accident would be two parties getting out of their car, assessing the damage - if any - filling out a form and getting on with their day after taking some pictures and shaking hands. We actually have enough of a disincentive here to not report accidents to insurance companies because of its effect on long term rates, that this tends to be the outcome of most (ane…
The UK had to regulate this because insurance companies were pushing Uberrimae fidei a bit too much. If you've had an accident and not reported it too them you're not acting in utmost good faith. They were using previous undeclared accidents as a reason to avoid paying out for later accidents.
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You shouldn't be down voted for this even though you are wrong. The EU system is very pro-consumer and is doing a lot of things to make life easier for consumers ditching roaming is just one of them. With regards to lawsuits the EU system takes the need out of much of that by having fairly strict rules for corporations and giving consumers much more legal backing when it comes to the return of goods, protection from…
In academic US legal theory, litigation is frequently portrayed as an efficient substitute for regulation, particularly from a libertarian perspective. Our political narratives also tend to reject regulation as government overreach or unconstitutional when carried out at the federal level. So we ended up with a highly litigious system, which (unsurprisingly) resulted in high litigation costs. Corporations have respon…
Law should be as efficient and precise and cheap and scalable as code. Hell, that's why they use the term "codified" when they talk about laws on the books.
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> Consumers are doing fine. By what measure?
Consumer satisfaction indices are published with some regularity, the United States is usually somewhere between the 20th and the 30th position of such rankings. Now obviously the United States is huge and there is huge diversity between the various demographics and localities but it is beyond dispute that consumers in Europe are doing fine (and that consumers in the United States are not doing much worse on average)…
Thanks for the data point. I'll point out that consumer satisfaction depends on many things in addition to what we are talking about in this thread.
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> No, they simply pass those costs on to the consumers. I believe this is a false narrative spread by those who want to reduce consumer access to courts. Businesses don't price their goods at (cost + profit). They price them at the level that will maximize profit. Sometimes that's at a loss, sometimes that's around break even, sometimes it provides a healthy profit, and sometimes they make extraordinary profits (what…
I think one element of limiting access to courts is forcing binding arbitration ( http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20170605/NEWS/170609... ). Are there others?
The ways discussed in the article and in this thread, as examples.
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> I believe this is a false narrative spread by those who want to reduce consumer access to courts. You are free to believe whatever you want but that's a quote straight from a conversation with the CEO of a very large manufacturer of consumer goods, who - in my experience - tended not to speak stuff that wasn't true.
Demand is relatively inelastic in some markets; less so in others.
There are exceptions and complexity, of course. In health care, raising the price of a good with inelastic demand such as, say, Epipens, might attract social and political penalties. On the other hand, pricing such goods (e.g., pills that cure terminal diseases) at very high levels to begin with is an accepted practice.
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> litigation ... efficient I don't think anyone who has been involved in litigation would use these words in the same sentence, or paragraph. Whose theory says it's efficient?
It was certainly an interesting argument :) I suspect that the thinking is that it's efficient in the sense that you don't have the wrong regulation. ie. in the sense that wrong regulation is extremely expensive. And if people was always employing an optimal strategy, then litigation would rarely be needed as the outcome would be predictable. But I guess people aren't optimal :)
How efficient is it to regulate the behavior on a case-by-case basis, taking years and often millions of dollars for each case, and with all the unpredictable outcomes of a lawsuit? Maybe one ruling by an expert regulator rather than many by inexpert judges and juries isn't such a bad idea after all.
It sounds like a rationalization for deregulation.
> if people was always employing an optimal strategy, then litigation would rarely be needed
If people did that, we wouldn't need government at all. We could live in happy anarchy with all our well-meaning, honest, optimizing neighbors!
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I believe litigation in the United States is based on the idea that access to the courts to redress grievances (against private individuals or public institutions) is fundamental for a civil society. This goes as far as preventing habeas corpus from being suspended in Illinois during the American Civil War as the courts were still in operation, and the "justification" for holding people in Guantanamo. While I have he…
> Snowflake society doesn't like calculating the economic (market) value of risk to life or limb, but the truth is that without reasonable tort the economic impact will still be born, but socialized by non-risk takers subsidizing expanding bureaucracies. Sounds like you should move to Somalia, land of the free market -- it's quite untouched and unregulated by nanny bureaucracies, in fact. Lots of opportunities to mak…