Dear Friends,
It seems to me, when a system is doing the opposite of its intended function, it is time to examine that system with an eye to correcting it. The legal system for example. It is supposed to adjudicate disagreements, enforce law and by doing so, facilitate the smooth operation of the economy. Today the legal system in the US does the opposite. It has become an impossible hurdle for business, individuals and even government to get over. Instead of facilitating the smooth interactions between economic actors, the legal system gets in the way, by undermining the utility of contracts, ambulance chasing and using law as a weapon. There have been a few attempts at limiting the problems that rogue lawyers pose, like anti SLAP legislation in several states, but with limited effect.
Rather than helping individuals settle disagreements, justly, the legal system does just the opposite. Court costs exclude the poor from using them to settle disagreements. Which lands them in criminal court, when they resort to settling disagreements, personally. Since they have no other recourse. Because the legal system demands to be unjustly enriched one way or another. If the legal system was set up to find justice, not political favor, the political favor of the advocate would be irrelevant. That an expensive legal team can get a rich scumbag off, while an innocent poor man with a public defender is screwed, is proof enough of the legal system’s injustice. One thing you know is true, if a system set up to mete out justice, metes out injustice instead, it is running counter to its goal.
Businesses are choked by the legal system in the US today. So much so, they move industry offshore to escape the legal morass of the US. The legal fees of the permitting process alone, for a firm to break ground in an industry unfriendly state, can run to a billion, before you even touch the ground with a shovel. Then there are the regulations that are supposed to make workers safe… by insuring they don’t have jobs. Add to it the constant threat of a frivolous lawsuit over spilled coffee, and you have a business environment in the US that is as toxic to enterprise, as Venus’s surface is to human life. A well functioning legal system would facilitate business, not torture it, like sand fleas would a beagle puppy’s face as it’s tied down. Profitable for the sand fleas…. until the experiment ends.
Even government finds the legal system a barrier to building infrastructure. In Vermont, a road was proposed back in the 1970s, to facilitate commuter traffic to a large IBM plant in Essex VT, and around the Burlington corridor. The permitting process and resulting lawsuits took about 30 years. Once the lawsuits were put to bed, the contractors began work. A lawyer filed a motion to stop it and re-litigate the whole thing, a judge agreed, and the tens of millions of dollars spent on permitting, regulation, environmental testing, ground work and legal fees was flushed down the toilet, the road didn’t get built. IBM moved out, to be replaced with gangs, violence and trust funders. In this case, we see that the legal system harvested incalculable dollars from the process, like a plague spreading parasite.
How many of the trillions the government is supposed to spend, on infrastructure, will be used to pay lawyers to hold it up? I bet the majority that is earmarked for infrastructure. Throwing a trillion dollars into the water will surely bring out every piranha in the river. Despite the Chinese Communist Party being an existential threat to the World, we send it all our money, because the legal system makes it impossible to run a business in the US. Since the legal system has made it more profitable for a firm to spend on political payola, than improving plant, efficiency or product. Meanwhile, the individual, unless rich, connected or favored, is ground in the wheels of injustice. When a system does the opposite of its intended function, but it worked before, the problem is… the elite in it are corrupt. Replace them.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
