I love it when people start carping about the tort system. They usually have little or no clue about it, and get their information from the propaganda placed by insurance companies. I spent twenty years practicing law in the tort system (for both plaintiffs and defendants) until I burned out on it, sold out and moved to Maine and I know wherefrom I speak. I've tried a lot of cases and won most. Let me give you a number of truths to chew on:
1. Plaintiffs' lawyers get paid on a percentage of what they recover. This means they are not going to take a case they can't win, because if they do, they are working for free. There are few faster ways to go broke than that. The cases they can win are the cases where precedent - the law, as defined by cases already decided - say their case is a winnable one.
2. Plaintiffs' lawyers do not take cases (as a rule) where there is neither insurance nor assets from which to collect. This is a corollary of #1 above.
3. Defense lawyers get paid by the hour (except when they're employees of the insurance company, often practicing under a bogus firm name to give jurors the impression they are not employees of the insurance company) and therefore have every incentive to make the cases last as long as they can.
4. Those runaway juries? They are populated by the same people who get jury duty, i.e., you and your neighbors.
5. The instructions the juries get are given by judges, based upon decades of precedent. And jurors follow the rules the judges give them.
6. No one gets punitive damages any more. The times you read about them in the paper are the exception. Sort of a "man bites dog" thing. And even when someone gets an award of punitive damages, they usually either don't collect or settle for a lot less rather than face an appeal.
7. Those huge jury awards? Just because a jury says a big number does not mean the injured person gets that. They usually settle for less - often a tiny fraction - rather than face an appeal. Appeals courts are populated with the lawyers who formerly represented companies and insurers, and who retain their sympathy for their former clients and their antipathy for plaintiffs.
8. Just because someone sues for a large number ("John Doe sued for $10 million...".) means nothing. Rather, the requirement that people say "I want $10 million" is usually a court rule adopted at the urging of insurers so they "know their exposure". Rather, it facilitates misleading news articles.
9. The insurer propaganda (and purchase of politicians through campaign funds) has been so effective that the same injury is today worth about half the number of dollars it was worth in 1990. I.e., if you got $50k for an injury in 1990, you're lucky to get $25k today for the very same injury.
10. You don't want to be the person getting a large jury award for an injury. If you are, you've been badly injured for life. Most of the money is calculated to be for your future medical bills and the lost income you would have been able to earn had you not been so badly injured. And, in addition, you'll have all sorts of long-lost relatives showing up with wonderful ideas on how you should use your money for their benefit. And those TV ads for people who will buy your structured settlement? They wouldn't be on TV if it weren't profitable to the people buying them.
Chew on those for a while.
Moving back to the "free trade" and "imported products only" at the big box stores (and the other complaints about nothing being made in the USA), remember this: you'll never find a union that went to the company and said "please move the factory and the jobs to China, Mexico or Vietnam." They weren't the ones who moved the factories and jobs overseas, and they weren't the ones pitching the benefits of free trade. Nope - those were the Wall Street boys and their purchased politicians in DC and elsewhere.
Now, whether one wants to shop at Cabelas or not is entirely up to them. I live pretty close to one of their stores and it is convenient - not that I need much other than consumables like ammunition, socks, the occasional fishing lure and stuff like that. But, I can say a lot of the small sporting goods dealers get out when Cabelas shows up.
