I’ve alway thought most regulation is counter productive. Better to let the courts interpret property rights and let people self-regulate as much as possible.
Being sued AFTER YOU'VE BUILT THE SKYSCRAPER is a massive problem. Better to have a process that allows you to solicit all the complaints up front and get rulings on them.
And yes, if there's no cost to complaining, people will. By all means impose a cost. But nobody wants to have to play massive games of lawsuit roulette with investments that have already been made - and without a regulatory system to address it, they often don't. Of course, you don't see what didn't happen, so the cost may be less apparent, but it's no less real for that.
Great article as usual, Dr. Caplan. The problem with making it difficult to sue is the simple fact that government almost always overshoots. What happens when it is not difficult to sue, thus removing complainers, but it becomes impossible to sue? Today, the federal government is protected by Sovereign Immunity, meaning they cannot be sued. Routine complaints of noise pollution are one thing. When my brother-in-law was negligently killed by the Defense Department and my sister could not sue, this was not what I consider to be a minor complaint. When government builds a moat around themselves to fully eliminate their own culpability, it can act in any way it wants without disincentive.
Say what you want about fundamentalism, but the Torah's rule that the plaintiff should get whatever consequence he wished upon the defendant, should his case prove full of fabricated details, was a powerful disincentive of baseless tort.
You can actually extend this principle further. For example, there is a woman named Timnit Gebru who used to be in charge of AI safety research at Google. She staged a confrontation with them such that she became unemployable, then leveraged her firing into a second career as a whistleblower-martyr. However, if you actually pay close attention to her complaints, they are just the world's most obvious lies in every way. You can't reconstruct what actually happened exactly, but you CAN tell that Gebru's role in it was manipulative and involved considerable use of consciously false deceptive allegations of, for example, interpersonal racism.
The proof is just that she went so far overboard in what she claimed, while never providing any specifics of any kind, and then never sued over it. Like she would have confrontations on Twitter with former colleagues who would say "I disagree with this resignation tweet, it doesn't accord with my understanding of the situation" and then she would get in their face in front of everybody and menace them, trying to make it sound like the two former colleagues had mutual knowledge of mysterious, deeply evil and discriminatory incidents at Google. But there were never any lawsuits, or hints of a lawsuit. If anything, it was obvious that Google was refraining from suing HER, even though they almost certainly could have won a major judgment.
None of it made any sense and she was (and is) so obviously just a pathological liar, who apparently gets to be a major public figure even though everybody kind of knows this because taking her down would be too hard and confusing for reporters. It's a grim situation, like if Tara Reade had somehow become untouchable in public and tyro reporters increasingly didn't understand you were just privately supposed to know.
And another way to rein in our litigious culture even more would be a provision whereby punitive damages were directed not to the litigant personally but to a charity of their choice. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
I’ve alway thought most regulation is counter productive. Better to let the courts interpret property rights and let people self-regulate as much as possible.
Yeah, no.
Being sued AFTER YOU'VE BUILT THE SKYSCRAPER is a massive problem. Better to have a process that allows you to solicit all the complaints up front and get rulings on them.
And yes, if there's no cost to complaining, people will. By all means impose a cost. But nobody wants to have to play massive games of lawsuit roulette with investments that have already been made - and without a regulatory system to address it, they often don't. Of course, you don't see what didn't happen, so the cost may be less apparent, but it's no less real for that.
Great article as usual, Dr. Caplan. The problem with making it difficult to sue is the simple fact that government almost always overshoots. What happens when it is not difficult to sue, thus removing complainers, but it becomes impossible to sue? Today, the federal government is protected by Sovereign Immunity, meaning they cannot be sued. Routine complaints of noise pollution are one thing. When my brother-in-law was negligently killed by the Defense Department and my sister could not sue, this was not what I consider to be a minor complaint. When government builds a moat around themselves to fully eliminate their own culpability, it can act in any way it wants without disincentive.
Which is exactly why the plaintiffs attorneys are a rent-seeking force to be reckoned with in every state legislature.
Say what you want about fundamentalism, but the Torah's rule that the plaintiff should get whatever consequence he wished upon the defendant, should his case prove full of fabricated details, was a powerful disincentive of baseless tort.
as an aside, the late great Ronald Coase wrote about several landmark nusiance cases in his social cost paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4210659
The real problem was that lawyers and the people who can hire them had outsized power and then captured the regulatory agencies too.
Haha you admit that people are complainers, meaning most people are not content with their lot, and yet you defend a natalist view.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
You can actually extend this principle further. For example, there is a woman named Timnit Gebru who used to be in charge of AI safety research at Google. She staged a confrontation with them such that she became unemployable, then leveraged her firing into a second career as a whistleblower-martyr. However, if you actually pay close attention to her complaints, they are just the world's most obvious lies in every way. You can't reconstruct what actually happened exactly, but you CAN tell that Gebru's role in it was manipulative and involved considerable use of consciously false deceptive allegations of, for example, interpersonal racism.
The proof is just that she went so far overboard in what she claimed, while never providing any specifics of any kind, and then never sued over it. Like she would have confrontations on Twitter with former colleagues who would say "I disagree with this resignation tweet, it doesn't accord with my understanding of the situation" and then she would get in their face in front of everybody and menace them, trying to make it sound like the two former colleagues had mutual knowledge of mysterious, deeply evil and discriminatory incidents at Google. But there were never any lawsuits, or hints of a lawsuit. If anything, it was obvious that Google was refraining from suing HER, even though they almost certainly could have won a major judgment.
None of it made any sense and she was (and is) so obviously just a pathological liar, who apparently gets to be a major public figure even though everybody kind of knows this because taking her down would be too hard and confusing for reporters. It's a grim situation, like if Tara Reade had somehow become untouchable in public and tyro reporters increasingly didn't understand you were just privately supposed to know.
And another way to rein in our litigious culture even more would be a provision whereby punitive damages were directed not to the litigant personally but to a charity of their choice. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/