[extropy-chat] Extropy and libertarianism - a search fo rmeaning...

[Robert Lindauer]

Mike Lorrey wrote:

>--- Robbie Lindauer <robgobblin at aol.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>The best thing about living in a fantasy world is that you get to
>>make things up as you go.
>>    
>>
>
>The problem with walking around with your foot in your mouth is
>everything tastes like dog crap.
>
>Now that we are done trading insults, I invite you to study a bit
>before showing what a fool you are once more. The areas of private law,
>alternative dispute resolution, and arbitration are well established,
>widely practiced, and constitute more of the legal work of the lawyers
>in the US today than of work in government courts.
>  
>

Arbitration costs money.  In an adversarial situation where a large 
company is suing a small consumer or vice versa, the party with the more 
money will try to force upon the party with the lesser amount of money 
the more expensive option(s) in hopes that this will force them to 
settle on their terms and/or force them out of business.  This is the 
nature of adversarial court situations.  This was the point I meant to 
illustrate in the Walmart example, perhaps you didn't understand what 
happened?

Say you and I are in a court conflict and I know that my court-costs are 
fixed (because I employ lawyers full time).  And I know that yours are 
not.  I regard your chance of winning in direct proportion to your 
ability to plead your case and bring the matter to a decision.  I will 
do everything in my power to make sure that doesn't happen - I'll file 
motion upon motion, hold conference upon conference, withhold discovery, 
appeal rulings, hold arbitration sessions for the specific purpose of 
making you and your lawyers attend at their hourly rate - simply in 
order to make it obvious that it's going to be very expensive for you to 
pursue your case against me.  Assuming I'm simultaneously rich and 
intelligent, I'll employ better lawyers than you can afford anyway....  
Court is war, the ones with the bigger guns win.

Arbitration, the mandatory settlement conference, preliminary settlement 
conferences, etc., are all just steps along the way for the wealthier 
party to simply force their opponents to spend more money.   Only in 
cases where there is a parity of resources on both sides are those 
conferences relevant since the threat on both sides is equivalent.

But when one side has more money in a legal battle, they're more likely 
to win NO MATTER WHAT the cause of their case - witness criminal cases 
against wealthy people where the states' limited resources are put up 
against billionaires and the obvious cases where a poor person wronged 
by a wealthy person simply hasn't got the resources to take them to 
court at all.

The your la-la-land where people can afford medical and legal insurance 
and the legal insurance that will be -good- (better than our current 
medical insurance situation?) and where the legal insurance that wealthy 
people carry is on par with legal insurance that the poor carry, is 
simply an impossibility, a pipe dream.

ON THE OTHER HAND.  Were legal restrictions on revenge lifted, you could 
pretty much guarantee that businesses would fulfill their promises and 
that buyers would pay since just about anyone can afford a pipe bomb or 
even a ground-to-air missile if needed.  You'd also be much less likely 
to see spurious cases taken to the absolute court of revenge - only if 
you were really wronged would you go and blow up someone's place of 
business and/or someone's house.

Robbie Lindauer