doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Done With Cabels.....

Still, the tort system encourages large settlements. The compensatory damages are usually something granted from a measureable reference, but the punitive damages are often rediculous. Punitive damages are touted as preventative in nature.

If that's true, what if we were to amend the law to make all punitive damages go to something like charity? That'd take incentive out of the "frivolous" suits.

Not saying that punitive damages are never unreasonable, or that the system isn't flawed. However, punitive damages are awarded by a jury of 12 neutral people who have listened to all the evidence, usually over a period of many weeks, and made their best decision. That decision is then reviewed by at least one appellate court. I am not sure how to make the system better than that.

To give punitive damages to a charity would encourage juries to error on the side of awarding punitive damages, since the money is going to a good cause, anyway.

Large businesses are usually the ones paying out the large punitive damages. These same large businesses have the resources (i.e. the money to hire lobbiests) to promote their propaganda that large damage awards are bad for society. I'd be wary of any publication or speaker concluding the same unless it is well supported by concrete data. In other words, I think any politician who is campaigning for tort reform is in the back pocket of big business, unless he/she has hard data backing up their tort reform plan.

JMHO

--shinbone

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.

Exploding tires on the Explorers was Firestone's fault.And the mayor of New York just chose Nissan over Ford to supply taxi cab fleet! Bobby

All the union organizers I've been around said: "give me more money and bennies, I don't give a rats axe if you can afford it". Union organizers try on small and mid sized business all the time. It's not just for big business anymore.

Having worked in small, mid, and large manufacturing businesses, I've seen small and mid sized businesses decide to go oversees for products they, themselves, manufacture. Eventually, leading to them becoming a clearing house for foriegn goods. Some of that driven by union pressures, some by greed, some by survival. Everyone is trying to paddle their own canoe, some sprinting for short times, some for long distance. There's a lot of reasons for work going offshore.

That's always struck me as humorous; guys who won't by a pair of boots or a shirt because it's not "Made in USA" will spend thousands on a shotgun made overseas.

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"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."

I worked for International Harvester for several years so I'm well familiar with unions the UAW in particlar so I beg to disagree with the above statement.
Every time the UAW got more unreasonable benefits and made American manufactures less competitive that's the implicit message the company received. "Please move your factory----" There was/is a $600 vehicle labor cost differential between a vehicle built in Japan and one built here the last I knew which is a tremendous differential.
Here is an example of union benefits: If you were a Labor Grade 10 and your job was eliminated and there wasn't another LG 10 position available you could take layoff in lieu of transfer instead. This meant that you would receive 90% of you pay for up to a year for staying home.
While IH never built plants overseas they lost a lot of business to Japanese outfits like Komatsu and came very close to bankruptcy.
IH survived as Navastar but it is a mere shadow of what it once was.
I'm pretty sure everyone on this forum who is familiar with Winchester knows that the classic Model 70 rifle and Model 12 shotgun both had to be eliminated due to skyrocketing labor costs.
Jim

But what's more American than Cabela's?

If you don't shop there, they'll go out of business. Then what? What about all the Americans they employ?

OWD

Guys putting bumpers on cars on a line making $75K a year or more are a part of the issue. The wages in some companies get pushed out of scope for the education/experience level compared to other similar jobs in industry.

My last Mercury waS made in Canad, with lots of Mexican-made Parts.

My current KIA is over 50% made in the USA.

In many instances, one would find it difficult to find American-made goods: TV's, PC's, cell phones, cameras, SxS shotguns, boots, clothing, dishes, etc.

Our domestic production costs are too high for multiple reasons: lawsuits, liability insurance, EPA, unions, etc. it seems doubtful that we will ever again be a manufacturing nation.

JERRY