A Legal License To Steal
One of the major problems with our society is the dependence upon and use of lawyers. Often they seem necessary, but in many ways they are a drain, even a burden on society. It is the how and why of their methods which are the basis of this problem.
There are two ways in which a society can govern itself. The one we chose originally is the rule of law. The one we have avoided, until recently, is the rule of man. Without delving deeply into the issue, the rule of man is when the leaders make up the rules to suit themselves as they go along. The result of this method is no one knows what the future holds. What a ruler may do one day, he may reverse the next. Conversely, the rule of law is when the rules are written down so they are known beforehand. Thus one can make decisions about the future knowing what the rules are and what the results of one’s actions will be, so far as government is concerned. Unfortunately, today in the US, the rule of law has been greatly weakened as indicated by Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s statement concerning the Constitution and President Obama’s shirking of contract law in the GM union payoff. Under a rule of law, rules will be written down on how various situations in life must proceed in order to abide by the law. And so lawyering begins.
The initial framework of rules, we call them constitutions, are written. They are simple enough. But then come the lawyers. Lawyers are needed to write contracts which abide by the rules. Lawyers are needed to decide if the rules have been broken and lawyers are needed to seek damages and punishments when the rules are broken. So far, all is well. But then the lawyers work to place themselves in position to write laws. They get elected to public office and then encourage laws that are not necessary to the proper functioning of society, but which do ‘increase the need for lawyers’. We find they advocate laws increasing petty rules where the determination of proper behavior will be decided by lawsuits which, all together now, ‘increase the need for lawyers’. They find error and complaint where none existed but having helped establish a convoluted and self-serving court system the process will (all together) ‘increase the need for lawyers’. They have organizations whose sole purpose is to work with various legislatures to ‘increase the need for lawyers’.
President Bill Clinton attempted tort reform. His goal was to reduce the lawyers’ ability to take from others. The lawyers were having none of it. President Clinton, trying to help the society become a better place for all, was quashed by the lobby for tort lawyers, who are interested solely in what they can take from everyone else. So what exactly do lawyers, especially tort lawyers, provide society? Why do we really need them?
If laws were written in straight forward, common language, where ‘is’ means ‘is’, most men would have no problem determining what the law means. But the lawyers have made the writing of rules an esoteric language of voodoo only to be deciphered by the anointed. They do this to maintain their position of importance. But what do they actually provide? In a word, nothing. There is no added value to their work. When they are on your side, when you are paying them, they work to help you stay within the rules and keep your money. When they are on the other side, when the other side is paying them, they work to find out how you broke the rules so they can take your money. They are here to take your money. You pay them to help you keep your money, while someone else pays them to take your money. This is not to say they are bad people. Really, it is only the 99% of them which give the other 1% a bad name. I exaggerate, it’s probably 80-20. (personally, some of my best friends are lawyers) But what is their added value? They say they are a service; well yes. they are: a leeching service.
In the trucking business, we provide a service. A customer wants his product delivered from this plant to his customer’s place of business. We pick it up, sign a standard bill of lading form which holds the trucking company responsible for the product until its safe delivery, and deliver the product. Something has happened that you can see. Now the produce can be purchased and taken home from the store. What service does an attorney provide? When you get arrested for the ridiculously criminalized laws against possession of marijuana, they help you reduce the punishment. When they help sue a trucking company for the results of a blown tire that scared a woman talking on a cell phone off the road, they are looking for a free ride. When they complain about President’s Obama’s $20 billion deal with BP to pay those injured by the Gulf Oil Spill, they are complaining about lack of an opportunity for a free ride. When they sued cigarette companies for billions, they were looking for and found a free ride. The tort lawyers fight to keep tort law unreformed because they like the opportunities for the free ride.
FREE RIDE
A husband and wife start a business in their garage working at night and on the weekends. They work hard, put their house and everything at risk. Their children get less than other children. The team turns the corner. Business gets better. They continue to work for years and become profitable, adding employees and assets. After 25 years they have a thriving business, which they spent thousands of days working at to build. They followed all the rules the best they could, but one of the workers didn’t put a safety device up correctly and someone got injured.
ENTER THE LAWYERS: For the single mistake after 25 years of work. A mistake by an employee, perhaps in a hurry to go to her son’s ball game, the lawyers will attempt to take everything the team has worked for, to divide among themselves and their client(s). If the company is a wealthy one there are lawyers who will pay witnesses and will invent injured parties in order to take from the business. The stories are ubiquitous. A current case is one against Texaco for its actions in Ecuador wherein Joseph Kohn, the plaintiff’s lawyer says, paraphrased, ‘it’s a profitable case for my firm’. The lawyers try to take what others worked for years to produce, simply because they know how to use the law to take it.
Lawyers produce nothing. In a perfect world they assist in maintaining a properly ordered and functioning society and, like police, are necessary. But having insinuated themselves into the legislatures, they have caused laws to be written whose sole goal is to enhance their position at the expense of those who actually produce those things we need to live. Lawyers might say they work hard, but an ink stain on a fingernail or staying up late writing reasons the opponent should or shouldn’t pay is hardly to be considered real work.
Their morality is simple as well: if it’s legal, it’s moral. After having helped write the laws which fabricate so many varied ways for lawyers to take other’s hard earned money, they have made all sorts of stealing not only legal but, in their minds, moral.
They are not moral and nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly there are exceptions, there are exceptions to most generalizations, but the generalization of lawyers being leeches on society holds true. They are no different than the bureaucrats in government who live by legally taxing others to enhance their lifestyles and positions. They are no different than the workman’s compensation cheat or the welfare mooch, or the insurance fraud. Their method is to use the law to take from others what those others have actually worked hard to produce. They rationalize and say: ‘I want it, I can find a way to make it legal to take it’. As much as I hate to insult Gollum by association with the tort lawyers, the object of their lust becomes their PRECIOUS. And like Gollum, their only concern is possession.
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