Many people are looking at drastic increases in states where Obamacare is being implemented, far higher than traditional growth, in part because they are forced to buy coverage they don't want and they don't need. Obamacare promised to rein in the the growth of health care costs and insurance premiums, and it is obviously a failure.
If you're going to implement European-style health insurance coverage, you must implement European-style cost controls, which usually involve strict limits on what insurance companies can charge, how much doctors earn, how hospitals are run, and what conditions are treated or not treated. Obama didn't do that, instead he handed a boondoggle to the insurance companies and private corporations and has the consumer pay for it, under the pretext of doing what other "civilized countries" do.
Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
Martian Translator Device: We come in peace! We come in peace!
I think public funding of basic research is one of the few areas where the federal government is justified in spending significant amounts of money.
But "generating economic impact" is a useless measure; the federal government could create a trillion dollars of economic impact by forcing everybody to burn down their houses or by simply forcing everybody to pay twice as much for their health care (well, they are trying the latter), but we wouldn't be better off as a result.
Without losing anything? Not true -- you've lost all the time you spent on that internship.
You show up, they tell you to make coffee, you stay two days to see whether it changes, you leave. Easy.
What's the point of an internship if you don't get a reference for not completing the term, because you left since you weren't learning/doing anything non-menial?
You can't legislate internships to be good experiences.
If that's the "lesson" to be learned, se la vie, but this shouldn't be a "coming-of-age" lesson to all interns -- it stifles legitimate business interests.
Is there any indication that "all interns" have this problem? No, of course not.
If you stay in an unpaid internship voluntarily, it might just be because you are young and naive and are getting exploited.
And you want to teach them that the way to deal with a bad employment situation is to sit out the internship and then sue for back pay. That is even more insidious than the fact that this decision will likely reduce the number of good internships available.
The main problem with your idea is that it requires someone to actually be harmed before any action is taken. That is just stupid. That harm could have easily been prevented in the first place, and it should have been.
That harm can only "easily be prevented" if you allow police to stop anyone anywhere for vague, unverifiable criteria. That's too intrusive for many people.
And yet, I could stand at almost any intersection with a camera, and I bet at least 25% of all drivers are in the middle of talking or texting despite it being illegal. Some days, it seems like more.
And yet, you would probably not be seeing an accident even if you stood there all year...
Don't accuse me of dragging fascism and right wing populism into this discussion: you did that. You just got your facts completely wrong. I suggest you do some reading.
You're defending third position economics, I'm defending laissez-faire free market economics and small government. It's as simple as that. At least have the decency of identifying your position correctly. Heck, you even have Mussolini's language down pat, accusing people who choose capitalism of being "slaves".
Of course people should get paid if they were promised an internship but end up doing menial labor. But they have a simple solution: they can just walk away from their unpaid internship without losing anything. If you voluntarily stay in an unpaid internship, presumably you are getting something out of it.
The insidious effect of this rule will be to place organizations providing good unpaid internships at a much higher legal risk, because the organizations that provide them now have to worry about getting dragged into court by a disgruntled intern for back pay. That not only means they are going to be less likely to have interns in the first place, it also means that interns who can't clearly contribute at a high level from day one have to be kicked out right away.
I really can't understand how anyone can embrace right wing populism and fascist economics after the 20th century, and that's exactly what you are doing.
True enough. Frankly, like most island economies, they face a fairly intractable problem that probably can't be fixed without some pretty amazing technological advancement.
There is no technological advancement needed, since there is no law of nature that every barren rock needs people on it. Nauru has always been a marginal habitat, and its original settlers were likely people who didn't have a choice because their original islands were facing overpopulation. The obvious thing to do is for the 9000 inhabitants to simply leave unless they can come up with a better strategy.
(Of course, the obvious strategy of turning Nauru into a tax haven and free trading zone doesn't work because the US and Europe aren't willing to let that happen.)
My main concern with the way they did things is that they spent way too much money on all the trappings of business success. Expensive buildings, an airport, etc.
Well, that's what happens when everything is owned communally and decisions are made by voting instead of markets. It's what happens when politician make "investments in the future".
So you basically have nothing except a doomsday collapse scenario. Now or later. It's sad to think that even a little restraint will instantly destroy the world.
I don't have a doomsday scenario at all: if we simply don't do anything about global warming. Even under the worst case scenarios of the IPCC and assuming no progress at all, we may lose 1-2% of global economic output to climate change; hardly a "doomsday scenario".
The doomsday scenario is if people succeed in sabotaging the global economy through unwise attempts to achieve sustainability through government action. That would both fail to achieve its goals, and it would preclude addressing the issues through economic development and technology.
Giving money to a political movement designed to undermine the state is not being a philanthropist - it's politics.
Koch's foundations advance the view that building basic institutions that protect the liberty of individuals to pursue their own economic interests result in greater prosperity for the larger society. That's the foundation of modern economics, not politics. The fact that people like you simply don't grasp this shows how important more education in this area is.
A lot of people thought that way in Italy and Germany in the 1930s. But the answer is not populist pricks that want to cut the majority of the population out of the loop and only allow the rich to decide what gets done
A key feature of fascist economics is "dirigisme", the strong ability of the state to direct private companies to operate in the interest of the people. They wanted people to have private property and engage in commerce, but they also wanted people to lose their property if it was determined that they were not using it for the benefit of the people. They called this the "third position", different from both socialism and capitalism, both of which the fascists opposed. Their big enemies were international finance and the economic dominance of big business, which they considered parasitical and unproductive.
That was the economic platform the Nazis were elected on, in the wake of a US stock market crash and economic crisis and the anti-capitalist sentiment that followed. It eventually made them the largest and most popular party in Germany, and Hitler was subsequently democratically elected dictator of Germany by parliament.
They are called "right wing populist" because they advocate ideas popular with a lot of people. Look in the mirror if you want to see a right wing populist, because that's what you are.
I can understand that hard times have made you feel that democracy is not working.
Democracy is working very well, and we aren't facing "hard times". I'd just like to keep it that way.
governments will use patriotism against you and even get your children to spy for them as was done by Germany during WWII
Not just during WWII; that continued all the way until the 1980's. Many people living and working in Germany today, even many politicians, were spies and informants for the German "state security service".
The point about Nauru was the inherent problem in rapid, unsustainable development using up limited resources while placing blind faith in future technological and/or economic advances to sustain you in the future.
But what alternative did they have? Any "sustainable" option would have meant not mining the phosphate, since it is a finite resource. Without mining the phosphate, they'd be a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on a pile of shit, which is no better than their current situation of being a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on bare rock. Sustainabilitiy wouldn't have improved their lot at all. Mining the phosphate slowly wouldn't have helped either because a small trickle of money wouldn't have helped them develop. The people of Nauru correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot. Their error was in how they went about it.
The point about free markets was really a separate point and I should have put it in its own paragraph to be more clear.
But it isn't a separate point. The problem with Nauru wasn't that the people exploited their resources unsustainably, it's that they failed to use the money to innovate. And they failed to do that because they left exploitation to a government monopoly.
The Nauru example shows that the right way of dealing with finite resources is to leave their exploitation to the free market: it ensures that they are exploited quickly and efficiently, and the people doing it are going to invest the proceeds in a way that ensures economic returns after the resources are gone.
No, I want democracy and the rule of law to actually function instead of the sad farce we're stuck with.
That's what you think you want, but you are actually arguing transferring decision making responsibility to credentialed scientists. That's not democracy, and it leads to disaster. Germany didn't decide to kill all the Jews because they were having a bad day, it was mainstream scientific dogma at the time that some races were superior and others were inferior; Germany tried to improve its society and ensure its long term survival according to what the majority of its highly credentialed scientists agreed on at the time. Any scientist who disagreed lost their job and was sent packing. And the USSR didn't ruin its economy out of scientific illiteracy, is built its entire economy on "scientific socialism", one of (at the time) mainstream expert opinions on how to organize production for the benefit of humanity. Again, any scientist who disagreed lost their job, was reeducated, or worse.
Uh, yeah. Wasn't that kind of _my_ point. Politicians and economists can't plann for the future worth anything. You need people not caught up in short-term interests to do that. Why aren't you accusing yourself of wanting "to subvert democracy and the rule of law"? Short memory?
So, we agree then that neither politicians, nor economists, nor climatologists give a f*ck or are capable of managing people's long term affairs, because they all misuse their positions of power and influence to advance their own self interest.
But there is one group of people who passionately cares about the future, namely the individuals who care about their own future. And to harness that passion, we have free markets, which reward people who make good decisions about the future and punish people who make bad decisions about the future. So, a democracy with free markets and a laissez-faire approach to economics avoids the inevitable disasters that result when you transfer decision making to either politicians or scientists. It also happens to be the most democratic choice.
And the Nauru example illustrates what the market would and should do: it would use up the finite resource (whether it's fossil fuel or carbon capacity) relatively quickly and individuals would invest
Ok, so your father (or is it the imaginary analogy patient, I can't quite tell) is an idiot
No, he simply has different objectives and preferences. Maximizing lifespan is not what life is about.
Do everything you can to reduce the extraction and burning of fossil fuel is is good advice for a plethora of reasons.
Really? What does "do everything" mean? The death penalty for using fossil fuels? 10000% taxes on a gallon of gasoline? Where do you draw the line?
Furthermore, the tricky thing about government regulations and taxes is that people usually evade them altogether if they become too onerous, so not only do they end up being ineffective, you also lose any influence and promote lawlessness.
But politicians and economists are almost universally either morons or so tied up in self-referential, narcissistic (frankly, pretty much masturbatory) systems that they're completely out of touch with the real world.
In different words, you want to subvert democracy and the rule of law because you don't like the decisions that politicians are actually making.
Rapid development can work if the results are planned to be future-proof and sustainable. If "rapid development" just means "exploit all of your local non-renewable resources until nothing is left", then it doesn't work so well.
It has worked well for the past 2000 years, if not longer. Humans have always lived with change and never lived sustainably. Running out of resources is what drives progress.
Just ask the people of Nauru. . They were the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet for a while there. not so much any longer. So called "free markets" can work well for some things, but they're completely blind to the future.
Except you fail to understand the lesson in this: the free market had nothing to do with Nauru's failures. Quite to the contrary, government attempts to plan for the future were the cause. After independence, the Nauru government created a government-owned and run corporation to extract mineral wealth and provide for the long term future of the people of Nauru. What happened? They handed out vast amounts of money to the people of Nauru in order to buy votes, and then the government employees had a party with what was left over. That is the predictable consequence when you hand over long term financial planning to politicians and government employees. If phosphate mining had been a large number of competitive small enterprises, many would have screwed up their finances anyway, but some would have used their revenues wisely to plan for the future.
Europe's cap-and-trade system has not only been ineffective, it has simply resulted in increased prices to consumers and increased profits to corporations.
No - I just have to point out that people like Koch are selfish pricks
You have no rational basis for saying that; the guy is one of the top US philanthropists. His only sin is that his political beliefs differ from yours.
I've tried to be polite, but I really do see you as the enemy of a free society since you're a useful tool for those that want to restore the Aristocracy.
You're the enemy of a free society, because you want to transfer individual liberties and decision making to a large, unaccountable executive branch. The endpoint of that is what happened in the communist east bloc. Of course, given your demonstrated utter ignorance of politics, history, and economics, it is hardly surprising that you fall into the same traps as your fellow socialists and progressives.
If not, why not? Is that discriminatory? After all, "Corporations are people too my frienda".
"A corporation is people" like "Soylent Green is people": it's composed of people who retain their rights even if they voluntarily assemble. A corporation obviously isn't identical to people, which is why they get taxed and treated very differently.
Furthermore, regardless of what they are, you can discriminate against anybody you want, except the few classes that are protected by law. Don't like redheads? Don't hire them. Don't like people with mustaches? Don't hire them.
If they can have an account who is allowed to stream content on their behalf, employees? shareholders? officers?
They are allowed to do whatever they have a license for from Netflix.
People aren't "ignoring the science", they are are "ignoring the scientist's policy preferences". Scientists aren't any more qualified than the rest of us to decide what to do with the predictions they make.
"We don't care about the costs imposed on people 100 years from now" or "we think technological and economic progress is going to solve the problem by itself" are rational and valid positions.
That's an interesting "right to be silent" you point to: you have a right to be silent, except the jury may draw "adverse inferences" if you "fail to give evidence at trial or answer any question". Sounds actually like the DeVry graduates got it right.
Are you reading what I'm writing? I'm advocating democracy
You're advocating a specific form of democracy, namely a European-style democracy where there is a large amount of power in the hands of corruptible politicians, as opposed to a US-style laissez faire democracy.
I think overthrowing that and replacing it with some army of lawyers for hire or similar naive idiocy (the armed wannabe-warlord "libertarian" faction) is a very bad idea.
You can think what you want, but that doesn't make an argument. If you want to make an argument, you have to explain how shifting more and more power from the judicial branch to the executive branch is going to reduce rent seeking. And you have to explain why countries that take that approach are doing so much worse than we are.
Consider what legal representation a homeless man gets versus someone like Donald Trump, and the outcomes.
So, in different words, you don't have any actual evidence, you are simply creating a straw man.
How are people going to afford to sue Koch for instance if their water is undrinkable downstream from one of the Koch operations if Koch gets his way and pollution controls are repealed?
Through class action lawsuits. They are extremely lucrative for the lawyers involved, so the people are going to get excellent representation, and they are decided by juries. Right now, he just needs to get some friendly regulator in place at the EPA and he gets off free, with no ability for anybody to sue him.
Do you see what I mean now about it just being window dressing on selfishness for some leading "libertarians" and directly opposed to what Franklin, Washington etc were trying to do.... The west has been pushing back against this bullshit since the 1600s so it's truly depressing to see it on the rise in the country that gave us modern democracy.
The US was founded by classical liberals and based on classical liberal ideas. They actually explicitly and firmly stood against redistribution of wealth and tried to design a Constitution that would limit it.
People like you want to impose failed European political ideas on the US, and heaven help us if you succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people are looking at drastic increases in states where Obamacare is being implemented, far higher than traditional growth, in part because they are forced to buy coverage they don't want and they don't need. Obamacare promised to rein in the the growth of health care costs and insurance premiums, and it is obviously a failure.
If you're going to implement European-style health insurance coverage, you must implement European-style cost controls, which usually involve strict limits on what insurance companies can charge, how much doctors earn, how hospitals are run, and what conditions are treated or not treated. Obama didn't do that, instead he handed a boondoggle to the insurance companies and private corporations and has the consumer pay for it, under the pretext of doing what other "civilized countries" do.
Don't run! We are your friends!
Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
Martian Translator Device: We come in peace! We come in peace!
I think public funding of basic research is one of the few areas where the federal government is justified in spending significant amounts of money.
But "generating economic impact" is a useless measure; the federal government could create a trillion dollars of economic impact by forcing everybody to burn down their houses or by simply forcing everybody to pay twice as much for their health care (well, they are trying the latter), but we wouldn't be better off as a result.
You show up, they tell you to make coffee, you stay two days to see whether it changes, you leave. Easy.
You can't legislate internships to be good experiences.
Is there any indication that "all interns" have this problem? No, of course not.
And you want to teach them that the way to deal with a bad employment situation is to sit out the internship and then sue for back pay. That is even more insidious than the fact that this decision will likely reduce the number of good internships available.
That harm can only "easily be prevented" if you allow police to stop anyone anywhere for vague, unverifiable criteria. That's too intrusive for many people.
And yet, you would probably not be seeing an accident even if you stood there all year...
And paying them for a worthless internship helps them get their credit ... how?
Don't accuse me of dragging fascism and right wing populism into this discussion: you did that. You just got your facts completely wrong. I suggest you do some reading.
Koch's political views: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Koch#Views_and_intellectual_development
Third Position Economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Third_Position_economics
You're defending third position economics, I'm defending laissez-faire free market economics and small government. It's as simple as that. At least have the decency of identifying your position correctly. Heck, you even have Mussolini's language down pat, accusing people who choose capitalism of being "slaves".
Of course people should get paid if they were promised an internship but end up doing menial labor. But they have a simple solution: they can just walk away from their unpaid internship without losing anything. If you voluntarily stay in an unpaid internship, presumably you are getting something out of it.
The insidious effect of this rule will be to place organizations providing good unpaid internships at a much higher legal risk, because the organizations that provide them now have to worry about getting dragged into court by a disgruntled intern for back pay. That not only means they are going to be less likely to have interns in the first place, it also means that interns who can't clearly contribute at a high level from day one have to be kicked out right away.
I think the proper title for that Lego model might be:
Ceci n'est pas un detecteur ATLAS.
I really can't understand how anyone can embrace right wing populism and fascist economics after the 20th century, and that's exactly what you are doing.
There is no technological advancement needed, since there is no law of nature that every barren rock needs people on it. Nauru has always been a marginal habitat, and its original settlers were likely people who didn't have a choice because their original islands were facing overpopulation. The obvious thing to do is for the 9000 inhabitants to simply leave unless they can come up with a better strategy.
(Of course, the obvious strategy of turning Nauru into a tax haven and free trading zone doesn't work because the US and Europe aren't willing to let that happen.)
Well, that's what happens when everything is owned communally and decisions are made by voting instead of markets. It's what happens when politician make "investments in the future".
I don't have a doomsday scenario at all: if we simply don't do anything about global warming. Even under the worst case scenarios of the IPCC and assuming no progress at all, we may lose 1-2% of global economic output to climate change; hardly a "doomsday scenario".
The doomsday scenario is if people succeed in sabotaging the global economy through unwise attempts to achieve sustainability through government action. That would both fail to achieve its goals, and it would preclude addressing the issues through economic development and technology.
Koch's foundations advance the view that building basic institutions that protect the liberty of individuals to pursue their own economic interests result in greater prosperity for the larger society. That's the foundation of modern economics, not politics. The fact that people like you simply don't grasp this shows how important more education in this area is.
A key feature of fascist economics is "dirigisme", the strong ability of the state to direct private companies to operate in the interest of the people. They wanted people to have private property and engage in commerce, but they also wanted people to lose their property if it was determined that they were not using it for the benefit of the people. They called this the "third position", different from both socialism and capitalism, both of which the fascists opposed. Their big enemies were international finance and the economic dominance of big business, which they considered parasitical and unproductive.
That was the economic platform the Nazis were elected on, in the wake of a US stock market crash and economic crisis and the anti-capitalist sentiment that followed. It eventually made them the largest and most popular party in Germany, and Hitler was subsequently democratically elected dictator of Germany by parliament.
They are called "right wing populist" because they advocate ideas popular with a lot of people. Look in the mirror if you want to see a right wing populist, because that's what you are.
Democracy is working very well, and we aren't facing "hard times". I'd just like to keep it that way.
Not just during WWII; that continued all the way until the 1980's. Many people living and working in Germany today, even many politicians, were spies and informants for the German "state security service".
But what alternative did they have? Any "sustainable" option would have meant not mining the phosphate, since it is a finite resource. Without mining the phosphate, they'd be a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on a pile of shit, which is no better than their current situation of being a bunch of uneducated nepotistic savages sitting on bare rock. Sustainabilitiy wouldn't have improved their lot at all. Mining the phosphate slowly wouldn't have helped either because a small trickle of money wouldn't have helped them develop. The people of Nauru correctly concluded that their best option was to mine the phosphate and use the money to improve their lot. Their error was in how they went about it.
But it isn't a separate point. The problem with Nauru wasn't that the people exploited their resources unsustainably, it's that they failed to use the money to innovate. And they failed to do that because they left exploitation to a government monopoly.
The Nauru example shows that the right way of dealing with finite resources is to leave their exploitation to the free market: it ensures that they are exploited quickly and efficiently, and the people doing it are going to invest the proceeds in a way that ensures economic returns after the resources are gone.
That's what you think you want, but you are actually arguing transferring decision making responsibility to credentialed scientists. That's not democracy, and it leads to disaster. Germany didn't decide to kill all the Jews because they were having a bad day, it was mainstream scientific dogma at the time that some races were superior and others were inferior; Germany tried to improve its society and ensure its long term survival according to what the majority of its highly credentialed scientists agreed on at the time. Any scientist who disagreed lost their job and was sent packing. And the USSR didn't ruin its economy out of scientific illiteracy, is built its entire economy on "scientific socialism", one of (at the time) mainstream expert opinions on how to organize production for the benefit of humanity. Again, any scientist who disagreed lost their job, was reeducated, or worse.
So, we agree then that neither politicians, nor economists, nor climatologists give a f*ck or are capable of managing people's long term affairs, because they all misuse their positions of power and influence to advance their own self interest.
But there is one group of people who passionately cares about the future, namely the individuals who care about their own future. And to harness that passion, we have free markets, which reward people who make good decisions about the future and punish people who make bad decisions about the future. So, a democracy with free markets and a laissez-faire approach to economics avoids the inevitable disasters that result when you transfer decision making to either politicians or scientists. It also happens to be the most democratic choice.
And the Nauru example illustrates what the market would and should do: it would use up the finite resource (whether it's fossil fuel or carbon capacity) relatively quickly and individuals would invest
No, he simply has different objectives and preferences. Maximizing lifespan is not what life is about.
Really? What does "do everything" mean? The death penalty for using fossil fuels? 10000% taxes on a gallon of gasoline? Where do you draw the line?
Furthermore, the tricky thing about government regulations and taxes is that people usually evade them altogether if they become too onerous, so not only do they end up being ineffective, you also lose any influence and promote lawlessness.
In different words, you want to subvert democracy and the rule of law because you don't like the decisions that politicians are actually making.
It has worked well for the past 2000 years, if not longer. Humans have always lived with change and never lived sustainably. Running out of resources is what drives progress.
Except you fail to understand the lesson in this: the free market had nothing to do with Nauru's failures. Quite to the contrary, government attempts to plan for the future were the cause. After independence, the Nauru government created a government-owned and run corporation to extract mineral wealth and provide for the long term future of the people of Nauru. What happened? They handed out vast amounts of money to the people of Nauru in order to buy votes, and then the government employees had a party with what was left over. That is the predictable consequence when you hand over long term financial planning to politicians and government employees. If phosphate mining had been a large number of competitive small enterprises, many would have screwed up their finances anyway, but some would have used their revenues wisely to plan for the future.
US carbon emissions fall to lowest levels since 1994
That's obviously not the case in Germany.
Europe's cap-and-trade system has not only been ineffective, it has simply resulted in increased prices to consumers and increased profits to corporations.
You have no rational basis for saying that; the guy is one of the top US philanthropists. His only sin is that his political beliefs differ from yours.
You're the enemy of a free society, because you want to transfer individual liberties and decision making to a large, unaccountable executive branch. The endpoint of that is what happened in the communist east bloc. Of course, given your demonstrated utter ignorance of politics, history, and economics, it is hardly surprising that you fall into the same traps as your fellow socialists and progressives.
Yes, you did.
Are you an expert on economics? If not, then frankly your opinion is irrelevant.
"A corporation is people" like "Soylent Green is people": it's composed of people who retain their rights even if they voluntarily assemble. A corporation obviously isn't identical to people, which is why they get taxed and treated very differently.
Furthermore, regardless of what they are, you can discriminate against anybody you want, except the few classes that are protected by law. Don't like redheads? Don't hire them. Don't like people with mustaches? Don't hire them.
They are allowed to do whatever they have a license for from Netflix.
It's like damning with faint praise, only they are doing it to themselves.
People aren't "ignoring the science", they are are "ignoring the scientist's policy preferences". Scientists aren't any more qualified than the rest of us to decide what to do with the predictions they make.
"We don't care about the costs imposed on people 100 years from now" or "we think technological and economic progress is going to solve the problem by itself" are rational and valid positions.
That's an interesting "right to be silent" you point to: you have a right to be silent, except the jury may draw "adverse inferences" if you "fail to give evidence at trial or answer any question". Sounds actually like the DeVry graduates got it right.
You're advocating a specific form of democracy, namely a European-style democracy where there is a large amount of power in the hands of corruptible politicians, as opposed to a US-style laissez faire democracy.
You can think what you want, but that doesn't make an argument. If you want to make an argument, you have to explain how shifting more and more power from the judicial branch to the executive branch is going to reduce rent seeking. And you have to explain why countries that take that approach are doing so much worse than we are.
So, in different words, you don't have any actual evidence, you are simply creating a straw man.
Through class action lawsuits. They are extremely lucrative for the lawyers involved, so the people are going to get excellent representation, and they are decided by juries. Right now, he just needs to get some friendly regulator in place at the EPA and he gets off free, with no ability for anybody to sue him.
The US was founded by classical liberals and based on classical liberal ideas. They actually explicitly and firmly stood against redistribution of wealth and tried to design a Constitution that would limit it.
People like you want to impose failed European political ideas on the US, and heaven help us if you succeed.