—-”Why do Americans love to sue each other?”—-
TWO REASONS, 1-COMMERCIAL, and 2-CIVIL
1 – COMMERCIAL. Europeans and most of the world REGULATE ability to engage in agreements. Americans RESOLVE conflicts in court instead. This is why there is such a big difference between american and european innovation at all but the macro industrial levels, and frankly why europeans are poorer than americans (aside from the number of hours worked).
So europeans and most others use BUREAUCRATIC PRIOR RESTRAINT to limit conflict at the expense of experimentation, innovation, and the size of the entrepreneurial classes, and Americans use JURIDICAL RESOLUTION to resolve conflict in order to obtain experimentation, innovation, the size of the entrepreneurial classes, despite the (lower) cost of juridical resolutoin.
Americans consider the RIGHT TO FAIL part of liberty. Europeans (it seems strange to us) are afraid of failure. For example Bankruptcy for an american entrepreneur who tries again, simply means he’s heroic for having tried, and more heroic for getting up and doing it again. Whereas in europe it’s still socially unacceptable. (Which in modern economic terms is rather ridiculous).
So different societies place controls at different places and pay different prices for those controls. Americans favor rule of law by the natural law of tort while what we consider the ‘nanny state’ prohibits such experimentation.
(I have owned businesses internationally and … I wouldn’t even consider doing business in France because of laws, or Italy because of the impossibility of the tax code). It’s 10x as hard in canada, and 50x as hard in the UK. For no good reason. It’s always seems like some moron takes great pride in throwing up requirements and objections to suppress non existent or marginal risks. (That and brits tend to be fairly lazy.) Germans are wonderful people at all levels but the bureaucracy inhibiting entrepreeneurship is just daunting.
In america you can pretty much lose money for three years and never pay a dime in taxes. If you do it right you can lose money for ten years an never pay a dime in taxes. This is how people learn to become entrepreneurs – by failing a little bit until they succeed.
2 – CIVIL. We have nothing in common except commerce, and all claims of a melting pot outside of dense urban centers are false. Unlike European countries we have been prohibited sine the 1960’s from enforcing norms. So Americans had the same problem with Jewish conformity in the 20th century that Europeans are having with Islamic conformity – and for the same reasons. We allowed this process to continue with tolerance and it ended up destroying our nation by way of ‘diversity’. Ergo, without norms enforced we must LITIGATE disputes. This will come to europe if it hasn’t already.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine