Scheiber: The Case For Socialized Law
Anyone who has ever picked up a tabloid knows full well how the 1 percent flouts the laws that bind the rest of us. We still collectively stew over the world’s William Kennedy Smiths (acquitted on rape charges in the early ’90s) and Lizzie Grubmans (37 short days in jail after speeding her SUV into a crowd). And each passing year only brings fresh affronts. In 2010, there was Martin Erzinger, a Colorado money manager who maimed a cyclist in a hit-and-run. Erzinger escaped felony charges by arguing that the smell of his new Mercedes-Benz had aggravated his sleep apnea, which briefly knocked him out. In 2011, William Bryan Jennings, a Wall Street bond executive, stabbed his cab driver with a two-and-a-half-inch blade over an “exorbitant” fare and somehow got the charges dropped. It’s hard to imagine anyone without a trust fund or a hedge fund or a bond fund experiencing such legal good fortune.
Here is Scheiber’s idea to remedy this:
Click here for reuse options!…since there isn’t enough money in the country to allow all of us to spend as much on ourselves as Lloyd Blankfein would—to say nothing of the mega-rich like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett—then we have no alternative: We must limit what Blankfein and Buffett can spend.
The idea would be roughly as follows: in criminal cases, we decide what the accused should be able to spend to defend themselves against a given charge—securities fraud, grand theft, manslaughter, etc. No one can spend more, even if she has the money, and those who can’t afford the limit would receive a subsidy for the full amount beyond what they would have spent on their own (say, beyond a certain percentage of their annual salary or net worth). In civil cases, we decide what the plaintiff should be able to spend to pursue an award of a particular amount, or to pursue a particular kind of claim, and what the defendant should be able to spend in response.8 The same subsidies would apply.
Copyright 2014 Liberaland
