Creative Commons license icon

Reply to comment

Let's get real indeed. A few google searches and here's what I find and/or conclude.

  • PG&E: Over 100 plaintiffs, through approximately 20 law firms, have sued Pacific Gas and Electric and/or its parent, PG&E Corporation, in the Superior Courts of California in over 70 separate lawsuits. -Wikipedia (I assume you are referring to the explosion in 2010.)
  • KBR/Halliburton: Corrupt definitely. Not sure if lawsuits are being filed or not. But they're basically in bed with the government, taking advantage of the fact that we're going on a warm, fuzzy, nation-building campaigns using tax-payer dollars. Even just returning to a gold standard would largely prevent these kinds of abuses. Nobody would allow the government to go to wars they don't agree with if they saw up front what the cost was. The cost of this "war" is mostly hidden from us because the fed is paying for it by printing money. But sooner or later, we're going to pay for it in the form of inflation, among other things.
  • Massey Energy: I assume you're referring to the mine explosion in 2010. The claim you're probably making is that not following regulations is what lead to the explosion, and that if they'd just followed the regulations, everything would have been fine. What lead to the explosion was simply unsafe practices, whether the regulations said so or not. What would have prevented the problem was rational thinking, not regulation. Unsafe practices that could lead to an explosion is a sign of shallow, short-term, in the moment thinking. Which regulation actually encourages, by giving you a false sense of security that you can run a business well without knowing how, as long as you comply with the regulations that magically guarantee that you're being safe. Abolishing regulation would weed this behavior out by making people think for themselves, and competition in the free market would reward the most rational, long-term thinkers. Oh, also, it was a tunnel mine. Environmentalist laws ban strip mining, which is much safer. But heaven forbid we be allowed to mess with nature for the selfish goal of making human lives better and/or safer. Not that they should get off the hook for the dangerous practices. And I doubt they did.
  • BP: Same as above. Regulations encourage faith in regulatory agency, faith and reason are contradictory, etc etc blah blah. And if environmentalists allowed us to drill in Alaska or closer to shore, BP would not have had to drill to such dangerous depths. Not that that means BP should have gotten off the hook. They chose to do what they did and still rightly had to pay damages and cleanup costs, as far as I know.
  • Monsanto/Agent Orange: Agent Orange was being used to give us an advantage in the Vietnam War by defoliating the trees that enemy guerrillas were hiding in. I don't think it was known at the time that it was poisonous. Monsanto (And Dow Chemical) simply manufactured it. Our army used it. But litigation was brought up against Monsanto anyway.
  • The Radium Girls: They sued U.S. Radium. There was wide media coverage over it. U.S. Radium's reputation was probably destroyed. Sounds like justice was done to me.
  • Every example you provided either a: Started with a violation of someone's rights and ended in punishments being meted out to the violator, through the justice system, upholding Capitalism; and/or b: is made possible or is influenced by the government violating peoples' rights, which is a failure to uphold Capitalism.

Reply

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <img> <b> <i> <s> <blockquote> <ul> <ol> <li> <table> <tr> <td> <th> <sub> <sup> <object> <embed> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <dl> <dt> <dd> <param> <center> <strong> <q> <cite> <code> <em>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This test is to prevent automated spam submissions.
Leave empty.