What’s the difference between liberals and conservatives? Conservatives look for things that are broken, so they can fix them. Liberals do just the opposite.
It’s a silly adage, with a lot of truth in it, as can be seen in Democrat-dominated legislatures all across the country.
Whereas legislatures in saner states seek to identify problems and find solutions for them, legislatures like ours are continually preoccupied with breaking things that weren’t broken and making existing problems even worse.
Take champerty, for instance. It used to be a crime in Illinois and most other states, but our sage solons decided to legalize it, and now they’re planning to make it even easier to engage in.
What is champerty? Champerty is third-party financing of lawsuits, otherwise known as lawsuit lending. It consists of putting up the money for someone else’s litigation in exchange for a share of the anticipated settlement.
The criminalization of champerty was a good thing, because it discouraged frivolous lawsuits, preserved the integrity of our courts, and protected potential plaintiffs from the lures of loan-shark lenders.
But champerty has its champions, particularly among lawyers and lenders looking to profit from it, and beginning in the late 1990s they recast this age-old vice as a newly-minted virtue and succeeded in having laws against it overturned in many states, including Illinois.
The problem with people who break things on purpose is that they’re never satisfied with the damage they’ve done. They want to break more things. Unlike ordinary people, they rarely have to pay for things they’ve broken.
Our iconoclastic lawmakers are now considering a bill to legalize “predatory lending practices” for lawsuit lenders. Needless to say, the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association supports the bill.
The Illinois Manufacturers Association (IMA) opposes it, for the obvious reasons.
“Use of these secret lawsuit lending arrangements will increase legal costs and frivolous lawsuits, reduce the number of settlements, and diminish awards for injured parties,” IMA President Mark Denzler warns.
Denzler is right. Instead of promoting champerty, we should outlaw it again.