The Regulatory Attack on US Business Is Not the Real Problem

The criminalisation of American business … Corporate settlements in the United States The criminalisation of American business Companies must be punished when they do wrong, but the legal system has become an extortion racket … Who runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company. The amounts are mind-boggling. – Economist magazine
Dominant Social Theme: Let these multinationals breathe. Give them air and freedom and keep the lawyers away from them.
Free-Market Analysis: The Economist magazine has decided a major problem with the US economy is that its largest multinational corporations and banks are being held for ransom by avaricious lawyers.

This post was published at The Daily Bell on August 29, 2014.