One of the Downsides of Our Contemporary Culture

This is a story from Stocktwits, a daily email newsletter that gives a recap of what's happening in the market, etc. In addition to summarizing the day's Wall Street activities, they pass along stories and do in-depth breakdowns of specific companies that seem to be flying to the moon or heading into the swamp.

At the end of each newsletter they have a "Bullets From The Day" section of one paragraph summaries of various events. Yesterday's Bullets were as follows:

 Hertz to buy up to 175,000 EVs from General Motors.

 Apple App Store announces international price hikes.

 Two veteran sports execs launch Velocity Capital Management.

 Judge denies bid to stop UnitedHealth’s acquisition plan.

And finally, this one, today's lead Bullet:

Cancer victims urge the court to end the J&J bankruptcy roadblock. People suing Johnson & Johnson over its talc products urged an appeals court on Monday to revive their claims, saying it should not be allowed to use a bankrupt subsidiary to block lawsuits alleging the products cause cancer. The company spun off its subsidiary in October, assigned its talc liabilities to it, and then placed it into bankruptcy. The commonly used restructuring strategy paused about 38,000 lawsuits J&J was facing and sent the victims into a state of perpetual litigation

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If the talc issue is legit, it's shameful that J&J can skirt responsibility like that. Then again, the tobacco industry hasn't been put out of business even though that link to cancer is self-evident. The government likes the tax revenue generated by tobacco addicts. 

And if the talc issue is not legit, it's sad the extremes to which companies must go to defend themselves from endless litigation about nearly everything.

I'm curious how much money is spent on attorneys that could have been spent on research and development to make companies stronger as they launch into the future. Then again, I can hear people saying that the money spent on lawyers would probably just end up in the pockets of CEOs and their ilk. 

I dunno. It seems like the whole country is wrapped up in legal red tape. Has it always been this way? 

Well, I know that Daniel Boone was frustrated with all the red tape people were tangled in right from the start of this nation. The Kentucky pioneer was a land surveyor. He helped settlers identify their lands and get title deeds. For reasons I am unsure of, many of these would get challenged and the people would lose their land. Over time, to make things right he gave away all the land he personally owned, disgusted with the lawyers and the legal system.

By 1800 the U.S. was only on its second presidency and Boone, 66 at the time, was so fed up he left the country he bailed. He went West across the Mississippi to land owned by France. At last, he could live free. 

Unfortunately, in 1803 Thomas Jefferson made a deal with France, which we know now as the Louisiana Purchase. It stretched from New Orleans to Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, more than a half billion acres, all for the sum of $18 million. For us this is just a history datapoint, maybe the correct answer to a question on a quiz. But for Daniel Boone, and the sons who joined him in his exodus, this was a serious bummer. He was back in the "civilized" world, with all its legal entanglements.

The point is, we have way too much red tape, too many rules and regulations, hurdles to jump, walls to bust through. And it's stifling our economy.

Map Illustration Credit: William Morris, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons