I have no doubt that a large number of American lawyers do wonderfully worthwhile things. But the trouble is that there are just too many of them. In fact, the U.S. has more lawyers than all the rest of the world put together. The U.S. now boasts 346 lawyers for every 100,000 citizens. Britain, by contrast, has 196; Japan a mere 22.
Every year over 90 million lawsuits are filed in the U.S., and many of these are what might simply be called ambitious. Two parents in Texas are suing a high school baseball coach for benching their son during a game. In Washington State, a man with heart problems is suing local milk companies “because their milk did not warn him about cholesterol.”
Along with the idea that lawsuits are a quick way to a fortune, there is the interesting and uniquely American notion that no matter what happens, someone else must be responsible. So if, say, you smoke eighty cigarettes a day for fifty years and eventually get cancer, then it must be everyone else’s fault but your own, and you sue just about everybody involved in making and selling cigarettes.
The cost of all this to society is enormous. New York City alone spends $200 million a year settling “slip and fall” claims – people tripping over the edge of a sidewalk, and the like. According to a recent TV documentary, because of the ever-growing legal costs, consumers in the U.S. pay $500 more than they need to for every car the buy, $100 more for football helmets, and $3,000 more for heart pacemakers. They even pay a little extra for haircuts, because several customers successfully sued their barbers after being given the sort of embarrassing haircut I receive as a matter of routine.
All of which has given me an idea. I am going to smoke eighty cigarettes a day and slip and fall on a New York sidewalk while drinking high-cholesterol milk, and then I’ll call a lawyer and see if we can strike a deal. I don’t expect to settle for less than $2.5 billion ― and that’s before we’ve even started to talk about my least haircut.
