Video game makers and sellers have just been added to the list of industries vulnerable to financial rape by personal-injury lawyers. The State of Washington is considering a bill that would make them responsible for any psychological damage that any attorney says is caused by their products.
Of course, these firms now join a large group of vulnerable industries: Tobbacco, fast food, firearms, automobile, etc.
This post was the first essay I ever wrote on this blog, and it's still my masterwork after over a year of blogging. It examines the history of the erosion of Personal Responsibility in this nation. Read it again, and then see if my suggested solution fits.
This nation was founded, AND STILL EXISTS, on the concept that an individual has to take responsibility for his/her own actions, made as an adult. These attempts to weaken that principle are attacks against our culture as sure and as devestating as those made by radical Islamic clerics and their followers.
Yes, I'll repeat that: The attempts to water down the concept of personal responsibility are a direct attack on the American way of life.
So, how to we beat back this little "insurgency", as the press would call it if they cared to illustrate some cases and outline some of the rapists?
It's not going to be easy. We have to encode the principle of personal responsibility into law, and make it a legal principle that lawyers have to defend, not attack.
Let's start with the 10 or so states that have the Initiative and Referendum process, and get some Constitutional Amendments going in those states. When the rest of the nation sees just how well everyone BUT personal injury lawyers do when those amendments take effect, maybe we can amend the Federal Constitution to require adherence to this bedrock principle.
The opposition will be fierce. The personal injury lawyers (the most powerful bloc in the Democratic Party) will see this as a direct attack on their livelihood (it is), and react with a last-stand fight that might border on insurrection. We must steel themselves to their tactics, and prepare our initial thrust so that it is designed to defeat those tactics in detail as they are brought into play.
I believe that Personal Responsibility would have been encoded in the Bill of Rights, from the start, except that the Founding Fathers simply could not envision life WITHOUT such a basic concept, so they assumed the nation would always be driven by that principle, and left it out. It was, at the time, the basic principle of law in any form of government.
It's time to put it in to that foundation, our Constitution, that these lawyers treat as just another contract that they can break with re-definitions of the word "is".
Put this in the back of your mind, dear Readers, because you are going to see more of it. The decent people of this Nation have to go on the offensive here. We have to take forthright action, or else we will wake up one day in "1984".
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