>It started out as a way to hold companies responsible for small amounts of harm that are spread out to many individuals. Is it worth it for any one individual to sue a company for a $5 product that purposefully misleads consumers? Is it okay for a company to take advantage of consumers in this way purely because they are unlikely to be called upon to account for their misbehavior? That's the reasoning behind a class action lawsuits. Allow many people to join together to act as a counterbalance to companies flaunting their relative position of power. Regulation is the other way to deal with this, but regulation often lags abuse, and why regulate specifically what is already against the law and just needs an enforcement mechanism?
Thanks for clarifying, I learned something new. I think ideally you would have as little regulation as possible and inspectors + fines for highly critical stuff, so courts and consumers will not have to deal with this at all.
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> I think ideally you would have as little regulation as possible and inspectors + fines for highly critical stuff, so courts and consumers will not have to deal with this at all.
I agree that that as little regulation as possible would be better, simply because regulation generally seems to also create perverse incentives, so when you can incentivize the behavior you want without it you are probably better off. Unfortunately, fine and inspectors are regulation. They make sense in some areas (such as food and building inspection), but I don't think it's feasible to expect that to work for every type of problem, for every type of industry, when we don't even know everywhere they would be useful now, much less the future. So, we have class-actions as a fail-safe.
>It started out as a way to hold companies responsible for small amounts of harm that are spread out to many individuals. Is it worth it for any one individual to sue a company for a $5 product that purposefully misleads consumers? Is it okay for a company to take advantage of consumers in this way purely because they are unlikely to be called upon to account for their misbehavior? That's the reasoning behind a class action lawsuits. Allow many people to join together to act as a counterbalance to companies flaunting their relative position of power. Regulation is the other way to deal with this, but regulation often lags abuse, and why regulate specifically what is already against the law and just needs an enforcement mechanism?
Thanks for clarifying, I learned something new. I think ideally you would have as little regulation as possible and inspectors + fines for highly critical stuff, so courts and consumers will not have to deal with this at all.