We also like Paul Krugman’s descriptive paragraph:
…ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
That more or less fits ALEC’s civil justice agenda too. It’s new priorities are listed in a brand new report called ALEC 2013: Jobs, Innovation, and Opportunity in the States, and when it comes to people harmed or killed by corporate wrongdoing, it focuses on three areas: making it more difficult for people injured or killed by unsafe or defective products to hold manufacturers accountable in court; limiting the availability of “class actions,” so that big companies can more successfully violate large numbers of people with impunity; and limiting lawsuits by people who have been defrauded under state consumer protection laws. All such laws transfer the costs of injuries away from those who caused them and onto others (like taxpayers, when people are severely hurt and need care.)
In other words, ALEC would like to undermine the tort system’s economic function - deterrence of non cost-justified accidents - replacing it with new rules constraining what is now a free-market approach to holding corporations accountable for their negligence. (You can read more about the tort system's important economic function in the 1987 book, The Economic Structure of Tort Law by conservative economic theorists William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner.)
So let's add one more ALEC description - subverter of the free market tort system.
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