“The reason there is so much tort litigation, Mr. Geoghegan says, is that workers and others no longer have contracts they can enforce. Lacking contracts, they are reduced to making wild allegations and asking for extravagant damages in suits that mostly fail but that sometimes pay off like a lottery ticket.”

Huh? As noted elsewhere, any lawsuits that might serve as a substitute for this area would be a tiny fraction of the overall number of lawsuits. Worker’s compensation systems, for instance, preclude suits in many states for on-the-job injuries, and race-and-sex-based discrimination claims are absolutely, positively a result of liberal politics, not conservative. Poverty or the evils of capitalism as an explanation for the tort explosion don’t explain why we didn’t have a lawsuit-crazy country during the Great Depression.

The right, meanwhile, champions self-reliance, business success and the restraint of complaint, not greedy, whiny, state-power invoking lawsuits.