There’s also something to be said for cleanly eliminating the windmill. Even if, in reality, there were extremely little abuse of the tort system, the fact that there is, without question, a serious incentive to try to abuse it (since an amount of money that will “sting” for a big corporation is almost guaranteed to be a massive windfall for an individual recipient) is almost certain to create a severe negative perception, which those who want to erode the legitimate right to sue will not hesitate to use politically. If it’s possible to clean up the image of tort law without hurting its purposes, even if this results in no substantial change to the actual movement of money, that’s a good thing.

About the neglectful state–this is a far broader issue than tort law, and I think a fundamentally orthogonal issue to it. We give the state all sorts of rights–to receive our taxes, to collect fines in criminal cases, to confiscate assets generated through criminal behavior, and so on, that allow it to receive money of which it is not always an ideal steward. Even if the state fails to adequately screen potential drivers, it collects the money from speeding tickets. Even if the largely state-run education system fails to instill decent critical-thinking skills, making the country easy pickings for con-men, the state gets to keep any money they confiscate that they can’t return to the rightful owners. The solution here is to improve the state–after all, in a democratic society, the state is the representative of us, appointed by us, and if they are too often inadequate representatives, perhaps we need to reconsider our hiring practices. What it doesn’t mean is that speeding tickets or unreturnable confiscated money should go to various individual citizens with no more right to it than anyone else or that separately-compensated plaintiffs should receive punative damages.