In the Tennessee Chamber and NFIB led push to ban lawsuit lending in Tennessee, debate occurring in the Tennessee on January 28th, a true to her principals free market republican said something profound:
“You know as law makers we can’t simply do [name of NFIB representative intentionally omitted] whatever it is that we want to do. I like to ask high school students can I ban the color purple. As a law maker can I do that? And they struggle with that unfortunately and eventually one of them always comes to it and they say, no you can’t and I say why? And they always – eventually someone comes to me and they say because of liberty. People have the right to live as they choose to a certain extent.”
Her clarity continued:
“Not one consumer has come to us as law makers to say, help protect me from this practice. We would have to have some sort of constitutional authority reason of, you know, life, safety or fraud to ban this practice, to out and out ban it. So your question to your [NFIB’s] members, you know you might have asked them should we ban traffic tickets, because they would probably say yes absolutely ban traffic tickets. That question isn’t really a fair question because there really has to be constitutional authority to out and out ban a practice of some sort of trade or business in Tennessee.”
I surprise myself to be praising a Republican, but this is one of the more refreshing things I have yet heard in the debate on the fate of legal funding. And even more interesting that most of her Republican colleagues are standing on the other side of a free market issue so that they can gain scoring points with the Tennessee NFIB, the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce. After all, this is an election year in the state house of Tennessee and donor politics trump this one Republican's philosophical stand more often than not.
Feel free to find safe regulations that allow a product to exist and give people the freedom of choice, but why ban a product only because big insurance companies like State Farm and Allstate, and business groups like NFIB, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce do not like the product.
Borders did not like Amazon, but stuff sometimes happens in the name of progress and innovation and the government should not be playing favorites when it comes to which business models prevail.