misery loves companies

I just stumbled across the Mises Economics Blog (scion of the Mises Institute, a bulwark of Austrian Economics) and discovered a post with an interesting twist on Loser Pays.   Contributor Skip Oliva of Citizens for Voluntary Trade, has -- to my knowledge -- never met an antitrust case or regulation he liked.  Oliva's fix for what he feels are overzealous or incompetent government prosecutors is this Proposal for Meaningful Legal Reform:

"In all the public discussion of tort reform, I have yet to see any proposals dealing with the costs unjustly imposed on businesses by regulators who bring cases that ultimately fail. Sometimes businesses can recover legal fees from the government, but this wrongly burdens taxpayers for the incompetence of state lawyers.

"One reform, then, would be to eliminate the state-action immunity that prosecutors generally enjoy when exercising state power. If a prosecutor brings a case and loses, he should be personally liable for the defendant’s costs. Defendants would have the right to attach a lien to the lawyer’s current assets and any future income earned, meaning that lawyers who cash-in on their state work would have to bear the stigma of their prior failures."  (emphasis added)

I wonder what FedLawyerGuy thinks of this proposal?   In another recent post, Oliva opined that the FTC "often adopts policies designed to expand the potential earning power of senior FTC lawyers" and "deliberately adopts vague policies to entrap innocent businesses, who are then forced to settle false FTC complaints lest they face costly administrative litigation." 

I only spent a decade at the FTC, so maybe I missed out on the scullduggery, but I can assure you that I didn't get rich once I moved on.  One thing for sure: If Oliva's "meaningful legal reform" ever gets enacted, there will be quite a few vacancies among the Commission's attorney staff.