L’etat c’est AG
Zurich American Insurance Company and a hodgepodge of AGs have reached a settlement. The AGs tacked on an extra $20M—11% of the $171.7M deal—in this nifty clause:
“the monies may be, at the sole discretion of the Settling Attorney General in each signatory state, applied for any of the following purposes: (i) payment of attorneys’ fees and costs, (ii) antitrust or consumer protection law enforcement, (iii) deposit into a state antitrust or consumer protection revolving fund or (iv) any other use in accordance with state law; provided further that the Settling Attorneys General shall be responsible for allocating the State Payment among the Settling Attorneys General and the Settling Insurance Regulators.”
Litigation fees, we can understand (the merits of the suit notwithstanding). But, items (ii), (iii), and (iv) look an awful lot like taxation: AGs funding themselves to do whatever AGs want to do; government by, for, and of government.
So the AGs gave themselves gas money for their free-wheeling litigulatory tour of national commerce. Good for them; we were starting to worry that we would run out of things to write about. We needn’t worry.
Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist has already kept the AG-wheeler truckin’ right on through the insurance interstate. He filed a suit against Marsh & McLennan, the world’s largest insurance broker. Marsh is somewhat blind-sided by this suit, because it already settled with another AG, New York’s Eliot Spitzer. Marsh forgot, it seems, that AG regulation of the national economy will not stop until each and every business in the country has been sued by—and settled with—each and every state in the union. No settlement is global enough, no payment high enough, for the one-way ratchet of state-by-state regulation.
We could all save a lot of time if we just gave AGs everything—cash, checks, homes, mutual funds, pants, fire hydrants, lawyers, guns, coffee mugs, matches, medicine, kitchen sinks, all fair and green things—right now.