THE PREDATORS AMONG US

Part of our problem is that we don't control economic predators.

At the most primitive level of economics, families and small groups are co-operative and self sufficient. Men and women cooperate in a family because they need each other, men cooperate in hunting groups to kill big game and women cooperate in food gathering because a group is safe from predators.

In other economies women may tend gardens and men tend herds, but they still cooperate.

As they learn to make tools and implements the men and women who make the best products may make them for others. In the first stages of specialization their reward is prestige and they still hunt and gather their own food.

As society becomes more complex people who make one kind of goods trade with people who make another kind -- tools for clothing, for example -- but in a tribal society most of them will still hunt or gather their own food. Even if they could trade for food, hunting and gathering are social occasions and they would not want to be left out.

Author Jane Jacobs speculates on the next step in her book {The Economy of Cities} (Random House, Vintage Books, 1970). In a very credible scenario she describes how specialized artisans might settle at a convenient point -- near the source of their materials and often near a ford in a river through which most travelers have to pass -- and trade their wares to passing hunters for food, hides and other goods.

As more artisans settle at the same point they form a village with its own social life, no longer based on hunting and food gathering. Hunters and gatherers bring their produce to the village to trade for tools, pots or other made goods and the artisans give up hunting and gathering for their own use.

This begins the specialization that makes human culture so productive. For the first time we have one group of workers who don't have to find their own food, and another who don't have to make their own tools.

This stage of development also brings a quantum leap in technology because a specialist in a village can usually make better tools than a hunter in the hills. The critical point in the development of human technology may have been the invention of the polished stone axe, about 8,000 BC in Europe and earlier or later in other areas. The axe was so good that it has become the accepted marker of the "neolithic" or new stone age, as opposed to the "paleolithic" or old stone age.

The neolithic axe was man's first really good tool -- easily capable of cutting down trees to clear farmland or to build big buildings.

But while an average workman can make a chipped stone axe out of local stone it takes a very rare type of stone and a high degree of skill to make a good neolithic axe. Because of that most people had to get neolithic axes by trade. By the end of the neolithic age axes made of augite-granophyre stone from a mountain in North Wales were used throughout the lands that are now Belgium and Holland, axes made of obsidian from northern Hungary were used throughout most of Europe and axes made of a type of jade found on one mountain in the French Alps were used throughout southern France and most of Spain.

The neolithic axe created trade, trade created travel and travel created civilization.

There were no tourists in the days before trade, because there were no valid reasons to travel. Borders between territories were not marked but they were recognized and enforced.

A stranger found in another tribe's territory without good reason was assumed to be either an invader or a poacher, and dealt with accordingly.

Tribes did inter-marry and party together but people travelled only to weddings and other parties with a neighboring tribe. Most of the time people stayed in their own territory and minded their own business.

But when people don't travel, ideas don't travel. If a member of one tribe finds a new way to thatch his hut or to light a fire or trap an animal other members of his tribe will learn about it, but from there the idea will spread very slowly.

If members of another tribe visit to party once a year the idea can move to one other tribe in one year -- but it may well take another year to move to a third tribe.

Trade and travel change all that. Traders are allowed to travel because they have an obvious reason to travel, and most tribesmen will allow traders to pass because they know the traders, and because they themselves want the goods the traders carry.

In the few cases where traders were not allowed to pass it was because one tribe claimed the trade for itself, and would buy all the traders' goods and take them farther itself. Either way, the goods travelled.

And ideas travelled with them. An idea that travels from tribe to tribe at party time will move only a few miles a year, but an idea that moves with traders may move hundreds of miles a year. Only a few ideas are actually contained in the goods, of course, but traders carry the rest. Above all else traders are salesmen, and most salesmen talk to everyone they meet.

Probably because of the axes, trade and travel exploded in neolithic times. Archaeologists find amber from around the Baltic Sea in neolithic cave dwellings in Crete. Ornaments made from the shells of one particular type of mussel that is found only in the Black and Aegean seas were traded as far north as Poland.

Some of the best metal workers of the European bronze age lived in what is now Denmark, where they had to import both copper and tin. Metalsmiths in the first bronze age of ancient Greece imported tin from Turkey and later Greeks and Romans brought it from Cornwall.

In the Americas neolithic Indians in the city of Cahokia near the present site of St. Louis traded with both coasts of the U.S.A., with tribes in Canada and with the Aztec who lived in Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City.

The traders are a new economic group, of people who do not make anything themselves and who do not find or produce their own food. They perform a useful function but they live on the products of others and they can survive as an economic group only if others produce the goods they need to live, and to trade.

And trade also produced predatory economics. Primitive men may have fought over territory or food -- as monkeys and apes sometimes fight today -- but where there are no concentrations of wealth there is no strong motive for robbery.

Trade creates concentrations of wealth, and the goods carried by even a small trading caravan were worth a small fortune. The cargo carried by a single modern tractor-trailer truck may be worth millions of dollars, and truckers around the world have to keep a watch out for hijackers.

The first organized robbers were probably highwaymen who waylaid caravans and took the goods. In the early days it was probably not considered a crime to rob strangers but even if their tribes approved their raids, robbers would have worked outside their tribal territory.

Caravans will avoid routes and territory where caravans are robbed, so robbers must move around. That means they will have to work at least part of the time on other tribes' territory, where they will be seen as unwelcome poachers.

But there is another way. Robbers who take only a portion of the goods can call it a "toll" or "duty" or "protection". If one route is haunted by robbers and another is held by a robber baron who takes only some of their goods, traders will travel the route held by the robber baron. In fact the robbers who waylay caravans on one route may be the soldiers who guard them on the other, but that is not relevant. The soldiers are not allowed to rob people who have paid the toll and who remain within the protected area.

A robber baron lives better than a highwayman because the baron can build a fortress and hold land. Many of the castles along the Rhine river in Germany were built to enforce a local aristocrat's claim to a toll on goods passing through "his" lands.

As the robber barons gained power they attracted sycophants and other hangers-on who were not strong enough to be predators themselves, but who were willing to serve the predators in return for a share of the take. Together the robbers, robber barons, soldiers and hangers-on form a new economic group which is significantly different from the others. They are predators, and the people they rob are their prey.

Even the ones who pretend to be defenders are predators. An aristocrat may speak of "his" people and he may claim to protect them, but he also claims to own the deer in the forest and he will protect them from poachers. Robber barons and soldiers may protect their victims from other predators but their role is still predatory.

And by necessity, predators have different moral standards from others. Producers and traders depend on voluntary co-operation and repeat business, and if they are not trusted they can't stay in business. A predator's business depends on either deception or coercion, or both, and success is the only standard he can afford to recognize.

A lion does not give an antelope a sporting chance, and we don't expect robbers to play fair.

Like traders, robbers and soldiers do not make their own tools or provide their own food but there is another difference. When producers can't produce -- perhaps because of crop failures or other problems -- they don't have to deal with traders, and when their customers have no money traders can't sell their goods. In hard times the voluntary economy may slow down.

But robbers and robber barons take what they want whether their victims can afford to pay or not. If times are very hard the predators may suffer too, but as a general rule they will be well paid even when the producers and the traders are not. Because of this hard times encourage people to become predators, and predators make hard times harder for the producers and traders.

At this point we have three distinct economic groups.

The first are the people who produce the goods. They include the hunters and the gatherers and the artisans who make axes and other tools, and in more developed cultures they will include the herdsmen and the farmers and the man who makes the micro-chip for your computer.

They are the foundation of the economy and their products are the wealth we all share. If they don't produce, we have no wealth to share.

The second group are the traders and they perform a valuable function but they do not produce their own food, clothing, shelter or other goods. Because they do not produce goods themselves they are totally dependent on the producers, and they could not live without them. On the other hand the service some traders perform is vital, and producers without traders would live a primitive and restricted life. Even though the trader does not produce anything himself his service adds more to the quality of life in his community than it costs to maintain him.

The third group are the predators, both the robbers and the mercenaries who protect us from them. Like the traders they do not produce the goods they need, and they are totally dependent on the producers and the traders. They may also perform a service but, no matter how useful the service, predators are always an economic cost to the community they live in.

The soldier who defends a town earns his pay, but he is still a cost the town would not have to bear if there were no soldiers or robbers.

Within all three economic groups we have several classes of people. Among producers, for example, we would have to include Henry Ford and the village blacksmith and the semi-retired pensioner who sweeps a Ford factory. They all play a part in the production of goods, and they must all be classed as producers.

Timothy Eaton was a trader but so is the clerk who works in an Eaton store, and the man who sells peanuts or popcorn on the sidewalk outside the Eaton Center in Toronto. The scale is different, but the function is the same.

A robber baron is a predator, and so is a mugger who works in a back alley. Some members of the robber baron's household, like the clerk who keeps his records or the steward who manages his house, may not work directly as predators but -- like the pensioner who sweeps a Ford machine shop -- they must be considered part of the organization they serve.

And the same person may move from group to group or be a member of two or even all three groups at once. A soldier can own a farm or a farmer serve as a soldier, and either way he could sell his own produce -- but we're not talking about individuals here. We are talking about social/economic functions, and the soldier who owns his own farm and sells his own produce just happens to fill three roles.

When a robber baron hits the big time he may become an emperor, and rob and plunder whole countries. Imperial centers were the first large economies which were not self-sustaining, and in some cases they may have had to conquer other people because they were not self sustaining.

Empires try to control predation within their own boundaries but they may sponsor predation against outsiders. As a "privateer", or licensed pirate, Henry Morgan had the approval of the British crown when he sacked towns along the coasts of Venezuela and Panama in 1668 and '69.

England happened to be at peace with Spain when Morgan sacked and burned Panama City in 1670 and he was arrested for the crime, but the arrest was a diplomatic sham. After his trial in London Morgan was knighted by Charles II and appointed governor of Jamaica.

Piracy is illegal now but other forms of "predatory" economics, in which the actor takes profit for himself at the cost of others, continue. The techniques are different but the similarity is recognized in the popular terminology that sometimes describes a speculator or a corporate raider as a "pirate".

The main difference between old-time piracy and modern financial manipulation is that piracy used to be sanctioned by a king or a government only if it was practiced against citizens of another country. Pirates were not allowed to prey on their own countrymen, and many of them worked for the welfare of their own nations. That's why Sir Henry Morgan and other pirates were knighted.

But most speculators and other financial manipulators prey on their own countrymen, and they are in fact enemies of their own people. Governments don't interfere partly because governments are themselves predatory, and financial predators are supported by banks and other financial institutions which make a profit by their operations. By extension the banks and other financial institutions thus become the enemies of most of the people they pretend to serve.

Legitimate trade is a win-win transaction because both sides gain from it. Like other forms of predation, speculation and financial manipulation are win-lose transactions. When a speculator wins, somebody has to lose.

More than 20 years ago a new copper mine was opened near Kamloops, BC, then a city of about 50,000 people. While the mine was being developed a friend of mine sold his house in Kamloops for about $15,000. Before he moved it had already been re-sold for a profit of nearly $10,000.

A speculator from Calgary had come to town and put down payments on nearly every house that was for sale -- including my friend's.

With the mine opening people needed houses, and the speculator ran the prices up to suit himself. He made about $100,000 profit -- ten years' income for a middle-class man, in those days -- for an investment of less than $100,000 for about a month.

The speculation was legal but it was a crime against the economy because the $100,000 did not represent production. In fact the speculator may do more harm than -- for example -- a burglar because if a burglar steals your property you will work to replace it, and the money still represents material goods.

The $100,000 this speculator got represents nothing, but the money had to come from somewhere. Because there were no goods produced it had to come either from the savings of others or from a overall devaluation of the whole country's money supply.

In fact it came from both. People who bought houses had to pay more for them, and because prices rose the value of all our money dropped.

But in spite of that, we act as though speculators are respectable members of society. Economist John Maynard Keynes himself made a fortune by speculation in the futures market, but he either didn't know or didn't care about what it did to the economy.

The stock market is essentially neutral but it encourages predatory activity. Governments and media seem to think the stock market is a real part of the economy -- the media devotes more ink and air time to the doings of the stock market than to real business -- but in fact the market probably does more harm than good.

First the obvious. Companies need money to go into business and they may need more money to expand. People want to invest their money, and the stock market gives them a place to do it.

Then something that should be just as obvious. The stock market does not help start-ups or small companies. People who actually start companies get their money from savings, or by borrowing. When a company is doing very well it may "go public" on the stock market to raise money for expansion, but honest development of that type represents a very small share of the stock market's business.

Almost all of the action on the stock market is the buying and selling of established stocks, for profit or loss. People who play the stock market may be gamblers or they may have inside knowledge or they may be manipulators, actually making the value of stocks rise and fall. Either way, they harm the economy in several ways.

One problem is that the stock market helps only big companies. There is an obvious need for a mechanism that would help inventors and small businessmen raise money to develop new ideas, but the stock market won't help them. Instead it helps promoters who raise money to buy and destroy small business, and large manufacturers who need cash to automate and get rid of their employees.

That's bad because in most cases the small company or the start-up is the better investment. There is more risk but the fact is that a small company may double its value in a couple of years, and a big one will probably not.

It's easy to double $1,000, and not very hard to double $1 million. It's hard to double $1 billion, and virtually impossible to double $1 trillion in a short time.

Studies show that small companies make more jobs per dollar of investment than big companies, they make more technical progress, and they are more likely to be open to innovative ideas.

But one thing they can't do is get help through the stock market. In fact the stock market makes it harder for small business to get started.

Because the stock market exists and because it's the accepted vehicle for investment, most investors put their money into it. Because most investors put their money into the stock market, small companies and start-ups find it harder to raise capital.

"Venture capitalists" and banks may offer to back small business but the offer is often a hollow one. The managers who run these companies will bet only on a sure thing, and it may be sure because it contains no new ideas. Any half-decent businessman who can raise a small down payment and get a franchise for a big-name hamburger stand can get backing from a bank, but the genius with the new idea will not

I remember the news about the arrival of one of the major hamburger chains in Canada, about 20 years ago. A company that was already big got a $500 million line of credit to open a chain of restaurants based on an American franchise. The newspapers thought that was good news, but I had questions.

One was the thought that if I had $500 million to work with -- worth more than $1 billion today -- I think I might be able to develop my own recipe for a hamburger. One advantage would be that if the recipe was Canadian, the profits could stay in Canada. Because the big company chose to buy an American franchise, they have to send a share of their profits to the States.

The other problem with that deal is that it establishes another chain of me-too American spin-offs in Canada, and makes it harder for any Canadian who wants to open a Canadian restaurant. The big company that bought the franchise and the bank that backed it made a profit, but the Canadian economy lost.

Another problem with the investment economy is that many investors look for short-term profits, and they encourage management to work for short-term profits rather than long-term value. It's not impossible to get both but it is unlikely, and hot-shot "turn-around experts who move from company to company know they can produce better short-term profits if they skimp on long-term plans.

The easy way to produce fast profits is to gut the company and destroy its long-term viability. If you shut down research and development, cut back on customer service and use cheaper materials the profits go up for a while. The company itself will go down in a few years but that's no problem to a corporate rapist who plans to move on to another company before the results of his work show.

In a world in which speculators and profiteers are seen as respectable citizens, rapacity is seen as good business practice.

Investors don't mind because money is mobile. When a corporate rape-artist moves in the profits go up, for a while, and the price of the stock goes up with them. When the rape-artist moves on the investors know it's time to sell, and leave the suckers holding the empty shell of what was once a solid and profitable company.

The stock market also financed and made possible the binge of take-overs and conglomerate formation that debased much of the Canadian business establishment in the 1970's. The theory then was that some kind of "synergy" would make a combination of companies more profitable than the same companies run as separate operations.

But in many cases it created monsters that exist only to make money. If you believe in Marshall's economics making money is itself a noble function, but in a working economy it should be only a side issue. A company has to make money to keep working but the money should be a means to an end, and not the end itself.

Let's consider the case of the West Wombat Widget Works, established in 1886 by William Wigglewoggle and controlled by his family until a few years ago.

Wigglewoggle had two passions in life -- his love of widgets and his love of the town of West Wombat -- and he passed them both on to his sons. West Wombat Widget Works was not the most profitable company in Canada but it was healthy, it made the best quality widgets in the world, it paid good wages to its employees and it was a good corporate citizen of the town, the county and the province.

Wigglewoggle owned the whole company, when he set it up but later he gave a ten per-cent interest to the employees pension fund. Over the years employees and their pension fund were allowed to buy more shares and when Wigglewoggle died he left one third of his holding to each of his two sons, and one third to the pension fund.

About the time that Wigglewoggle began making widgets Seymour Scrimp began work for his father's grocery store. He helped turn the Scrimp and Save Mart into a major regional grocery chain and his son Sebastian took the company public and built it into the conglomerate we know as Brontosaurus Corp.

Sebastian Scrimp knows that WWWW stock is under-valued, partly because the company devotes a large share of the profits to civic projects. With backing from the bank that William Wigglewoggle helped establish Scrimp offers the management company that runs the WWWW employees pension plan a high price for the plan's shares in the company, and leverages his edge into a hostile takeover.

Scrimp knows that West Wombat is a fine place to live and that the Widget Works is a great place to work and he would like to maintain both, but he also knows that he doesn't really run Brontosaurus Corp. It runs him, and sometimes he doesn't like the direction it takes him.

As chairman of Brontosaurus Scrimp is responsible for billions of dollars invested by millions of private citizens and thousands of pension funds, mutual funds and other money managers. It's his job to make money for them -- either by making so much profit that Brontosaurus can pay good dividends, or by increasing the value of the stock.

In Wigglewoggle's day the WWWW was a family company and the family could make decisions on a human level. If it had some property it was not using and the town needed a park, the company could give the land away. If a new technology could replace a dozen employees but they were people Wigglewoggle had known all his life, he could delay the change-over until after his old scoutmaster had retired and he could find work for the others.

But Scrimp has no choice. He is responsible to his stock-holders, not to the citizens of West Wombat or the employees of the Widget Works, and his stockholders are interested only in profits. Most of them don't even know that West Wombat exists.

But they do know that wages are lower in the third-word country of Bingabang, and that people there can make Widgets too. Three years after Brontosaurus takes over WWWW the plant in West Wombat is shut down and the WWWW trademark shows up on a new line of widgets imported from Bingabang.

Everybody should be happy because WWWW now shows a higher profit and pays higher dividends than ever before, but somehow the former employees and the people of West Wombat don't share the joy.

That's an extreme case, of course, but it's not an outlandish one. The companies most liable to takeover are those with the best names -- earned by quality goods -- and low profits which may be the result of high wages in the plant, low prices in the market or good works for the town. In other words the companies most vulnerable to takeover are the companies that are now doing the most they can for their customers, their employees and their towns.

Even if a conglomerate has good intentions, the chances are that it cannot run the small company as efficiently as local management can.

A small widget company is liable to be run by people who know how to make and sell widgets, and who devote their whole attention to the job of making and selling widgets. That's all they do now and all they plan to do in the future. If manufacturing methods or the market is about to change, the local management will probably foresee the change and they will react to it if they can.

The management of a conglomerate just wants to get the most profit possible out of their new company and they may not know or care how to make or sell widgets. If manufacturing methods or the market are about the change, management of the conglomerate may not see it coming. If they do see it coming they will choose an option that will maximize profits for the conglomerate, which could mean running the widget company into the ground and selling it just before it collapses completely.

That might make the most possible gains for the stockholders but the widget company and its employees, the residents of the town and the Canadian economy as a whole will lose.

Conglomerates are no longer as fashionable as they once were but for the past few years we've had a big rush on mutual funds, as people realize that they will have to provide for their own retirement.

On the surface a mutual fund sounds like a good idea, but in fact it may be the final death blow to a dying economy.

The idea sounds good because investors who also work for a living have no time to watch the market carefully, or to develop the expertise it would take to choose the right investments. It makes good sense for a group of investors to band together and hire a manager to watch the markets for them.

But modern mutual funds are highly competitive multi-billion dollar businesses, and the only standard they have for success is to get the highest possible return on their money. Because money is mobile, they are interested only in the short term.

Because they control huge amounts of money the mutual funds have enormous economic power, and because the funds have no standard other than money they are tempted to abuse that power.

The manager of a mutual fund is judged by how well his fund performs. That means he must buy stocks that will rise but, since he can also sell those stocks, he has no stake in the long-term health of the companies he buys into.

The perfect scenario for the mutual fund manager is to buy into a company just before a corporate rape-artist takes over, and sell just before he leaves. If he serves his own and his clients' best interest, the mutual fund manager is a predator preying on the economy and an enemy of society.

Another problem with the stock market is that most of the money gained or lost on stocks does not represent real wealth. When stocks go up the dollar value of the paper increases but there is no increase in real wealth, and the increased price does not represent real value.

Stock market profits are a form of {imagined} money. {Imagined} money is valid if it is used to produce new capital goods but if used in any other way it will cause inflation. Most of the people who make their living in the stock market do not use their profits to create new capital goods.

Even if the stock market did no real harm it would be a problem because the big profits it offers lure thousands of capable men and women into useless work. People who could do something useful trade stocks instead, and why not? The market offers more money for less work than any useful occupation, and as long as the market is considered respectable we can't blame people for working in it.

In a more rational world the stock market would exist only as a vehicle to serve honest investors. Speculation would not be illegal but a speculator would not be considered a respectable citizen and his profits would be subject to heavy taxation.

Among the most numerous modern predators are lawyers. Like the robber barons of old some of them set up shop on the highways of commerce and collect tribute from all who do business. As in earlier times if you refuse tribute you risk attack and robbery by another lawyer, or by your own lawyer now working for someone else.

Other lawyers operate like highwaymen, using the courts as weapons of robbery. When a friend of mine rear-ended another car on the Don Valley Parkway a few years ago there was no damage to either car, and no-one was hurt. My friend and the other driver agreed that nothing had happened.

But it seems the other driver had second thoughts because my friend later learned that her insurance company paid more than $40,000 in damages for that accident. Her agent explained that even though there may have been no actual damages the plaintiffs were represented by a lawyer who specializes in suing insurance companies. The insurance industry has learned from sad experience that it's cheaper to pay off even an obviously fabricated lawsuit than to fight it.

It's even possible that the people who collected "damages" from my friends' "accident" were not involved. The New York Transit Authority often finds that when a bus is involved in an accident the claims may out-number the seating capacity of the bus.

People who see or hear about the accident may say they were on the bus and register claims. In one famous case 32 people registered claims after one accident in which the bus involved was on its way to the barn and carried no passengers.

So-called "honest" lawyers may deplore frauds but they profit too, because honest people have to hire a defense against frauds. As in the old days, the man who defends you against a robber may in fact be the robber in a different guise.

Predatory lawyers and phony lawsuits can even destroy big companies. In the spring of 1995 American lawyers forced the multi-billion-dollar Dow Corning company into bankruptcy. About one percent of Dow Corning's total business was the production of about 750,000 jelly-like breast implants for women who had lost a breast to disease or who just wanted to look better.

But in January of 1992 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration imposed a moratorium on the use of the implants. Lawyers across the country smelled blood, and some advertised in local newspapers to find women who had implants and who might be persuaded to file claims against Dow Corning.

The company was not worried because it carried more than $250 million insurance, but hundreds of thousands of women filed claims saying the silicone breast implants caused illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis and auto immune disease.

In fact tests by the Mayo Clinic and other reliable medical facilities found that women with breast implants have the same incidence of diseases as women without implants. With 750,000 implants in use that means a lot of women with implants have a variety of diseases, and lawyers encouraged any woman with an implant and a disease to blame the disease on the implant.

And the truth is no defense against lawyers. It would have been so expensive to fight the cases that Dow Corning offered a "global" settlement of $105,000 to $1.4 million to each claimant, depending on her health and age.

That would have cost the company more than $4 billion but it would have limited the lawyers' take and many of them urged women to continue their lawsuits. One Houston lawyer pursued more than 1,000 settlements outside the global settlement.

In May of 1995, after a federal judge said the $4.2 billion that Dow Corning had committed to settle the claims would not be enough, the company filed for voluntary bankruptcy.

The breast implants were a tiny part of the business and the company offered them only as a public service. Nobody ever proved that any of the implants harmed anyone but a business worth billions of dollars was destroyed. The lawyers who did the damage made millions, and their gains are recorded as a contribution to the U.S. gross national product.

In 1997 some lawyers attacked the multi-billion dollar Dow Chemical Corp., on the grounds that it owned part of Dow Corning. It's hard to imagine that they could do serious harm to Dow Chemical but it was hard to imagine that they could ever hurt Dow Corning. All we know for sure is that they can do millions or billions of dollars damage to the American economy, they will probably make millions for themselves, and that their work will show as a gain to the gross national product of the United States.

Some lawyers pretend to be white knights who protect the defenseless, but many court cases work out better for the lawyers than for the people they pretend to represent.

In January of 1993 ABC Television's 20/20 public affairs show tracked some of the lawsuits that destroyed the multi billion dollar Johns Manville Corp. and six other companies that produced asbestos or products that included asbestos.

The case is not a parallel to the Dow case because there is solid evidence that asbestos does cause health problems, and evidence that some companies continued to use asbestos after they knew of the problems.

The asbestos companies paid millions for their mistake but most of the money was collected by lawyers. Most of the 500,000 people who sued for damages got only a few thousand dollars each, but the lawyers who orchestrated the lawsuits got millions.

And some innocent companies were destroyed. Keene Corp has more than 4,000 employees making hundreds of assorted products but it made the mistake of buying a small company that had once made asbestos ceiling tiles.

The company cost $8 million to buy and the litigation over a product it did not even make when Keene bought the company cost more than $530 million. Plaintiffs got about $210 million of the settlement, and lawyers collected about $350 million.

Lawyers do well out of lawsuits but the rest of us pay. In an ABC news special "The Trouble With Lawyers" first broadcast Jan 2 of 1996, reporter John Stossel says that several American lawyers make more than $10 million a year and the best-paid lawyer in the US received more than $90 million in fees in 1996.

That's good business for the lawyers but it's hard on their victims and -- one way or another -- we are all their victims. Lawsuits for "slip and fall" accidents cost the city of New York about $200 million a year, and Stossel says the cost of lawsuits and insurance add $100 to the price of the average football helmet, $500 to the price of a car and about $3,000 to the price of heart pacemaker.

Every economy has some predators and some are useful. A healthy economy can afford the useful predators and even a few that are not, but every economy has a limit because predators live on their prey. When there are too many predators the prey will be wiped out and the predators will starve.

Over the past 40 years we have seen a rapid growth in the number of predators in the Canadian economy, and a decrease in the number of the producers who support us all.

We have survived the increase in predators because we started with a rich country, but the balance has been destroyed. Our economy is failing now, and unless the balance between predators and prey can be re-established, there is no hope for it.

We control physical predators. If a mugger robs someone in a back alley, if a burglar robs a house or a gunman holds up a bank, we demand that the police hunt him down.

Unfortunately we don't even try to control financial predators. We have some laws to protect one speculator from another but no laws to protect a victim from a speculator. The general public has very little protection from predatory lawyers, and our laws make virtually no attempt to protect our economy from the stock market gamblers who can destroy it. Such laws would be difficult to write and to enforce, but survival demands that we try.

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