The situation is even more problematic when the injured parties are not in contractual privity with the wrongdoer. If a coal plant in Chicago causes $1,000 of health damage to each resident, that's a multi-billion wrong. But unlike with a bank, the residents can't simply decide to do business with a different company.
There's a lot of money to be made doing two things: 1) selling people more risk than they think you're selling them; 2) foisting risk and costs onto third parties that aren't in a contractual relationship with you. So long as you do these things to a large number of people with a relatively small dollar value for each injury, you'll make a lot of money at it, and the legal system isn't great at stopping such behavior.
Also litigation takes for ever. That is doubly true for billion dollar cases.
I'm working on a case with a billion dollar verdict. It's been 6 years and not a dime was paid. We are going back for a retrial. This thing won't be done for several more years at the earliest.
Even if courts did not exist, very few business would be that dumb to steal from their customers, because once details of it were known to the public, all rational customers would take their money out of the bank and it would eventually go out of business.
Information asymmetry isn't a theoretical construct--it's the basis of a lot of different ways to steal from people without their knowing.
One major problem is that it weakens the rule of law (something that most libertarians prize highly) when you throw so much into the courts. Nobody knows where they stand or what their liabilities are, which leads to paralysis.
I identify with libertarians, but I think it would be much better to come up with clear laws inidicating the costs of negative externalities, and then force various behaviors to pay for those costs in various ways to various people. Also, certain practices should be outright criminal, in the same way that vandalism is a crime.
I think things like cap-and-trade are ridiculous, for instance. But a straight tax on air pollution or drawing from the water table might be reasonable.
In fact, some of the worst polluters are nations where the state owns the majority of land and/or production like Soviet Union and China. I was both dumbfounded and sad to see the amount of trash in the Black Sea along the Russian coast that was dumped there or floated into it via the danube river during soviet rule.
It's especially sad to see this sort of thing happening in the United States, which is a relativity environmentally conscious country with large swaths of protected land. I wouldn't take it as far is the following article details, but some of the ideas here would be better than the current system: https://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Po...