Offering someone a bad contract harms them. (By ‘bad contract’ I mean one that gives negative utility to the party that didn’t draft it.) Either they accept it without knowing it’s bad, in which case the bad terms harm them, or else they find out and reject it, in which case they’ve spent resources analyzing it for which they get nothing in return. And checking a contract for bad terms isn’t cheap; lawyers charge thousands of dollars for that service. Someone who goes around offering bad deals can still inflict massive damage even if none of his offers is accepted. No one has managed to come up with a “private means of protection” which is cheaper than a lawyer on retainer. I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want to be protected; rather, the problem is that most people can’t possibly afford any private protection.
Offering someone a bad contract harms them. (By ‘bad contract’ I mean one that gives negative utility to the party that didn’t draft it.) Either they accept it without knowing it’s bad, in which case the bad terms harm them, or else they find out and reject it, in which case they’ve spent resources analyzing it for which they get nothing in return. And checking a contract for bad terms isn’t cheap; lawyers charge thousands of dollars for that service. Someone who goes around offering bad deals can still inflict massive damage even if none of his offers is accepted. No one has managed to come up with a “private means of protection” which is cheaper than a lawyer on retainer. I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want to be protected; rather, the problem is that most people can’t possibly afford any private protection.