Free Market Regulation

One of the progressive arguments for big government is “the market can’t regulate itself”. The very nature of this statement calls to mind a single entity “the market” which becomes a single big company, regulating itself and doing so poorly. Naturally, companies have many incentives to tightly control the quality of their products and avoid acute injury to their customers, but I am thankful to the many other market forces that provide external regulation.

Here’s a great example of that market force called the free press-and I mean FoodBabe.com Blogger Vani Hari, not USAToday-doing their job and providing external regulation that the government has failed to provide. The best quote (emphasis mine):

Hari says she’s not asking beer makers to change their formulas — or their labels. “I’m not asking for government involvement,” she says. “I’m asking for voluntary disclosure on their websites.

The great news is that the Internet has lowered the cost of organizing large numbers of consumers who can give this feedback to companies, so an initiative like this has a good chance of succeeding-all without the state. The progressives like to pretend that “the market” doesn’t include all the information and tools available to consumers from consumer advocates, review and rating systems, the retailers who distribute products, insurance companies, and all of a given company’s competition, when in fact “the market” is really society as defined by pretty much everyone besides the state apparatus.

Post this on your progressive friends’ Facebook pages, and invite them to respond using the computing, telecommunications, and electrical systems and equipment that are almost entirely certified and regulated by that free-market friend of the consumer, UL.

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6:33 pm on June 12, 2014