From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Fri Jul 05 2002 - 12:50:18 MDT
-->Harvey Newstrom
> I don't see how proponents of the free market can oppose labeling. It
> seems that open markets require informed consumers who know exactly what
> they are buying. Like open source, it lets the customer verify for
> themselves what they are getting. Like disclosure requirements in the
> stock market, it requires complete openness about what is going on. I
> don't see why we would want to use secrecy and misdirection to trick
> people into buying something they don't want. It seems dishonest and
> fraudulent to me to deliberately hide information from a buyer because
> one knows that they would turn down a deal if they knew the truth.
And who finances this costly process of coercively subsidising people who
are unwilling to invest their own time in checking products that they buy?
Let the market decide whether companies who label their product contents do
well. Let the market opportunity allow entrepreneurs who develop product
monitoring and rating companies make money for their investors. Just don't
create a huge tax-funded and unaccountable monstrosity to force people into
doing things that they don't want or need to do.
Why, oh, why, does everyone seem to think that it's ok to force a million
people to do something because a couple of guys want them to?
> Technotranscendence wrote,
> > The real problem here is requiring food labels is coercive. Eliminate
> > that. If consumers insist on knowing what's in the food, then, chances
> > are, they will provided with such information. However, having the
> > government call the tune is not freedom in action. Nor, given what we
> > know about politics and history, is it rational.
>
> I don't see forcing corporations to tell the truth about their products
> as being coercive. It seems that hiding the truth or misleading the
> customer into making choices they don't want is the coercive action.
How is this "forcing" not coercive? This is a ridiculous statement. Like
much of todays language, it seems to assume that the customer has no
responsibility or intelligence. No-one can make choices that they don't want
to make; they can make choices that they don't like, but by the very fact
that it's called a "choice" they made it of their own free will. If you
don't like a product, don't buy it. If the market is truly free and enough
people don't like the product, then someone will quickly come out with
products that address the consumer concerns because there is money to be
made.
A truly free market (unlike just about all of the markets we have today in
the US) is far, far more responsive to what people want than any form of
legislative governance.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
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