Isn't that how market economies are supposed to work?
By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
It's a small step from there, to outsourcing part of that to a middle men like Costco. Costco benefits from their reputation with customers they got from those efforts.
Similar for product reviews on independent websites or magazines or even on Amazon.
It's only in exceptional circumstances that 'consumer regulators' can not be private entities.
And much of the time, we get lots of government regulation that could be done by private entities just fine or better. But to be honest, lots of that regulation is still 'good enough', so it doesn't do that much harm. Two examples to illustrate:
Germans like to eat raw minced pork. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett So there are rules in Germany that all pork sold has to be save to eat raw. In most other countries, people don't share that peculiar preference, so the government regulations on pork are less strict.
I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging. (You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print list of ingredients.) By and large, German customers don't like palm oil in their chocolate. So German supermarkets mostly only carry 'proper' chocolate. So we private companies regulating the German chocolate market, to give consumers what they want.
By default, consumers are their own best regulator.
You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that
shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
This only really works if the product is cheap and most people can afford to try lots of competitors, or if the consumer is sufficiently knowledgeable.
It works pretty well for bread or chocolate: most people can afford to try different brands until they find one they like. No knowledge required.
It works less well for relatively expensive items like printers with relatively hidden pitfalls that require a some level of domain knowledge and research to comprehend before purchase. Most people can't buy a different printer every week until they find the one they like, and outside of the HN crowd many (most?) people don't have the domain knowledge to research a tech product properly.
Obviously third-party review sources (Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, whatever) can mitigate this somewhat but they are subject to their own biases.
The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you
can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly
declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging.
(You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print
list of ingredients.)
To me an ideal solution for printers or other cloud-dependent tech devices would be along these lines. I don't think HP's behavior should be outlawed, but there needs to be standardized messaging/warnings telling the consumer that:
1. the box contains a device that is nonfunctional unless consumers pay an ongoing subscription fee
2. what that fee is
3. a warning and the manufacturer can essentially brick the device at any time by intentionally discontinuing support or going out of business
Yeah. Excellent point. The free market hardliners' counterargument is that "well, it's not in companies' best financial interest to sell poisonous chocolate, so we can trust them not to do it to the best of their ability."
But that assumes consumers can tell when they're being poisoned. If a person drops dead immediately after eating a candy bar... sure, that's pretty obvious. But long-term harms can't be easily attributed to a single product.
The free market is a very very useful tool. So is government regulation. Both of them also are wholly inadequate on their own.
That's a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food'). But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is necessary nor useful.
Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal
and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food')
Please consider a more realistic example. We're not talking about taking a jar of rat poison and labeling it "chocolate" and the need to prevent this with a law.
Think of the more general cases of adulterated foods and/or foods with unacceptable levels of harmful chemicals whose like mercury, arsenic, etc. These are things that consumers cannot practically check for.
A reasonable free-market response might be that if consumers really think this is important, they will pay more for products that have been vetted by some trusted third party and therefore the government is not needed. There could even be multiple such third parties and consumers could vote with their wallets for the one(s) that they find best. This already exists in a sense in the form of organizations that certify food as halal, kosher, etc.
I don't totally disagree with this, but I think it is ripe for corruption and monopoly in ways that a well-functioning government is not.
But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is
necessary nor useful.
Nobody is claiming that all existing regulation is necessary or useful. That is not a good-faith interpretation of anything anybody is saying.
> This only really works if the product is cheap and most people can afford to try lots of competitors, or if the consumer is sufficiently knowledgeable.
It also only works if there are lots of competitors. With tech that is often not the case. You probably only have a handful of consumer printer manufacturers to choose from and if all of them decide to pull the same shit (because its more profitable) then you're SOL.
You’re literally arguing with someone advocating for consumers to be provided with enough information to be able to make decisions for themselves. They’re not saying they want the government to ban these practices, just to make them non-deceptive. Which is a role the government has performed successfully in the past: see the Pure Food and Drug Act.
> Governments are very good at making pronouncements but they are slow and often no more expert than the consumer. Consumers can correct their mistakes much faster than bureaucracies can.
Here in New Zealand we have some legislation called the consumer guarantees act. It’s gold, and has all sorts of gems. My favourite is that things I buy should last an amount of time commensurate with the price I paid.
For example, my iPhone was replaced at 3 years for a faulty home button and my Stihl saw had its motor replaced at 3 years. It’s amazing. I see the sort of warranties available in other countries and wince.
> The second example: thanks to harmonised EU rules you can put palm oil in your chocolate without loudly declaring it and still call it chocolate on the packaging. (You just have to mention the palm oil in the fine-print list of ingredients.) By and large, German customers don't like palm oil in their chocolate. So German supermarkets mostly only carry 'proper' chocolate. So we private companies regulating the German chocolate market, to give consumers what they want.
Except, Hershey has been using vegetable oils in Chocolate in the US, due to lower costs and lax regulation, for decades. It hasn't stopped them at all and is the primary reason the cheap commercial chocolates in the US "taste like vomit", to foreigners.
The vomit taste comes from butyric acid, I believe - which seems to be a breakdown product of milk:
The process is a company and trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed. This produces butyric acid, a compound found in substances such as Parmesan cheese which stabilizes the milk from further fermentation. This flavor gives the product a "tangy" taste that the US public has come to associate with the taste of chocolate …
My understanding was that butyric acid was a byproduct of the overall process. I am not an expert at all though, so thanks for the correction.
I think that just further reinforces the point though, that the market doesn't correct for a (generally regarded) subpar product, on its own. It requires external influence; whether it be regulatory, cultural, health-based, etc.
Americans prioritized the price over the accuracy of the product, and at this point the "vomit" flavor is what Americans prefer. Same deal with other foods full of oil like American cheese. Same thing with other artificial ingredients like gums (cream cheese, ice cream, etc.).
These foods are deeply ingrained with the culture now. It's much more complex than just having an opinion about how things are made and assuming that opinion is correct.
Just because a vocal minority complains about the quality of a product doesn't mean the majority agrees or stops buying it. People vote with their wallets.
This is just moving goalposts based on your weird biases. Even on an almost 1:1 comparison, you're handwaving away because "Americans just like shitty food".
OP claimed that the market would balance things out when given subpar foods. When Hershey first made these subpar chocolates the market didn't correct it, despite OP's claims. Just like how the market didn't correct meat glue use in Europe, until it was regulated out.
> OP claimed that the market would balance things out when given subpar foods.
No, I never claimed that. The claim that I wanted to make is the one that sublinear made: the market provides what the people care enough about that they are willing to pay for.
Eg Germany has good pork and decent chocolate in mainstream supermarkets. But the boil-in-bag rice those places sell would make your average Asian through up a little.
Consumer regulation does the least harm, when it is the least necessary: when the mainstream consumer already agrees with it, and when it's reasonably easy for knowledgeable people with different tastes to side-step.
Eg the German 'Reinheitsgebot' purity law has some strict rules about what you can put in your beer and still call it 'Bier'. But it doesn't actually restrict the knowledgeable consumer: your supplier can concoct whatever they feel like, they might just have to get creative with the name.
If Americans like 'shitty food', that's up to them. Who are we to judge them?
Your point might apply if Lindt, Ghirardelli and Guitard weren't the most popular chocolates after Hershey's; all considered pretty high quality. That's like saying "Germans like shitty meat because you can buy cheap, low-quality sausages at the corner store" (which I can attest to myself, anecdotally).
The point being, a lack of regulations allowed for low quality chocolates that are available and some people purchase. There's no reason to believe the same wouldn't happen in other countries; Germans, French, Japanese, etc aren't somehow more enlightened about food.
I never made a statement towards my personal preference for or against regulations, because it's moot to the topic.
I simply was countering the claim that regulations were unnecessary to block the production and sale of low-quality foods, based on cultural merits (or, in general).
If my personal opinion matters at all, I'm a hardline libertarian on any issues that directly affect (to avoid going down a conversational pigeonhole of obesity affecting the medical system, or otherwise) solely the individual.
Drug consumption, food, prostitution (e.g. a single person/entity choosing to sell their body/intimate services to another person/entity in a consensual and legally protected manner), personal data encryption, etc: zero regulations, beyond commercial ones forcing full disclosure by corporations ("our food was sprayed with these pesticides", etc)/the authority entity (full disclosure on STD testing by sex work provider and consumer).
Trafficking (including the less savory forms of sex work, such as pimping and brothel work that constitutes servitude/slavery), gun ownership/sales, drug sales, fraud, employer relations, tenant protections, etc: regulated (including banning, in many cases) in favor of the general public.
If someone is fully aware that Hershey's has butyric acid and vegetable oil in it, and still chooses to consume it; go for it. If Hershey's add a heavy carcinogen to their recipe which increases general risk for cancer, probably should regulate it. It's a muddy line, but it's like they say about porn: "you know it when you see it"; and one feels like a clear societal problem.
It's more like saying that Germans like shitty meat because the best selling kind was the cheap, low-quality sausages at the corner store. Your attestation is the cherry on top.
It's not the Hershey's chocolate bar that this impacts, and makes it taste of vomit, as already mentioned it's the soured milk that causes that. The extra vegetable oils impact the white chocolate more obviously.
Have you tried American white chocolate, like the white Kisses? Candles have more flavour.
My grandparents used to have a fruit bowl that looked extremely tempting. However there were not real fruit, and even though I was a child, that waxy tasteless mouthful of disappointment has never left me.
My MIL has white chocolate kisses (and those grim white chocolate mint ones) every Christmas, and they remind me of that same day if I ever feel like I might have been too hard on them and try one.
Candles might have dripped melted wax on some birthday cakes, in my past...
(( But even so, I can't say any kind of white chocolate tastes like or has less taste than candle wax. White chocolate has distinctive tastes...which I don't like, and stubbornly refuse to believe the tosh that it's chocolate. ))
I'm from the US and I've had this same thought about American chocolate tasting like vomit. I figured I was just overly sensitive to the taste, sort of like how coffee smells like skunk sometimes.
> In the Victorian era, alum was used along with other substances like plaster of Paris to adulterate certain food products, particularly bread. It was used to make lower-grade flour appear whiter, allowing the producers to spend less on whiter flour. Because it retains water, it would make the bread heavier, meaning that merchants could charge more for it in their shops. The amount of alum present in each loaf of bread could reach levels that would be toxic to humans and cause chronic diarrhea, which could lead to death in young children.[26]
> ... by the early 1800s, the practice of adulteration had become so common, nineteenth century people developed a taste for fraudulent substances in their food and drink and often did not realize anything was wrong with what they were ingesting until it was too late.
> [Bread adulteration] gradually came to an end with government action, such as the 1860 and 1899 Food Adulteration Acts in Britain.[29] America had a more difficult time ending these processes of adulteration, however, as various states had varying policies regarding bread making.
The customer isn't the regulator here though, Costco is, and Costco can only do so with market power.
People aren't picking Costco because Costco has the best printers, they're buying their printers at costco because they're already at Costco buying groceries and clothing.
It's the same thing with apple -- monopolizing power gives corporations regulatory power.
> normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy
Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
I know multiple people who buy electronics at Costco specifically because they know it’ll be a safe buy, a direct result of Costco pushing these kinds of requirements. Reputational value that the actual tech company itself has lost
Agree 100%. For example, in the UK they extend the manufacturer's warranty on TVs to five years and have a reputation for being very straightforward to deal with when things go wrong.
The last several monitors I’ve purchased have been from Costco and exclusive to Costco.
Same with Samsung TVs. Unfortunately Samsung’s smart TV stuff is worthless, but the panels have been just fine.
I abandoned HP’s trash products awhile back. I found that replacing my HP printers with Brother’s mid-range laser printers have been a fantastic upgrade for the price.
> People aren't picking Costco because Costco has the best printers, they're buying their printers at costco because they're already at Costco buying groceries and clothing.
You could say that about every individual item Costco sells: people don't go specifically to Costco to buy socks.
People don't go to Costco specifically to buy celery either. Etc.
> Take out one regulation, while leaving another overlapping regulation, and the regulation still works? This is switching the conversation to which regulations are the most effective, rather than saying that regulations are irrelevant.
Maybe. General regulations like 'no lying in ads' or 'contracts need to be honoured' are better than specific regulations like, 'bananas that bend more than 5cm are banned'.
I'd love if the market fixed all these product quality
issues, but it doesn't.
Yeah. Free markets only work when consumers are educated and sufficiently informed enough to make good decisions.
The problem is that a consumer relies on thousands of products a year and it is a practical impossibility to be educated in all domains of knowledge. You can't have deep knowledge of transport, healthcare, technology, food, and a thousand other things.
It's even crappier than that. There are loads of products that don't see the commercial light of day. Vested interests work very hard to suppress competitors before it even gets to the point where consumers have a meaningful choice. In other areas, gatekeepers (e.g. supermarkets) make decisions on behalf of the consumers, often actively suppressing information that might damage other product lines.
And yet, someone was arguing in a comment here that a focussed government body couldn't be better than the individual! I'm sure they wouldn't make the equivalent argument wrt code...
I feel like everybody understands this deep down inside, but free market fanatics have some major insecurity issues and are simply afraid to admit that maybe they can't be experts in literally every category of consumer product
Also they skipped history class and are unfamiliar with all of the toxic and disgusting shit companies used to adulterate their food and medicine with
If you think it's impossible or merely undesirable for a society to have experts in public employ working for the greater good then... okay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm certainly not going to change your ingrained beliefs. But hopefully you can learn to understand others' views. What I'm seeing is the typical tendency to misrepresent others' beliefs as some sort of all-encompassing faith in "bureaucrats." Wrong.
Markets are useful and proven tools. So are rules.
Trouble is that in many cases the food industry has rebased what was once the normal product as 'premium' and charges a higher price for it. A good example is bacon.
No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
On a side note, it irks me that a certain brand of mayonnaise (made by a global chemicals company), which calls itself 'real mayonnaise' lists its top two ingredients as vegetable (not olive) oil and water. Not exactly a classic start to how the original was made.
Check how many minutes the average worker had to labour in yesteryear to afford 100g of 'normal' bacon, and how long it takes today's workers to afford the same quantity of 'premium' bacon.
> No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.
This sounds quite plausible if you go by the wording on the package. But the design can be quite telling.
a lot of retailers have their own lists of demands.
walmart has had plenty of walmart-specific model numbers.
it typically leads to more confusion over what a customer is buying. the model number proliferation and the typical act of using the short form names leaves it feeling closer to gambling.
Because if the market had been providing them what they did want (clean meat of any kind) that act wouldn’t exist. Prior to that act the American people thought they were getting a clean product, a few journalists and a government investigation later it was concluded broadly that the meat packing industry was failing.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ended up being a major catalyst, there were a lot of claims by the meat industry that the book’s account was overblown, but as evidence piled up regulation was demanded.
Markets only work when everyone is forced to be on a level playing field. Sometimes you need regulation to provide some minimum proof of this, sometimes market players themselves find it desirable even, otherwise new market entrants can make a much much lower cost product that relies on market ignorance of what people are buying (so what if all the meat is packed by people on their death bed and sick… my margins are better).
I think you need to explain why in the United States chocolate is shitty and meat is toxic, as well as why Germany doesn't have regions with poisonous drinking water, nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.
American mainstream consumers have weird preferences, I would guess?
It's perfectly possible to buy decent chocolate in the US. Eg Lindt and Ritter Sport seem to be widely available. (They are far from the best chocolate, they are just decent-enough brands that I remembered at the top of my head, and could verify with a quick web search are available in the US.)
How toxic is that meat actually? What are your sources? How do you know it's more of a problem in the US than in Germany? (Americans like to complain about their products. But we get American beef here in Singapore, and it's generally ok. Typically not as good as the Japanese or even Australian stuff, but good enough.)
> [...] nor health clinics where you can simply declare yourself in need of large amounts of highly addictive opiate painkillers in order to receive a prescription.
The stories I heard are rather the opposite: the political and regulatory backlash against the alleged 'opioid epidemic' has been so bad, that it's hard for people who legitimately need painkillers to get a prescription.
I suspect the US is a big country, so both accusations can be true at the same time. Even if the problem is tiny in relative terms, because of the size of the country, in absolute terms you will find plenty of cases of both failure modes.
You seem very in denial about a lot of this. Obviously 'weird preferences' do not really explain these issues (I note you completely ignored the case of heavy metals in drinking water, hard to explain as a 'consumer preference' for cheaper but unusable water.) So you've chosen to pretend that well documented things do not exist or are trivial.. Libertarian Germans often have to tie themselves in knots to pretend that all the elements of their high-trust society would exist without paternalistic government, when it's enough to compare their society to most others in the world to establish the opposite!
What country does Ritter Sport come from? Is it considered luxury chocolate in that country?
The huge differences between husbandry and meatpacking standards in the United States and Western Europe are extremely well known. Most US meat products are not allowed to be imported to the EU because of this. I'm surprised you need a 'source' for this widely known fact pattern (which in fact, you yourself mentioned in your comment above - pork in the US can not be eaten rare). What US meat is exported is generally a completely different standard than what's sold domestically.
The ready availability and aggressive marketing of opiate painkillers in the US continued for around twenty years, many of it based in 'pain clinics' whose only service was writing scripts for pills. Such clinics do not exist in Western Europe. The govt cracked down on these at a point where addiction was endemic in some regions. The problem was demonstrably not 'tiny in relative terms'.
Lindt? There may be better brands, and I've actually seen someone gag on the 70% dark Lindt that I favour; but "far from the best" seems to me an idiosyncratic view.
I guess that still doesn't explain why consumer preferences need to be conveyed through a strongman like Costco?
Is Costco really doing anything other than selling the more expensive version which you could buy anyway?
If not it suggests Costco is acting as some kind of hired protection, which definitely doesn't sound like an optimal supply choice scenario in an ideal market.
They don’t need to, it just happens to be in the best interest of Costco, so Costco inserts itself.
People buy larger ticket items at Costco because they trust it to work, with a return policy that makes it a safe bet. So Costco needs to sell products that don’t get returned in order to make this strategy work.
They are creating a trusted environment where you can buy things that don’t suck. That has value. If it was the mafia they would require you to shop there.
Costco is also saving themselves money by making sure that people don't return HP printers because they don't work. When you have a known liberal return policy that is a feature of the membership, you have an incentive is to make sure that customers don't want to return those products.
So, I see it less as a trusted environment and more as a seller motivated to make sure returns don't hit their margins. A consumer-positive/trusted environment is still be a good thing for consumers, regardless of if the creation of that environment was motivated by the bottom line.
>By default, consumers are their own best regulator. You buy only the bread that tastes good, and that shoes that fit, so the market will provide, etc.
This theory only holds if the consumers are fully informed about their options in the market - which isn't the case, else everyone would buy their printers & TVs at Costco.
> So there are rules in Germany that all pork sold has to be save to eat raw.
Are you sure about that? Supermarkets do sell Mett and normal minced pork separately with the latter usually having an indication that it is only to be consumed cooked.
This would match the Wikipedia article you linked which mentions that
> Unless pre-packaged, the German Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production.
> I hold that even in the absence of specific regulation, the German market would provide Germans with pork that's safe to eat raw. Companies would just put a little sticker on their meat that tells you, that it's safe to eat (and normal existing rules about truth in advertising would make sure the sticker is trustworthy).
Yeah fuck that. Companies regularly make a mockery of any truth in advertising laws - something being proven misleading in court and something misleading actual customers are very different things. Food safety is not something you can leave up to for profit corporations.
>Isn't that how market economies are supposed to work?
Well people are supposed to be able to vote with their wallet, and reward businesses that supply what the customer wants.
This assumes perfect knowledge from the consumer though. And actionable signals.
The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
You could view your chocolate example the other way. If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it. 'ideally' there would be a palm oil alternative so that consumers have a choice. But this also highlights another shortcoming of the market economy. There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix.
I suppose you could argue that is why Germans don't want palm oil in their chocolate, but this isn't an outright ban, so palm oil could still pop up in other things.
> This assumes perfect knowledge from the consumer though.
Not at all. Imperfect knowledge is enough most of the time. Consumers will reward companies that are transparent and trustworthy over a long time.
> The question is, do consumers value a printer with a usb port, how much is it worth to them, do they have a choice in the matter?
Indeed, consumers have to make their own trade-offs about whether they value having a USB-port.
> If you do like palm oil in your chocolate, you don't have the option of buying it.
It's legal, and available, if you look for it. (Even before the rule change in Germany it was legal, you were just banned from calling the product 'chocolate'.)
> There are negative externalities to Palm oil production, externalities that the market seem incapable or unwilling to fix.
Since those negative exernalities are still around, you could equally blame the government or Santa Claus for not fixing them.
The 'market' does some of that fixing: customers who often pay a premium for 'ethically' sourced products that don't include palm oil. And there are producers who oblige them.
Most, but not all, of those externalities occur in the palm oil producing countries. It would make sense for the people most affected to eg vote to put taxes and subsidies in place to internalise those externalities. (Alas, many of those places also have corrupt and incompetent governments.)
This is a pretty wild omission of all of the food safety regulation out there. Regulation we got because the "let each consumer get sick enough to change their behavior" approach turned out to have some flaws that people did not like.
The bread that tastes good to most is the one that has shitloads of sugar added. Good for the company bad for people.
Salmonella only hurts a few people and not the company, and skimping on cleaning gives execs bigger bonuses. There's tons of regulations that are good and well intentioned.
Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
> The bread that tastes good to most is the one that has shitloads of sugar added. Good for the company bad for people.
In all the places I lived, you can buy different kinds of bread. My taste buds prefer bread without sugar added. (And that's also the most common kind in Germany, where I grew up.)
If you need a nanny that bans you from consuming sugary bread, please hire one.
(There might be some laws in Germany that ban you from calling stuff with too much sugar in it 'Brot', but you can still make it and sell it under a more creative name. So no regulation keeps this kind of product off the market in Germany.)
> Shit, even with your example of chocolate in the US capitalism got us shitty ass Hershey "chocolate". Why would that happen ya think?
The market provides what customers are willing to pay for. I don't know why mainstream Americans have weird taste in chocolate.
Germans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for. And Americans get the kind of chocolate they are willing to pay for.
As far as I can tell, it's perfectly legal to sell Hershey's in Germany. (You might just have to get creative with the name, I'm not sure.)
There's about as much 'capitalism' in German chocolate as in American chocolate.
Lest you think everything is great in Germany, they have their own weirdness. Eg in mainstream German supermarkets you can't find the quality of rice that would be acceptable in eg Singapore. You'd have to go out of your way to a specialist store and pay a premium.
It's perfectly legal in both Singapore and Germany to sell low quality rice. Mainstream Germans just don't care enough.
>If you need a nanny that bans you from consuming sugary bread, please hire one.
Reading through some of these comments makes me wonder why people still hold this sort of opinion. Companies are actively attempting to screw you over like hiding the functionality of a printer behind a sticker. It's active deception. Are we all to become experts in everything and join all the specialty forums? Where is the time to make an informed decision coming from? Do you think consumer protection agencies formed because consumers were being told all the relevant information to make an informed decision?
Why do you need that time? You just buy the printer that an expert you trust suggests to you.
That expert could be your knowledgeable friend, it could be a review in a blog or it could even be a retailer like Costco.
Having a reputation for recommending quality products is valuable. And if they screw up a few times, they can lose it quickly. So they are going to be careful and protect it. (Or rather, the retailers that keep their reputation are those who have been careful.)
LOL, most liberatrains are not even aware how deeply they depend on the "nanny". Starting with law enforcement and capturing those who counterfeit money.
Ahahahaha, 19th century banks had tiny circulation of their own Mickey Mouse notes, compare to global reach of the dollar. Now who would police the banks, lol who would arbitrary decline the notes in case of low liquidity?
You mean by far and away the cheapest possible chocolate and bread money can buy? The chocolate and bread the majority of us grew up with because it was cheaper than dirt and it was all we could afford?
Why do you think healthier options have been flooding shelves for 20 years now? We’re getting wealthier, and our standards are going up. Don’t make the mistake of mandating your standards onto others ‘for their own good’. Sometimes availability is the goal, not the quality of a good.
Or ignoring the cost of those standards, as measured by a corresponding reduction in goods produced proportional to the additional effort those standards require.
Consumers can only make a choice if there is a choice.
If nobody sells a TV that doesn't spy on you and play ads because of collusion, or simply because it's the single best profit optimizer, how do consumers regulate the market? The only option is for nobody to buy a TV ever again, which clearly won't happen.
Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
"The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
> If nobody sells a TV that doesn't spy on you and play ads because of collusion, or simply because it's the single best profit optimizer, how do consumers regulate the market? The only option is for nobody to buy a TV ever again, which clearly won't happen.
Someone can start a new TV producing company to break the collusion. Or even just make a clever router that filters out the spying.
> Capitalism requires external regulation, otherwise we get monopolies and collusion that remove choice so that consumers have no option other than to pay too much for something that doesn't work well enough.
Real world regulation is responsible for more monopolies and collusion than 'capitalism' ever was.
Yes, you can come up with some nirvana regulation that's perfect. Just like we can come up with some 'nirvana' scenario for the market that's perfect. That doesn't prove very much either way.
> "The market" isn't a fairy godmother with your best interests in mind. It's a senseless machine that can only optimize for more paperclips forever. It's fundamentally incapable of doing anything else without external input.
The market is consumers and producers interacting. They provide the 'external input'.
If consumers want paperclips and are willing to pay for them, that's what they get. If consumers want quality products, that's what they get.
There are better pain killers on the market these days, if you are looking for a 'perfect product'.
Btw, heroin partially became popular as a re-creational drug because smoking opium and pot was banned. Just like the American prohibition of alcohol led consumers to switch from beer to hard liquor, because less bulky drugs are easier to smuggle.
Thanks. That looks perhaps like an instance of what the grand-father comment described:
> I mean, it's on-brand; if the USA has bad things from too much privatization, it's poetic for the solution to be more privatization.
The municipality of Flint that's mentioned in the article still was in charge of providing water. They just outsourced parts of that duty. More privatisation might have helped. Who knows?
I think his point is that markets work through competition. If we have 10 different companies running pipes to every home in Flint, all run by separate companies, then we might be set. But with one, market mechanisms don't work, so a market fundamentalist ideology leads to bad outcomes.
Very approximately, Americans spends about 20% of their GDP on healthcare. Britain spends about 10%. Singapore spends about 5%. (Those numbers include both government spending, like on the NHS or US Medicare and private spending.)
The NHS looks good compared to the broken American system. But it's a spendthrift compared to Singapore.
Healthcare outcomes in Singapore are no worse than in the US or UK.
Costco has incredible leverage over their suppliers. I worked for a supplier previously and they forced changes to our packaging including labels, cases, and pallets to make things easier for them. I have no doubt that Costco could give HP or Sony an ultimatum like this to dictate functionality or just not carry their brand.
As far as I can tell it was always structured as a normal business, albeit one requiring an annual membership fee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costco
Does Costco do "business"? It buys merchandise from suppliers, sells to people. It's incorporated. Its shares are traded on the NASDAQ. Yes, evidently, it partakes in business.
Is it owned by the public (the state), or by private persons? Private persons.
Even if you somehow banded together all Costco members (i.e. people who paid membership fees to be able to ship there), you wouldn't be able to force the board of directors to resign (other than via boycotts etc.).
For a clearer example, Sam's Club has a similar membership, but that's well-known to be owned by Walmart…
And when there are real co-ops owned by customers around the world. Which require investments to get membership. And often you get that investment back if you leave.
