Out of Egypt:

a question for all libertarians

How do you plan to protect the rights of the consumer in a world of imperfect information?

What "rights" are we talking about here?

Posted by: Amir Larijani at June 21, 2008 6:42 PM

Well, to be more specific, I'm talking about how at point in time food companies could put anything in their products that they wanted, and consumers would rarely be any the wiser. But then after exposés like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the government started regulating the industry. Now we have institutions like the Food & Drug Administration to check on our food products in ways which we couldn't easily do ourselves.

Regulation is not good in itself. However, it can prevent some abuses which it would be difficult for the market to correct on its own.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at June 21, 2008 7:38 PM

Evan, are you wondering, in general, where to draw the line between regulation and impeding personal choice? Or are there specific Constitutional rights that you have questions about?

Posted by: Carrie at June 21, 2008 8:16 PM

I'm not talking about rights in any specific legal sense. I'm just wondering how libertarians, Mises fans especially, expect an unregulated market to keep companies from taking advantage of consumers.

Specifically, I was thinking about this video - The World According to Monsanto - about how the giant agribusiness firm (creator of PCBs, Agent Orange, and Bovine Growth Hormone) is trying to introduce more genetically modified crops into the market, with consequences that cannot yet be determined. Unless regulators require soybean growers or milk producers to label their products which have been made with GMO biotechnology, consumers would have no way of knowing. How would Austrian economics fans counter that - with some kind of super-consumer who finds out the facts behind everything so the rest of us don't have to?

Posted by: Evan Donovan at June 21, 2008 9:41 PM

I posted a lengthy reply that got eaten. Anyway, see (at least part of) The World According to Monsanto, a documentary about one of the largest agribusiness firms and their various machinations to get dangerous genetically-modified organisms on the market. Without regulation, how would consumers be protected from such things? We can't be expected to know where all the milk we drink or soybeans we eat come from.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at June 21, 2008 9:44 PM

Guess it didn't getting eaten after all...

The new MT is weird. Anyway hope that clarifies things for you.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at June 21, 2008 10:00 PM