Bad idea. The market is supposed to process information for us. Consumers are just individuals who know what they need and what they want, but not much else. The market (if we are to believe the hype) can process enough information to make selfish actors in aggregate cooperate. So why not let the market solve it?

Consumer-responsibility is pure propaganda: in the same way “we” (collectively) drop plastic into the middle of the ocean, “we” (chiefly the corporations and their marketing departments) drop the symbolic responsibility on consumers.

They are not born by me, as I personally have a very low influence on the market. Market is dictated by the masses, and masses are manipulated (nudged) by media, which is again controlled by the corporations.

Your argument of blaming individuals for bad choices masses make is deeply flawed and skewed in favor of corporations.

This is actually not true. As a consumer my choices are constrained by retailers and suppliers (and government due to regulations). They choose based on price what to offer. If all retailers in my area don't want to supply organic food, I can't buy it.

So I have limited power to alter the market. For extremely bad options, there's the choice not to buy, but for necessities, that option is precluded.

Which is why a healthcare "free market" (hint: it's anything but free right now) is a chimera: when you or your family is dying or suffering, you are willing to pay "value based pricing".

The real solution is to delink the "global" supply chain and build up local options. Resilience also increases jobs and tax base, but reduces megacorp profits. Since we actually live in an oligarchy, profits are all that are chased.

I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism.

free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses

There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. If anything, caveat emptor. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them.

That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why The Fountainhead is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse.

Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing.

The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.

Any free market purist will tell you that all transactions must be both mutually consenting and informed. If these conditions are not met, it is the governments job to step in.

I never claimed to be a perfectly rational market player engaging in a fully voluntary exchange of goods. Any human claiming to be fully rational lacks a healthy amount of introspection, and we're almost all faced with the prospect of starving if we don't partake in the exchange of goods. I want choice despite these shortcomings, and I don't have any desire to deprive others of choice if they're less rational or more desperate during their decision making processes.

>History teaches us that if the market can get away with unsafe goods, not only it will, but those goods will become the only thing available to people without lots of discretionary income (i.e. most of the population).

If those goods are banned, the alternatives will cost more. Who am I to tell somebody who can't afford a car with airbags that they shouldn't have the option to buy a car without airbags? You rightly point out the wretched state of the world with dispossessed masses of people, but then you deny those dispossessed masses the ability to make their own decisions about what to do with those few possessions they do have.

Edit:

> I might not like you telling me which tradeoffs to take, but I would appreciate if you were able to take some of the things forced on me and turn them around, or at least back into real tradeoffs.

Cost saving quality cuts are a real tradeoff -- they make goods and services available to those who would otherwise not be able to afford them.

It's interesting that most people who like to defend the free market act as if consumers actually have choices most of the time.

That's just simply not the case nearly all the time.. or it's a complete illusion of choice.

Especially in any rural/smaller suburban area (of which the US predominantly is). It's not as if you have 1000 choices for everything around. That's only in large urban areas. The US is so spread out that it can't cram tons of competition in most of it's areas. And that is probably what is being exploited here.

I agree, but there's no underlying constant that humans act rationally or in their own best interest. I don't think the market can protect rights, period. And putting a price on them marginalizes the poor even more.

Right, and it delivers that by pushing costs onto the greater proportion of people who are not involved. That is neither ethical nor sustainable -- it's more like a kind of theft.

What you are citing is a clear example of how the "free market" can fail to operate in the best interests of society.

Producers have responsibility as well. Government should enforce such laws and consumers, in an idealistic sense, should be able to choose products and services that don't require slavery. Meanwhile, pretending that as a producer or supplier, I have no power or choice in the selection of labor is a farce at best. Every participant in a given market has some degree of responsibility.

The market itself is a system of policies, regulations, actions, and so on contributed to not solely by government or its constituents but also by private entities that have financial influence in policy making, often more than the people we're looking at in the mirror. Yes, as a consumer I have some responsibility and yes, governments have some responsibility as well, but so do other players like businesses and the very structure of the policies, regulations, and even incentives in a given market structure. Ignoring these is just passing blame along to others. It's critically important to realize that not everyone has the same weight of influence in a given market. I can look in the mirror all day but the influence in my choice of a my potential future EV purchase has miniscule sway relative to the opinions of someone like, say Elon Musk with a mountain of resources and influence.

Exactly! We saw precisely this thing with cell phone chargers. Not enough people recognize this.

A healthy dose of market realism is in order - if the market doesn't deliver what people want, it's not the market, it's the people who are wrong.

No, that's how markets are _supposed_ to work but we don't live in a world of perfect competition where completely free markets work without flaws.

Preserving a free market sometimes requires regulation of anticompetitive behavior. That necessarily impinges on the economic freedoms of the largest players. But the intent is for such regulation to yield a net increase in market freedom.

> Let's say I have a platform for kids. Now I can't disapprove adult apps? Are you effing kidding me?

Presumably, a good law would make some allowances for things like this. It's not that you have to approve literally anything anyone wants to sell.

In my opinion the best interests of society are best served by letting people make their own decisions regarding themselves and their own property, and not by aggression or deliberate attempts at social engineering. I tend to be pro-market on average but really it's not the market I'm interested in so much as liberty. I also take a very expansive view of what the market entails; not just materialistic concerns but the full spectrum of human preferences. Does it always lead to a perfect outcome? Of course not. No system comprised of fallible and incompletely-informed human beings could possibly do that. It's just better than all the alternatives.

All the human failings which prevent markets from achieving optimal results are also problems for the various political schemes that aim to regulate them, magnified by the introduction of force as a "legitimate" means of achieving the desired end state. (It's ironic, for example, that people turn to governments to save them from monopolies—mostly government-created monopolies—when the government itself is the biggest monopoly of them all.)

In the end the real goal isn't to make people "happy"—we could do that much more easily with drugs. Rather, it's to ensure that people can live their lives the way that they choose, so that they can seek happiness, or purpose, or whatever else means the most to them. The fact that people make choices that (in someone else's opinion) probably won't make them happier is not sufficient justification for taking away their freedom to choose for themselves. I happen to think the moral, principled position also happens in this case to be the one that leads to the best outcomes for the most people from a purely materialistic point of view, but this is merely a happy coincidence; it would still be the right thing to do even if it resulted in abject poverty.

No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.

The fault with your idea is that consumer choice that organically influences the market will always lag greatly relative to immediate & absolute government regulation. Sometimes, the correction on a monopolistic with consumer choice alone can not be achieved.

Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"?

It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.

As someone who used to be a free market libertarian: take is as a data point, and make appropriate conclusions. Such as: free market doesn't solve every problem. It doesn't mean that we should ditch it - it's still the least invasive way to allocate resources, so it's a reasonable default. But we shouldn't elevate it to dogma. When it works, great! When it doesn't, regulate it. And thus, we can have the best of both worlds.

Exactly. Having a free market is desirable if and only if we can also ensure fairness for all market participants. Otherwise it's just like the Wild West where the strong take advantage of the weak.