> I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.
This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all. I also disagree that the better outcome is to grow the government's role in something like this. To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.
> If the people collectively decide that then yes.
I think we have to be very careful about how this is used; people collectively decide silly things all the time ("Pink Slime" comes to mind, for some reason), and we have to be very careful about how we encode things into law. Once the government is responsible for something, it's hard to walk back on that. Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.
> To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.
This may be true to some degree, but it aligns pretty well with people's changing opinions and wants/needs. If we're careful about some things (e.g. monopolies, access to information, etc -- things that allow markets to work efficiently), we can avoid having to bring out the sledgehammer when it's not needed. Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia); that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement. This is a case where I believe this to be especially true.