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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    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.

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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...

It's so refreshing to just hear someone say exactly that. (Shouldn't this be obvious to everyone?)

    (Shouldn't this be obvious to everyone?)

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

> [...] and are simply afraid to admit that maybe they can't be experts in literally every category of consumer product

But bureaucrats are?

When people make the first half of this argument, as they do readily do, and omit this second half, you can use that as a heuristic for "unserious"

Experts exist.

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.

Both of them have proven inadequate on their own.

(Just FYI, one could interpret your comment in totally opposite ways, as it’s unclear what argument you’re referring to.)

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