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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

The wonderful thing about the free market is that consumers have choice. There is indeed a large market for high quality products at a higher price. Old brands become shitty, and new brands pop up.

Bernie Sanders, a famous modern-day socialist, is famous for saying we don’t need so many brands of deodorant: https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/too-many-products-bernie-sand...

This is where I fundamentally disagree. Only the market, where consumers put their hard-earned dollars at work, can tell us how many brands of deodorant are needed. From skin sensitivity to smell to the chemical makeup, I don’t want a government bureaucrat deciding the “correct” number of deodorant brands. I want as many as the market sees fit.

Extending that principle outwards, the market will decide the type of sofas that can be made, and at what price.

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The framing of 'government bureaucrat' vs. 'consumer choice' is at best misleading. As lordnacho pointed out, such a free market only works for consumers when the consumers have real agency. We exist in a state of immense information asymmetry, where vendors have immense advantages over the buyers. (Immense resources focused on highly misleading marketing vs. individual expertise, with attempts by consumers to organize frequently hijacked.) I shouldn't need to be a domain expert in order to make an informed choice. The level of acceptance of a "free market" overwhelmingly dominating by deceptive marketing is insane.

Yes. We are heavily manipulated by the media to think that we need 20 brands of deodorant. I think this is the subject of Herman/Chomsky book "Manufacturing Consent" (from a more political angle but I think applies to advertising as well) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

(edited typo)

A solid part of that book goes to the notion that "the media" are also manipulated | shaped by external forces .. economics leading them to often take the path of least resistance for greatest return.

The linked wikipedia overview lists 5 key points (of the authers outline) of the "Propaganda model of communication" and lists the government and the advertisers having a powerful shaping force on the media.

Brands are dead now. We have arbitrary number of deodorant brands, as producers can, and do, create new brands all the time, and recycle or trade old ones. Between this and influx of faux brands for white-label dropshipped goods, there's very little signal in brand labeling today.

Creating new brands all time time is poor for creating consumer loyalty, which is the entire point of a brand. You are missing the whole point!

Nobody cares about customer loyalty anymore, that's the entire point! Customers still loyal to brands are just marks about to be exploited.

I think you yourself are loyal to more brands than you would admit! I can’t imagine you never eat from the same restaurant twice, buy from the same e-commerce website twice, or use the same brand of toilet paper twice.

> Only the market, where consumers put their hard-earned dollars at work, can tell us how many brands of deodorant are needed.

Not even 'the market' can do this. Unless you mean it in some sort of tautological sense - e.g. only the market can tell us how many brands of deodorant the market can bear.

At some point a politician does have to make a decision on these things.

The decision won't look like "should anyone who introduces an additional brand of deodorant be thrown in prison?" but more like "should we give a tax break to this deodorant company here, or to that aerospace company there?" Or "should deodorant imports from China be treated as healthcare products, at a 15% tariff, or cosmetics, which get a 30% tariff?"

When making that decision, you need to take into account whether your citizens already have adequate suppliers of deodorant and cruise missiles.

You might not like this situation, and have an idealistic answer like "We shouldn't have tax breaks for anyone, there should be a flat corporate tax of X%", but you're not going to get that genie back into the bottle.

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