There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
--
Free to Choose (1980), segment Who protects the consumer?Milton Friedman
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I'd much rather have the consumer buy a Wii, some accessories, and a ton of games, vs. buying any of my competitor's products.
Reggie Fils-Aime
Corporations are necessary to the effective use of the forces of production and commerce under modern conditions. We cannot effectively prohibit all combinations without doing far-reaching economic harm; and it is mere folly to do as we have done in the past—to try to combine incompatible systems—that is, to try both to prohibit and regulate combinations. Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The only course left is active corporate regulation – that is, the control of corporations for the common good—the suppression of the evils that they work, and the retention, as far as maybe, of that business efficiency in their use which has placed us in the forefront of industrial peoples.
Theodore Roosevelt
If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.
Donald Norman
The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
Ludwig von Mises
Friedman, Milton
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