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.
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...
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
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.
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.