The rhetoric of “Consumer rights” is one of the most popular weapons for Neo-liberals, Marxists and Fascists alike to compel governments to impose their agenda on the populace. According to them, “we need to protect consumers from those giant greedy corporations and force them to provide good quality products to the consumers because if we give a free rein to them, they will all unite and will force consumers to buy inferior, expensive or even poisonous products”. Such idiotic statements and all other such opinions are very distant from reality.
Consumers can be forced to purchase a particular product from a single corporation only if there are no other alternatives available and that also is only possible if someone is cohesively eliminating competition or preventing (through violent means) anyone from providing that particular product cheaper and in superior quality and that cohesive power is only possessed by government. Every consumer rights activist will agree that corporations lobby government into imposing policies which will be profitable for them and bribe government officials to grant them permissions, licenses, environmental clearances etc.
But why corporations do that? Because only this group of human beings called government, has the publically accepted moral authority to extort hard earned money from individuals to raise funds for various government branches established to control the lives of individuals residing in a particular territory and whenever someone won’t comply with the wishes of this group human beings, he/she gets kidnapped and are held captive for some period of time or for life.
When an organisation holds such kinds of totalitarian powers, the human beings who are members of that organisation are obviously going to use their powers for totalitarian purposes. Ironically, the Neo-liberals, Marxists and Fascists also claim that human beings can’t administer themselves because they are too barbaric and violent but a special group of human beings are fully and selflessly capable of governing billions of unarmed human beings with a larger group of armed human beings which are trained to kill and never trust other human beings. But that’s another topic.
Let’s take an example, suppose the government forces automobile manufacturing companies into providing air bags in their cars. What will happen due to this law is that the companies would have to increase the prices of their cars due to the additional parts and production machinery they have to buy without which they won’t be allowed to sell their cars.
To fund the agencies which are responsible to impose these laws, the government have to increase taxes which decreases the spending power of consumers or the government have to print more fiat money which will cause the value of the currency to fall which further causes the rise of prices for all consumer products because people are forced to use only the government’s fiat currency, this phenomena is popularly known as inflation. As secondary economics illustrates, “the price of a commodity increases when its supply exceeds its demand.
Anyway, the surge in the prices of automobiles will also induce consumers into not buying a car at all, keeping the old car or buying a second hand car and common sense states that old vehicles are less safe than newer vehicles. According to the Automotive Research Association of India, there are total fourteen codes of standards for all kinds of vehicles allowed to be sold in India. According to a National Crime Records Bureau report, there are in total 135,000 deaths per year caused by road accidents in India, the number can be higher since many accidents goes unreported. Both of these statistics are just keep on increasing along with the prices of automobiles and various other consumer products.
Corporations force consumers into buying their products by keeping out competition through government regulations and licences which makes it too expensive or even impossible for an individual to start a business and provide cheaper and better quality products. Safety regulations demanded by consumer rights groups works in the same manner. They force companies to install certain equipments and these equipments aren't free and so the prices of products have to be increased which in result compel consumers to spend less elsewhere. This phenomena cause losses in the profits of companies, savings of consumers and wages of workers and the vicious cycle continues.
Consumers are the only regulators who regulate to protect the consumers. A corporation cannot survive in a market cattalaxy if it can’t satisfy the consumers because consumers always wants the best products for themselves and if a company’s product would not fulfill their needs, they’ll buy the product from another company which will force the former to provide better products from the latter if the former wants to exist.
