You’ve never heard of Consumer Reports or the firm that certifies electronics, who’s name I can’t remember off the top of my head. There are solutions that don’t involve the government – this is really nothing new if you would do a little research before you go off half-cocked.
You make the false assumption that the vendors don’t wish to conduct any new business. If a store will only buy from a vendor if they are certain that selling that product won’t tarnish their good name, which they worked very hard to establish because there are many stores just like them to chose from, and the only way to do this is to sample the product first then the vendor who doesn’t provide samples of their produce is either doing something shady or knows that the store won’t chose to sell their product because its quality isn’t high enough to satisfy its customers. Either way the consumer is better off because of the due diligence of the store owner.
If people chose to shop at this store over TrollMart down the street who has lower prices it isn’t a case of pareto inefficiency but they are paying the higher prices for the added service the owner provides in screening the products that goes on the shelves.
You really have no clue and I still refuse to explain it. I’ll give you a hint though, go read the chapter titled “The broken window fallacy” (or something to that effect) in Economics in One Lesson – in fact read the whole thing, you might learn a thing or two.
It always states the point of origin and the manufacturer. If someone is willing to risk buying a product with no information about it, then that is their prerogative.
What are you on about? My point is that if a firm suspects that someone is falsely selling products under its brand it has every reason to prosecute this violator.
You’ve so far only asserted there’d be rampant fraud, not proven it. At any rate, if individuals prefer the security brand names provide them, they prefer the products for that very reason (amongst others), in spite of their higher prices. I am sure they’d also prefer a world in which goods were costless. Unfortunately for them, they must act in a world of uncertainty and scarcity.
Erm, no. It’s more like ‘it is up to the buyer to sue or not’. The market will penalize individuals who repeatedly defraud their clients.
Well, since you say so…
From this thread and the other on slavery I wonder if you’ve actually ever seen how a business even works, or how contracts function. It reminds me of those economists who saw beekeeping as an externality-generating situation, when a simple look at solutions arrived at via the market already answered their question.
AC, you’re thinking of the Underwriter’s Laboratory IIRC.
hard to imagine urine as a cost-efficient additive, but’s let’s run with it, anyway. somebody buys your piss-butter, and gets very sick as a result. maybe the person is old and suffers renal failure from your secret additive. your fraud is no longer petty, and the civil redress options are now worthwhile. even if the victim is penniless, the potential damages claim will interest a no-win, no-fee lawyer. market to the rescue!
your other example, fraudster skimming off pennies from thousand of accounts is all too real. what happens under the current regime is that the bank, company etc refunds the defrauded customers, and doesn’t bother involving the authorities for the obvious risk of showing how its internal security failed. the loss would be written off, in all probability. again, the petty fraud argument is more nuanced than you are painting it, because the company/bank typically wears a large loss, even though they are not directly the defrauded party. many white-collar frauds currently go unpunished. i can’t see that you’ve proved your hypothesis - absent government regulation, petty fraud would skyrocket.
one final thing, shysters often used to pitch they wares from the back of the truck, so they could be off to the next town by the time their dodgy products were opened and tested. the fact that “snake-oil salesman” has entered the lexicon shows that, as others have said on this blog, caveat emptor is well understood by jo/jill average.
This is a very elementary question, based on a lack of understanding of human nature and property rights. The answer to your question is of course no, there would in fact be much less fraud, petty and otherwise. Would it still exist? Yes, but to a much lesser degree. Individuals are much better, efficient, at protecting their property than is any third party. When individuals are free to take sole responsibility for the protection of their property they will soon implement the most efficient means available to them to this end. As a result, fraud will be dramatically reduced. A perfect example of this, not that any are necessary since this principle is self-evident to most, is gun control laws. Where individuals are stripped of the right to defend themselves and their property with the use of firearms, crime goes up since criminals know the state cannot protect the relatively helpless citizens. Where citizens are free to arm themselves, crime is much lower. If you understand the basics of property rights and how individuals behave in relation to them, the answer to this question is obvious. It is not complicated, and it has nothing to do with the cost of litigation compared to the amount defrauded etc. It has to do with whether or not you believe the state is better at protecting property rights than the individual, that’s all, nothing else.