Responsibilities related to free and regulated markets

What do you think government and law should regulate in the market? Who has the responsibility for assuring quality, consumer information and protection of consumers from scam of different kinds?

Some examples of issues:
- laws for marking products with information about their contents, good or bad? Considering there are many allergics, it's IMO necessary for food products to do this. Also, if the consumer has the responsibility of choosing products and boycotting unethical, environmental hazardous and other undesirable products, it's necessary for the consumer to be provided with this information.

- responsibility of boycotting unethical products Products made by child labor, by slavery, or by using raw products that might be dangerous to the consumers are undesirable products. How should they be eliminated from the market? By laws against unethical products and/or trade, or by laws that the producer must provide the consumers with information about the labor situation for those making the product and about the contents of the product?

- if it's not lucrative to produce more than a few types of raw food, there's a danger of removing genetical variety in grown herbs, with the result that world supply of food becomes extremely vulnerable to disease and parasites. The fewer the different types of foods grown, the more damaging a single herb pest incident would be, and the larger our excess food production must be to secure the food supply of the world population. So how should market prevent farmers from tending to choose to grow only the most heavily consumed foods, so that genetical variety goes away and world food supply becomes extremely vulnerable? Some interesting facts: 70% of all ground that can be utilized for farming is already used for farming. The remaining 30% are mostly rain forests, which are crucial for producing oxygen and lowering the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Without these forests it would be impossible for any animals to breathe, so the conclusion is that we have very little possibilities of increasing food production on earth. So it's necessary that we utilize the capacity we have well, with BOTH variety and effectiveness. GM foods are for instance not tested more than a decade, and there's a danger that the best GM foods will become so much superior in terms of production per area that they'll out-compete all other things grown, causing the dangerous loss of genetical variety. In such cases, government or law intervention in one way or another seems necessary to prevent such a potential disaster.

- if sellling dangerous products and behaving irresponsibly as a company isn't punished by either law or system (prison, or losing customers etc.), then companies tend to be more willing to use unethical methods to be able to compete, as those who use just methods of competition fare worse. The result is that we hurt those of our corporations that are doing a good job, while supporting those of our corporations that are dangerous. How should we make sure harmful market behavior is reduced? After all, most companies would be able to survive as easily if they weren't allowed to use unethical methods - the fact that some companies are vulnerable to stricter laws against dangerous and irresponsible market behavior is because they've built up their strategy on being allowed to use the ugly tricks. Intel for instance got busted with a processor that didn't perform calculations correctly. They denied it at first, but eventually so much proof was found that they couldn't deny it. The result was that when they finally made it up to their customers, they lost a lot of money, and AMD processors took over the market shortly afterwards. That's an example of when ugly tricks resulted in lost customers. But all this requires that someone discovers the lack of quality of a product, or some other hidden information. How should the market be able to guarantee to customers that there isn't any hidden information? How should customers be protected from faults in products that aren't discovered or can't be connected to the product? For instance there have been chemicals in building industry that have caused cancer, but the connection was for a long time difficult to establish because the cancer came 10 years after using the chemicals.

- when markets such as medicine, hospitals, railroads etc. are handed over to the market rather than being kept by the government, the result is often that companies buy the rights to selling the cheapest goods/services within the branch that was handed over to the market. For instance aspirins, prescribing antibiothics and running train traffic at the most heavily traficated rail road stretches are taken by free companies, while the state must provide the more expensive products/services. When the state loses the income from the cheaper goods within these branches, more tax money is needed for the government to be able to provide the more expensive services and goods (say bypass surgery, selling medicine for rare diseases, and running train traffic in nearly desolated areas). But higher taxes are against the principles of free market spokesmen. How is this probem solved?

- some other real life examples of irresponsible market behavior and other issues that are related to the subject:
* grocery stores putting false markings on meat, claiming it's new while it's nearly rotten and might be harmful to the consumer. Some deaths have been caused by this, and some have also be caused by old candy that wasn't thrown away by the grocery store owner.
* larger companies unjustly suing smaller companies (for something that normally shouldn't make the larger company win the lawsuit) because the larger company can handle the costs of a lawsuit while the smaller company can't afford it, and after enough tries the larger company succeeds
* using child labor or slave labor abroad to get cheaper production
* lying about the raw materials of their products to hide the fact that harmful (but cheap) ingredients are being used
* environmentally dangerous products being cheaper than products better for the environment, in combination with most consumers (and sometimes also producers) being unaware of which environmental damage the products can cause. For example the gases that caused the ozone layer hole in the 80ies - 90ies. Several companies who used these gases after information form environment experts realized the danger of the gases and stopped using them - some companies even got better sales from announcing in their commercials that they used more environment-friendly stuff. But not all cases work like this, not always does environment-friendly products sell better
* EU discussing removal of requirement of several products to list the contents on the package. For instance juice is no longer required to contain only fruit content to be allowed to be called juice, but may contain plenty of extra sugar which causes weight gain, and artificial sweetening chemicals which in large quantities can cause brain damage, and if you aren't particularly scared about such things, I can tell you that I personally prefer the taste or real juice over fake juice, which is my main concern over this.

This is by no means intended to be a complete list, neither is it an attempt to be fair, as I've mostly mentioned the consumer perspective. It's rather a result of a bit of brainstorming. I think all it really suffices to convince me of, is that a completely unregulated market is impossible. But as for the degree and form of regulation, I don't know. I'm just interested to hear opinions on that, and also what arguments are used by those who speak in favor of a completely unregulated market, as I think the arguments for some sort of regulation (preferably small though) are pretty solid IMO.