Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou View Post
What? They're not doing that already?

Don't you find it odd that you think a democratically elected government can force companies to behave on the electorate's behalf, but the electorate itself can't force the change? If a majority of people want ingredients on food labeling, they vote for representatives that will enact the regulation. But, if a majority of people want ingredients on food labeling, can't they accomplish the same thing by buying from suppliers that do so? If it's important, it'll drive sales. If it drives sales, all suppliers will be doing it in short order.

Look at the explosion of organic food stupidity if you need an example. People are willing to pay 3x as much for a banana because it's "organic", as though other bananas are "inorganic". Therefore, you can't find a grocery store that doesn't stock them.
You're assuming that a majority of customers actually have the nerve and strength of will to use supply and demand tactics to bring about change. This is patently false as shown by the gaming market where people say they do not think a game is worth the money the supplier asks but instead of not getting it, they get it illegally instead since they cannot resist the urge to play it anyway. How many people can't keep their fingers off chocolate or meat or whatnot? If everybody were a purely rational homo oeconomicus who knows everything he needs to know about every product and service they consume, then we wouldn't need market regulation. But the world is not a capitalist utopia, there are markets where the forces work really well and there are markets where they don't work very well due to the nature of the product, the consumer or both.

With healthcare and food you also get additional interests such as children who cannot fully decide for themselves what they consume. You may say children of sloppy parents do not deserve to live or to be healthy anyway but apparently society at large disagrees with that notion.
Society also disagrees with having a large percentage of dumb people who cannot contribute so we introduced mandatory education and a public education system. Letting market forces handle such things has detrimental effects on a society because not everyone always makes the optimal choices or has the desirre/time to put in enough effort to make informed decisions about things.

In my opinion letting the government handle these things through regulations is just a form of centralization and specialization where the people at large outsource the decision making regarding some fundamental things to a small group of people who can make a better informed decision than most.

The system doesn't have to be perfect but there is also no pure and perfect free market, consider that companies using very good marketing and market manipulation can get advantages they should not get on a perfect free market. Intel bribed some electronics stores here so they wouldn't sell any systems with AMD CPUs. Now Intel are so far ahead because they made illegal market manipulations that they have a monopole in the upper mid and high end CPU "market". Now regulation does not stop this since it's illegal and happened anyway but the point remains that regulation is usually there to fix flawed markets that simply do not work properly without it because not everything in the world is perfectly aligned to work on a free market.