Quote Originally Posted by rong View Post
I can't find any examples beyond the frequently mentioned betamax vs vhs (which I know nothing about or if it is fact) but aren't there many examples of an inferior product winning out down to marketing? I mean, fuck, cigarettes are a good example of marketing at it's worst.

Due to the variety of products we all consume there is no way to be an expert and actually choose optimally all the time. Now I get your answer is review sites or similar but they can't necessarily be trusted so I don't see a huge downside to having a group who you know are acting in your best interests, ie the government (in theory), regulating things to ensure minimum standards, certainly with things like cars or gas fired boilers.
The need to choose expertly is a strawman view of capitalism. Maybe some economists have led people to believe in that view, but it is wrong and I doubt they intend to. Markets work because choices are yours and consequential to you. There is no better mechanism by which to spend your capital than for you to do it and for you to reap the rewards or losses. The same is true of everybody else. The fact that we're all mushed together in communities doesn't change that.

Capitalism = democracy if "democracy" were to be defined as "voting everyday, multiple times a day, for what you think is the right thing for you, those around you, and the world". When it's boiled down to brass tacks, no pie-in-the-sky view that you will cast a ballot for a politician who will fix worldly problems that you aren't yourself willing to pay for (like homelessness in India or schools in Austin, Texas) could even work in the first place. What works is a reflection of your dollar, my dollar, and everybody else's dollar. This is because our dollars are a manifestation of our capital, and our capital is a manifestation of our efforts. Governmental politics is an attempt by ourselves to thwart our own capital allocation. It's schizophrenia

And I just watched Friedman being interviewed discussing car safety and explaining how we should all have the right to value our safety individually but I don't feel qualified to make that decision and also, in the example of car safety, you're risking other people's lives too.
But you have made the decision. You make it everyday. You choose to drive to work, to the store, to recreational locations. The risk of dying on those drives exists. You could choose to move closer to those destinations so you could drive less or bike or walk, and you would reap the benefits of a lower risk of automobile-caused death or injury. The decision is already in your hands and it always has been. Friedman's point is this as well as those who seek regulations on the issue are doing so arbitrarily and forcing them on others.

Every car manufacturer knows of a thousand different ways they could make their cars safer, and they address them only when the cost/benefit analysis shows that they should. This exists in every industry you can think of. Government intervention does not perform a better cost/benefit analysis. Even if we wanted to solve some of these problems with regulations, we couldn't. Instead, we would be creating more problems by reducing the freedom to choose, creating distorted market incentives (like the ones that created that whole housing crisis), and hindering mechanisms that solve the problems