Consumer Protection
Consumer protection laws seek to regulate certain aspects of the commercial relationship between consumers and business, such as by requiring minimum standards of product quality, requiring the disclosure of certain details about a product or service (e.g., with regard to cost, or implied warranty), prohibiting misleading advertising, or prescribing financial compensation for product liability. Consumer protection laws are distinct from anti-trust. Some consumer protection laws are enforced by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which also has anti-trust responsibilities. However, many competition agencies—including the Justice Department antitrust division and the European Commission Directorate General for competition—lack authority over consumer protection.
Proponents of the Chicago school of economics are generally suspicious (and critical) of government intervention in the economy, including anti-trust laws and competition policies. Judge Robert Bork's writings on anti-trust law, along with those of Richard Posner and other law and economics thinkers, were heavily influential in causing a shift in the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to antitrust laws since the 1970s, to be focused solely on what is best for the consumer rather than the company's practices.
Read more about this topic: United States Antitrust Law
Famous quotes containing the words consumer and/or protection:
“The misery of the middle-aged woman is a grey and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)