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 poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The protection of a ten-year-old girl from her father’s advances is a necessary condition of social order, but the protection of the father from temptation is a necessary condition of his continued social adjustment. The protections that are built up in the child against desire for the parent become the essential counterpart to the attitudes in the parent that protect the child.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)