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 so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life’s duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)