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Who Protects the Consumer?
225
foreign cars. They were never able to attract more than a small
fraction of the total custom. If that was what consumers really
wanted, the companies that offered that option would have
prospered, and the others would have followed suit. The real
objection of most critics of advertising is not that advertising
manipulates tastes but that the public at large has meretricious
tastes —that is, tastes that do not agree with the critics'.
In any event, you cannot beat something with nothing. One
must always compare alternatives: the real with the real. If
business advertising is misleading, is no advertising, or govern-
ment control of advertising, preferable? At least with private
business there is competition. One advertiser can dispute another.
That is more difficult with government. Government, too, en-
gages in advertising. It has thousands of public relations agents
to present its product in the most favorable light. That advertising
is often more misleading than anything put out by private enter-
prises. Consider only the advertising the Treasury uses to sell its
savings bonds: "United States Savings Bonds . . . What a great
way to save!" as the slogan goes on a slip produced by the
U.S. Treasury Department and distributed by banks to their cus-
tomers. Yet anyone who has bought government savings bonds
over the past decade and more has been taken to the cleaners.
The amount he received on maturity would buy less in goods and
services than the amount he paid for the bond, and he has had
to pay taxes on the mislabeled "interest." And all this because of
inflation produced by the government that sold him the bonds!
Yet the Treasury continues to advertise the bonds as "building
personal security," as a "gift that keeps on growing," to quote
further from the same slip.
What about the danger of monopoly that led to the antitrust
laws? That is a real danger. The most effective way to counter
it is not through a bigger antitrust division at the Department of
Justice or a larger budget for the Federal Trade Commission,
but through removing existing barriers to international trade.
That would permit competition from all over the world to be
even more effective than it is now in undermining monopoly at
home. Freddie Laker of Britain needed no help from the Depart-
ment of Justice to crack the airline cartel. Japanese and German
226
FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
automobile manufacturers forced American manufacturers to in-
troduce smaller cars.
The great danger to the consumer is monopoly—whether pri-
vate or governmental. His most effective protection is free com-
petition at home and free trade throughout the world. The
consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the
existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is
eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the
consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the
world.
CONCLUSION
"The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We
will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses
and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile,
and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
19
That is how Billy Sunday, noted evangelist and leading cru-
sader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in
1920, enacted in a burst of moral righteousness at the end of the
First World War. That episode is a stark reminder of where the
present burst of moral righteousness, the present drive to protect
us from ourselves, can lead.
Prohibition was imposed for our own good. Alcohol
is a
dangerous substance. More lives are lost each year from alcohol
than from all the dangerous substances the FDA controls put
together. But where did Prohibition lead?
New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals
spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against
the state. Al Capone, Bugs Moran became notorious for their
exploits—murder, extortion, hijacking, bootlegging. Who were
their customers? Who bought the liquor they purveyed illegally?
Respectable citizens who would never themselves have approved
of, or engaged in, the activities that Al Capone and his fellow
gangsters made infamous. They simply wanted a drink. In order
to have a drink, they had to break the law. Prohibition didn't
stop drinking. It did convert a lot of otherwise law-obedient
citizens into lawbreakers. It did confer an aura of glamour and
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