I'd love if the market fixed all these product quality 
    issues, but it doesn't. 

Yeah. Free markets only work when consumers are educated and sufficiently informed enough to make good decisions.

The problem is that a consumer relies on thousands of products a year and it is a practical impossibility to be educated in all domains of knowledge. You can't have deep knowledge of transport, healthcare, technology, food, and a thousand other things.

It's even crappier than that. There are loads of products that don't see the commercial light of day. Vested interests work very hard to suppress competitors before it even gets to the point where consumers have a meaningful choice. In other areas, gatekeepers (e.g. supermarkets) make decisions on behalf of the consumers, often actively suppressing information that might damage other product lines.

And yet, someone was arguing in a comment here that a focussed government body couldn't be better than the individual! I'm sure they wouldn't make the equivalent argument wrt code...

It's so refreshing to just hear someone say exactly that. (Shouldn't this be obvious to everyone?)

    (Shouldn't this be obvious to everyone?)

I feel like everybody understands this deep down inside, but free market fanatics have some major insecurity issues and are simply afraid to admit that maybe they can't be experts in literally every category of consumer product

Also they skipped history class and are unfamiliar with all of the toxic and disgusting shit companies used to adulterate their food and medicine with

> [...] and are simply afraid to admit that maybe they can't be experts in literally every category of consumer product

But bureaucrats are?

Experts exist.

If you think it's impossible or merely undesirable for a society to have experts in public employ working for the greater good then... okay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm certainly not going to change your ingrained beliefs. But hopefully you can learn to understand others' views. What I'm seeing is the typical tendency to misrepresent others' beliefs as some sort of all-encompassing faith in "bureaucrats." Wrong.

Markets are useful and proven tools. So are rules.

Both of them have proven inadequate on their own.

(Just FYI, one could interpret your comment in totally opposite ways, as it’s unclear what argument you’re referring to.)

The market only fixes issues that customers care enough about to vote with their wallets.

Quality ain't free. There's often a trade-off between quality and price. Pretending otherwise is foolish.

Trouble is that in many cases the food industry has rebased what was once the normal product as 'premium' and charges a higher price for it. A good example is bacon.

No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.

On a side note, it irks me that a certain brand of mayonnaise (made by a global chemicals company), which calls itself 'real mayonnaise' lists its top two ingredients as vegetable (not olive) oil and water. Not exactly a classic start to how the original was made.

Check how many minutes the average worker had to labour in yesteryear to afford 100g of 'normal' bacon, and how long it takes today's workers to afford the same quantity of 'premium' bacon.

> No food manufacturer us going to sell the 'normal' product as just that and label the cheaper one as somehow inferior.

This sounds quite plausible if you go by the wording on the package. But the design can be quite telling.

Have a look at eg Tesco's 'Everyday Value' design. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+tesco+everyday+value That stuff is made to look inferior.

a lot of retailers have their own lists of demands.

walmart has had plenty of walmart-specific model numbers.

it typically leads to more confusion over what a customer is buying. the model number proliferation and the typical act of using the short form names leaves it feeling closer to gambling.