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)
“As Jerome expanded, its chances for the title, “the toughest little town in the West,” increased and when it was incorporated in 1899 the citizens were able to support the claim by pointing to the number of thick stone shutters on the fronts of all saloons, gambling halls, and other places of business for protection against gunfire.”
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)