Study of Economics: Microeconomics

Hugo Passemard topic today is "An economic study of Consumer protection in the US" In recent years, consumer advocacy has been something of a real growth industry. It has been sparked in this country, of course, by Ralph Nader who played the same role in developing the consumer advocacy industry that Henry Ford played at a much earlier date- and with much greater benefit to the consumer, I may say- in developing the automobile industry. But since Ralph Nader has developed into a multinational conglomerate, he has had many imitators and many successors; and there has been a whole host of organisations and agencies that have developed supposedly to represent the consumer. This whole movement has had three common characteristics. In the first place, it has been very strongly anti-business. It has portrayed to the public the notion of business enterprises as heartless giants, who will go to any lengths to force down the throat or into the hands of the unwilling consumers- shoddy products which will break under their hands. Of course, Nader never tells the contrast between the character of the products that are distributed and the method of distributing them, namely the post office.