“All voluntary agreements entail net benefits for all parties, in their own opinion, otherwise there would obviously be no agreement.  People who respect consumers respect their choices.  The terms of all agreements fall within the range of terms acceptable to parties.  No one ever gets everything they want.  All controls reduce the range of what consumers may choose, and force them to pay more for what they value less”.

Read Leon Louw’s article Consumers choking on misnomers of control which first appeared in BDlive yesterday, published by Business Day.

Extracts

ALL controls are people controls.  This simple fact is easily concealed by such deceptive terms as “credit regulation”, “exchange control”, “tobacco laws”, “national health insurance”, “consumer protection” and “liquor policy”.

. . . . .

Control concealment has become such a fine art that most consumers fall for it, tricked into believing they are better off when their sovereignty is eroded.  Consider the proposed Financial Sector Regulation Bill.  It is nothing of the kind.  Sectors are economic theory abstractions, not organisms lurking in dark alleys.  The proposal should be called the Consumers of Financial Products Regulation Bill.  The sole purpose of the regulatory noose closing around the necks of consumers is to ban an ever-increasing number of products and services they are allowed to buy.

. . . . .

The sole objective of proposed “plain packaging” and “graphic warnings” for cigarettes is to ban the basic right of consumers to choose and carry attractive products.  Fraudulent policy packaging as opposed to product packaging conceals the degree to which such demeaning and insulting proposals violate the constitutional right to freedom and dignity.

Although consumers are always the primary victims of megalomaniacal activists and bureaucrats with ballooning bureaucratic empires financed by needlessly high prices, there are other victims.  The pretence that the real purpose of regulations is to control greedy capitalists conceals the assault on consumers as effectively as the spotlight on a stage conceals what is really going on — stagehands moving sets and actors getting into position.  “Plain packaging” would indeed misappropriate billions of rand worth of brand owners’ intellectual property, but the far greater misappropriation would be the dispersed value of brands to consumers.