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Same question for you, except private corporations. Inundation with advertising is exactly private corporations using their power to modify behavior. The only
by imsofuture 7y ago
Same question for you, except private corporations. Inundation with advertising is exactly private corporations using their power to modify behavior.
The only difference I see is that the government has your best interest in mind (ostensibly, of course, don't mistake me for thinking it really does). Advertisers do not.
- homonculus1 7y agoI'm free to choose whether or not I do business with a corporation selling sugary drinks which I already know to be bad for me, whose power to modify my behavior rests on its ability to convince they can improve my enjoyment of life. I'm much less free to choose whether I comply with the government, whose power to modify behavior is ultimately derived from the threat of men with guns coming to lock me in a concrete cell. Advertising is memetic pollution but I'll still take it any day, every time over government compulsion; the equivocation of the two is ludicrous.
- conanbatt 7y agoThere should definitely be limits to what advertising is allowed to do and what spaces its allowed to use. Advertising, however, survives only because it finds the people interested in the products. When the government does it, it survives on people that pay for it at the risk of going to jail. The standard of what government can do is infinitely higher, because it can do something against everyone and do it forever.