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I'd like to add that advertising is also economic pollution that goes against free competition. The theory behind free markets requires that voters are more or

• krustyburger 7y ago
  Where would you draw the line? How would producers expect for consumers to find their product? Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other? What about design and product packaging? Isn't that essentially a form of advertising?
  • plankers 7y ago
    >Where would you draw the line? At paying platforms to advertise your product. >How would producers expect for consumers to find their product? How about typing "insert product here" into a search engine? >Would consumers be allowed to recommend products to each other? Yes, as long as there is nothing of value changing hands. >What about design and product packaging? Fine, as long it ends at the store shelf/online product-listing. Take my suggestions with a grain of salt, because they come from a person who ranks advertising as one of the top three problems facing humanity.
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      >How about typing "insert product here" into a search engine? But new products don't show up in search engines.
• snaky 7y ago
  > Mises in Human Action (p. 19) writes "Human action is necessarily always rational. The term 'rational action' is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man." https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational > The rational being practicing rational-expectations theory only makes behavioral economists laugh. And the neoclassical construct of equilibrium prices requires assumptions that only tenured professors who don't get out much could believe, like perfect competition, perfect information, and perfect rationality. https://mises.org/library/rationality-and-market-economy https://mises.org/library/rationality-and-market-economy
• munchbunny 7y ago
  I'd love to see an efficient market too, but banning advertising won't accomplish that, it'll just shift the burden of discovery elsewhere, like review aggregators, and information there is already questionably reliable. In practice, I think the problem that creates advertising is that humans have limited bandwidth for ingesting information in general, so we have tons of tools to compile more information into less information, such as news, books, statistics, reviews, etc. (For example, how many people really entirely understand their health insurance plans? It's not for lack of trying.) Advertising is sort of an arbitrage of that communication bandwidth based on the fact that some actors (companies) really want you to see their information more badly than others. That problem doesn't go away just because you ban advertising, it just moves the arbitrage opportunity elsewhere.
• asdff 7y ago
  I don't know if you can ever fix that. Here's a complaint about someone being cheated on a sale, 4000 years ago (1). Probably long before the ad men appeared, but people have always been looking for their angle. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir