>So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something? [...] So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situation

>So of course if people aren't so free thinking, doesn't that change something? [...] So then if actually we think government should intervene in some situations, why not in this one? Since the majority of your reply is about justifying more positive government intervention, I've done a poor job explaining what I was talking about. I already agree with government intervention to limit bad effects of advertising. That's not what my comment was about; instead, I was critiquing your rhetoric. E.g. the following type of statement : "If people are not truly free thinking, how can we have a free market?!?" The above statement has a nice poetic symmetry but doesn't actually advance the discussion in a productive way. Let me try more rhetorical examples and hopefully you'll see the same pattern: Proposal: Facebook should open its social graph as API so users can be free to choose their own 3rd-party client and not be locked in a walled garden. But if users are not so free thinking, how can there be a free choice to choose their own social client? Proposal: People should be able to freely choose which state or house they want to live in. But if citizens are not aware of hidden influences, and are not perfectly rational agents, and disadvantaged with information asymmetry, can there truly be a free choice to pick a home? Proposal: People should be free to choose their spouse. But... [same pattern]... because people don't know hidden life influences that had predetermined their eventual mate selection, etc. What I'm saying is that yes, we can be flexible with definition of "free" -- but that just means we're going down a rabbit hole of philosophical word games. I contend this isn't productive discussion. If we want to recommend more positive government intervention, we can do that without the "free isn't truly free" philosophy.