Consumer Protection Laws

My family and I experienced some pretty serious price gouging this past weekend. While shopping for clothes we really gouged the hell out of some stores. Why just a few weeks ago these stores were able to buy many dollars with only a few shirts, but this weekend they had to give us far more shirts for the same amount of money. I almost felt bad charging them so many shirts for my dollars, and was even concerned that the government would step in and charge my wife and me with gouging.

Skip Oliva offers an excellent analysis of this conundrum.

It’s difficult to reconcile the American concept of “equal justice under law” with the Federal Trade Commission’s motto, “Protecting America’s Consumers.” The implication is that there is one set of laws for consumers and another set—affording lesser protection—for producers and sellers. This conflict presents itself in all “consumer protection” laws, and it stems from an awkward premise: That in any given economic exchange, the party trading cash holds the legal and moral high ground over the party trading a good or service.

Put another way, try to fashion a consumer protection or antitrust law in a purely barter economy. If A trades two pounds of flour to B in exchange for a bushel of apples, which party is the “consumer” entitled to government protection? It’s easy to apply common law principles regarding fraud to such a transaction, but virtually impossible to employ contemporary consumer protection standards, which require a presumption that one trader is good and the other is bad.

Antitrust regulators obsess over short-term prices. They deem a price “anticompetitive” when they think it should have been lower. The seller is liable for trading a good at anticompetitive prices. But why isn’t the buyer equally liable? If the government sets the competitive price of a good at x and a seller trades that good at x+1, both the buyer and seller undermine the competitive price level.

The rejoinder to this is that the buyer is “forced” to pay the anticompetitive price because the seller controls the supply of an item desired by the buyer. But the reverse is also true. The buyer controls a supply of an item desired by the seller—cash. The seller lacks the ability to obtain cash from anyone except those cash-holders willing to trade for the seller’s item.