Attitude To Business: A Call to Consumer Activism

We Libertarians and free market types very often allow ourselves to be defined by our opponents. Oppose regulation, they insinuate, and you are therefore in favor of all the dirty and devious practices a business might engage in. I’ve met more than a few who actually are.

But opposition to regulation does not have to pigeonhole us into support of business practices; it just means we have to be nuanced. Nor is it impossible to make such a mindset sink in over time. There is a major parallel in the gradual acceptance of Enlightenment ideas around the time of the American founding, with the issue of free speech. People often lobbed criticisms at free-speechers of being factional or divisive. Now, a few centuries later, a particular phrase commonly attributed to Voltaire is burned into the American collective consciousness: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

This must be our attitude towards the private sector. I’ve heard people convince themselves that a nonneutral internet would be a good thing, simply because that is the position that net neutrality proponents have pigeonholed opponents into. Likewise with Apple’s arbitrary and draconian app store policy, or Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy. None of these are good for the consumer; we often delude ourselves into thinking that market competition always delivers good results. Competition is not guaranteed to deliver good results; what it is guaranteed to do is deliver what consumers demand at as high of a cost as they’ll take, and deliver that better than the public sector.

These costs are not always monetary. A loss of net neutrality would be a huge cost on internet use, albeit indirect. Apple’s lockdown on iPhone apps, though they have every right to do it, deprives the consumer of utility. Our position need not be that everything coming from the private sector is golden. Regulation is not the solution and will lead to worse problems in the long run, but even we market types can sometimes forget that the government is not the only sovereign. We have sovereign power as consumers: We need consumer activism, something that, oddly enough, now comes mostly from the Left.

Market consumer activism needs to be focused on the idea of personal responsibility as part of a larger cultural paradigm shift. Instead of crying to the government to regulate what we don’t like, we can do something about it ourselves. Too long have we been of two minds that it is acceptable to continue using the products of a detestable corporation as long as we call on the government to take care of them. Would Windows have marketshare upwards of 90% if not for this attitude? We can and should be proactive in changing the behavior of the private sector without supporting legislation and regulation. If we will not accept their costs, they can do nothing but relent.

Let us then not waste our breath defending the actions of Apple, Microsoft, and AT&T from proponents of regulation. Let us instead channel the outrage into legitimate, noncoercive, means. “I disapprove of what you produce, but I will defend to the death your right to produce it.”