Pants-of-dog wrote:So, you admit that the free market is particularly unsuited for this sort of thing.
That depends on what you mean by "free market". If you focus on the "market" component, i.e. the world of arms-length, profit-motivated transactions, you may well be correct, although for-profit charities may well play an important role. But then neither I nor any other libertarian ever assumed, predicted or wished for for-profit to be the exclusive type of human interaction.
In fact, libertarians tend to emphasise the broader world of "civic society" which encompasses a wide range of voluntary, not-for-profit activities and organisations.
UL is not going to spend money on hiring industry stakeholders that compete with them to put together a regulatory body that has representatives of all the different stakeholders in the industry.
Yet industry-wide, voluntary standard-setting organisations exist and operate all the time. Internet standards, for example, are set precisely by such bodies.
Because the product is cheaper.
Perhaps. It is possible that some people prefer to save some money at the expense of risk. If so, who are you (or is government) to prohibit them from doing so? But the way markets operate, profit margins tend to be squeezed, and "features" tend to propagate down the price scale. Inexpensive solutions to safety issues would tend to get universalised, just as all cars today tend to be equipped with A/C and a radio, once considered luxury features.
I'm not. Please reread my posts.
I did. I wrote: "Since governments determine the rules of the road today, blaming the free market for car accidents is odd." in response to your statement: "People do seem to be all right with killing babies so that they can drive.
That is where the free market has led us. Congratulations."
Please explain what you meant by the bolded sentence, if not to blame the free market for car accidents.
If people want to stop buying my good or service because of the harm it causes, then they have to know that mu good or service causes harm.
Not so. People will stop buying your good not because they know it causes harm, but because they aren't convinced that it doesn't. In other words, people can easily and simply restrict their purchases to those products, producers and retailers that they have a reason to trust. If they don't know you and your products, they won't buy them.
"Jews die in hospitals. Jews also fie in Nazi death camps.
Because Jews also die in hospitals, Nazi death camps can't be isolated as the cause, thus the claim that Nazi death camps killed Jews wasn't valid."
Something seems wrong with your logic here.
More healthy Jews died in Nazi death camps than in hospitals. Is it your claim that more babies die under capitalism than under other economic systems?
Since you didn't answer the question, I will assume that you agree that investigative journalism does not suffice as a guarantee of the safety of goods and services.
Investigative journalism is one component in the eco-system around product safety. Nobody suggests it alone suffices to guarantee the safety of goods and services. In fact, no system can "guarantee" that safety. Certainly not government regulation which has been with us for a century, even while countless unsafe products have been consumed, and killed countless consumers.
Yes, right wing libertarianism works well in a mythical or hypothetical world. We all agree on that. In that respect, it is similar to every other economic or political system ever devised. However, things like CFCs show how free market libertarianism doesn't work in real life.
No, it doesn't. Since libertarianism doesn't exist "in real life" (according to your assertion), no evidence from real life can show that libertarianism doesn't work in real life.
At most, CFCs represent an example of a problem that may be more difficult to tackle using free-society (market and non-market) tools.
What the OP and I wish to discuss is why these don't actually work out in reality.
And what evidence or rational arguments have you presented?
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.