Restoring Consumer Sovereignty: How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It

Abstract. For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions i

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Restoring Consumer Sovereignty

For decades, there has been broad consensus within antitrust, intellectual property, and consumer law scholarship that consumers make decisions in their own best interests by consciously weighting the market’s relative prices, quantities, and qualities against each other. That consensus is unraveling in light of novel findings from cognitive and social psychology that explain how individuals’ concepts of what they prefer drive the global economy. At the same time, producers nowadays no longer merely satisfy consumers’ needs but also communicate their values, identities, and aspirations through the sale and marketing of products. As part of the growing interest in observations such as these, a wealth of psychological studies challenge the fundamental teaching of economics that the interplay of demand and supply of goods in a free market economy provides us with material wealth. This book provides a normative defense of that assumption and a theoretical framework for understanding its contradictions. It argues that the erosion of consumer sovereignty through the ability of product manufacturers and sellers to systematically take advantage of individuals’ psychological weaknesses demands a twenty-first-century reconceptualization of the consumer and a modern account of how the law should regulate the digital economy. Such an account is justified to ensure a diverse marketplace in which consumers can influence how our societies are structured and arranged. By examining the role that market manipulation plays, it offers ingredients for a realistic descriptive and normative market regulatory theory that is aware of its political economy, its behavioral suppositions, and its distributional consequences.

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This article explores neoliberal fascism as a distinctive political formation within the current historical moment. In doing so, it first analyzes neoliberalism as a project that has since the 1970s destroyed all the commanding institutions of democracy while consolidating power in the hands of a financial elite. In addition, it analyzes neoliberalism as a movement, that produces and legitimates massive economic inequality and suffering, privatizes public goods, dismantles essential government agencies, and individualizes all social problems. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism creates the conditions for right wing extremists to mobilize the anger of white disenfranchised working class populations by both appealing to the economic injustices they experience while simultaneously blaming and directing their frustrations towards non-white minority groups such as immigrants, blacks, and Muslims. It is precisely this merging of the social, political, and economic hardships produced by neoliberal capitalism and its appropriation of the discourse of white supremacy to divert attention from its worst excesses and failures that a neoliberal fascism is produced. Â More specifically, I argue that in the face of 40 years of neoliberalism with its production of massive inequality, a frontal attack on the welfare state, and the erosion of civic institutions and culture, there has been a resurgence of fascist discourses and a populist fascist political movement. Neoliberal fascism represents the conjoining of the most extreme elements of casino capitalism with the discourses of racial cleansing, and white nationalism. The article concludes by examining how atomization, fear, and anxiety have become the breeding grounds of fascism and what it means to revive education as a central tenet of politics so as to address the task of not simply resisting oppressive economic structures, but also what it means to engage in the massive challenge of changing individual and collective consciousness as a precondition for collective struggle and the building of new social movements. Author Biography Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy

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