That point is sort-of pointless. It would be fair to boil a lot of the argument there down to "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad".
I can't argue with that, but the alternatives are worse. If you centralise power, sooner or later the advertising exec gets control of the powerful body, and now you can't choose to resist even if you can see that what is happening is bad.
A key part of the free market is precisely that the world is actually quite predictable. The fact that people sometimes make predictably bad choices doesn't especially undermine the free market. The market doesn't require people make good choices, it just redirects resources to people who make better choices than the average.
You could deploy the same argument in favor of allowing any kind of fraudulent product or service; the full libertarian "caveat emptor" approach. However, not only is this unpopular, prohibiting fraud doesn't in and of itself result in fraudsters taking over the market.
The boundary between overly enthusiastic promises and actual fraud is one that's in different places for different jurisdictions and is constantly at the forefront of litigation as people invent new fraud schemes.
> "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad".
Sometimes the reasons are bad in very objective ways.
A goes down to the market to buy a kilogram of apples. A vendor B advertises 1kg apples for a pound. He weighs them out on his scales. A hands over his pound. When he gets home he finds he has 800g of apples. Was A's reason for purchasing the apples from B good or bad?
(laws against short measure have been a thing since at least Roman times; I believe they also had a few product quality laws, although the canonical example there is always German beer law from 1516)
I can't argue with that, but the alternatives are worse. If you centralise power, sooner or later the advertising exec gets control of the powerful body, and now you can't choose to resist even if you can see that what is happening is bad.
A key part of the free market is precisely that the world is actually quite predictable. The fact that people sometimes make predictably bad choices doesn't especially undermine the free market. The market doesn't require people make good choices, it just redirects resources to people who make better choices than the average.