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Comment by viscountchocula | Hacker News Reader

Is it, though? By making disclosure a requirement, the market for sesame-free items is highlighted and elevated. It may find a profitable niche or it may not, but consumers are now better able to choose.

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Allergy labeling is likely a bit like support for people with disabilities: We regulate because the market doesn't work in these cases. The number of people who require accommodations are smaller than the value to make accommodating their needs profitable, so we use regulate because it's the right thing to do.

To be clear, we do it through the government because it’s otherwise inefficient: it imposes a bigger collective cost on society than the benefit to the individuals. Whether “it’s the right thing to do” is a moral construct. European countries, for example, have much narrower requirements for accommodation of people with disabilities than the ADA.

Though maybe more pertinent, the EU has required sesame allergen labeling since 2003.

The basis of the (edit: theoretical) free market is full information for all participants, which requiring more information on the label is helpful for. The problem here is they won't allow "may contain traces of X" as a valid acknowledgement, despite being easy to understand.

> The basis of the free market is full information for all participants,

It’s not, and in fact it is opposite of truth. The reason, for example, why free market economy works better than centrally planned one, is precisely that obtaining full knowledge is impossible, so it is impossible to effectively centrally plan, whereas in market economy, each individual contributes their own private knowledge that is unavailable to other people, through participating in market and communicating it through price mechanism.

See, for example, Thomas Sowell’s “Knowledge and Decisions”, which is precisely about this point, or for more classic reference, Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”. Again, to reiterate, the entire point of market economy is that nobody has full knowledge.

Perhaps I'm sloppy with my terminology, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition seems to agree more with my statement than yours.

Perfect competition can never exist. There is no scenario where market participants (which make the market) will each have perfect knowledge and act perfectly upon that knowledge.

Along with sometimes being smart or hard working, people are also sometimes lazy, dumb, irrational, careless, destructive, and so on. The point being, there is a wide variety and they bring their messy contributions to the market, which makes for a very messy market. There can never be perfect anything. It's not even a good theory, it's garbage, it would only work in a simplistic simulation with no chaos.

Perfection competition theory is incorrect, badly flawed in a similar manner, as the efficient market hypothesis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

Neither this or the GGP is remotely an argument that less information makes for a better market, though.

This is just an assumption of a mathematical model, not “the basis of the free market”. That’s like saying that the basis of the behavior of gases is the fact that the atoms are perfectly round and perfectly bouncy balls.

...because the warning was not valid.

It was being slapped on everything to a)be lazy about not actually having allergens get into food because b)it fooled consumers into thinking that the disclaimer meant they weren't liable for allergens in food.

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