I think you misunderstand Fred, I don't think you are arrogant for thinking people can be fooled, I think you are arrogant for wanting to protect those fools by eliminating basic rights and freedoms.
Well, I am sorry, but I think that trying to help someone out is legitimate. I know that's quite controversial and so on, but I do.
That's said, I'm not sure that the right to lie is such a vital right. It is, after all, routinely violated by the federal government - if you lie about someone else, they can sue you. You're also obliged to be imaginatively dishonest when selling a product. You can't be direct, it has to be sneaky. There are other prohibitions on the important right to lie, too.
I think you are arrogant for wanting to use the nuclear option because regulations aren't working to your satisfaction.
They cannot and never will work. Advertising by definition is without value. Literally nothing it does of use cannot be done a better way than through what is essentially bribery. Paying a person to express a point of view is inherently dishonest.
Depends. Most places I've worked for had me sign something saying, warning?, if I said anything negative about the company on social media it could be grounds for termination. Also being overly rude to customers. And insubordination often enough isn't hoping to do your careers.
That's all very well and good. I agree that if your job requires you to speak and you screw it up you should face losing your job. However, companies can also fire you for all sorts of insubordination. This can often infringe on privacy. You should not face losing your job for making a joke about your boss. That is a clear violation of your right to free speech, even though you don't face jail.
If you ban traditional forms of advertisement, big companies are guaranteed to find non-traditional ones. Pay their employees to spread their product via word of mouth, or stage some weird stunt that gets into the news, or whatever. It's hard to craft a law that fully covers "letting people know that you exist" without unreasonable limits on what companies can do.
I feel like if these were effective they'd be used. Again, I'm not sure what to do with the PR industry.
Sure, they can get into the catalogue, but given how people are there will be plenty who don't exhaustively check catalogues and just go with whatever they already know exists (which is partially the reason advertising works nowadays).
Not all goods and services are advertised at all. How do these industries currently work? Let's go with a mixture of that model and publicly-funded product journalism. If you don't care, you'll purchase the cheapest and if you want more details they are available. The modest amount of in-elasticity caused by advertising will vanish over the medium-run, leaving a more efficient market.
Do you know how much the advertising industry costs? Hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of trillions of hours of talented people's work, millions of hours wasting people's time. That's a vast cost for something that has nothing- or less than nothing - to show for it.
Advertising provides a reliable way to monetise a million different things, from Google to various forms of media to a bunch of small websites that produce decent content but can't make enough off selling t-shirts. Any alternative to that would involve complex government bureaucracies that would be a bitch to implement and deal with, thereby killing a bunch of possibly profitable and creative endeavours.
Advertising companies are complex bureaucracies, far more complex and inefficient than any government ministry or department (for instance: Medicare is far more efficient than private insurers).
I do admit that I don't have a perfect alternative business model - though some alternatives exist (CNN!). This is not to say that they are not conceivably possible, just that, obviously, evolution and adaptation would happen. Obviously, all these industries were funded before advertising came to exist in the ~1920s. We fund a number of industries in this way - the police force, for instance. I see no reason why the press, the music industry and so on would be unfundable either through some private means like point-of-use (
which they're trying anyway by the way) or as a public good.
I'm not gonna pretend that advertising is the most efficient thing or whatever, but I think it's worth taking a moment to appreciate that society has evolved a way to reward people simply for creating things that other people want to see, and it works relatively well without needing government interference*.
It doesn't work at all. Advertising causes crippling externalities, not limited to market distortion, and must always do so by its nature.
