75-10-A1
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Agency for Consumer Advocacy
TranscriptBad legislation keeps coming back like a song, only with a new title. I'll be right back. When bad legislation is defeated in Congress it has a way of coming back again the next year, usually repackaged with a new name and maybe some new trimmings. One such bill is last year's Consumer Protection Agency Act which has been reincarnated this year as the Agency for Consumer Advocacy. Well neither the old version or the new one, Senate Bill 200, bode well for you as a consumer. If the bill should become law the so-called Agency for Consumer Advocacy would cut across the jurisdictions of several Federal agencies which already are supposed to look out for the consumer's interests, agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Drug Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission. In a show of redundancy the new consumer agency could testify at other agencies public hearings, supposedly representing the consumer's viewpoint. But who is to determine what that viewpoint is when there are more than 200 million American consumers? The answer, of course, is the bureaucrats of the proposed agency for consumer advocacy will equate their own opinions with those of all consumers. Their opinions thus become yours whether it's true or not. Now if the consumer watch dog's job of various existing federal agencies isn't being performed properly Congress has it within its power to change the laws governing them, to improve them, but does it make sense to set up a competing federal agency with the huge new bureaucracy it'll spawn? There are some other disconcerting aspects of the consumer agency as it's been proposed. One of its duties would be to monitor the cost and quality of the goods we buy. It's odd though that the actions of organized labor, which have a direct bearing on both price and quality, are specifically exempted from the act. Odd but not surprising considering the heavy political debt many Congressmen owed to organized labor for its campaign generosity toward them. Another feature of the act is like a page straight out of Orwell's 1984. The Agency for Consumer Advocacy could, if created, demand from private businesses' confidential information including trade secrets and could make it public. Think for a moment what that provision will do to the development of new products. Is there a huge public groundswell of support for this bill that's prompting Nader, Senators Javits, Ribikov, Percy and others to plug for it? On the contrary, according to a recently published survey by Opinion Research Corporation which found 75 percent of the people are opposed to efforts to create such a consumer agency. Only some 13 percent said they would favor the agency, but more than half of these changed their minds when it was revealed that it would cost 60 million dollars in tax dollars to operate the consumer agency for its first three years. Of those polled 59 percent say they were usually treated fairly by business and another 27 percent went a step further and said they were almost always treated fairly, thus a total of 86 percent registered approval. By contrast only 13 percent said they've been unfairly treated as consumers. Now that's quite a testimony to the ability of the free market to adjust to consumers changing demands and needs and tastes, particularly in the face of a barrage of criticism by professional consumerists such as Ralph Nader aided by members of Congress who still don't understand that the people are tired of having their hard-earned money thrown away on yet more bureaucracies which interfere with their daily lives. Next time you sit down at your desk, drop one of those lawmakers in Washington a note and tell him what you think of senate bill 200, the consumer agency that almost no one wants. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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