L.A. Liberty

A Free Market Lesson in Diapers

As some of you may know, I took a cross-country trip a few days ago. It was my first trip alone with my wonderful 2 year old daughter.

On the flight to my destination I changed my daughter’s diaper twice. On the flight back, I changed it seven times and had to swap out pants three times. The difference? On the way there I had used the ‘Pampers’ brand diapers my wife had packed. But once I ran out of those, I bought some ‘Huggies’ that I found on sale.

Clearly, either ‘Huggies’ has an inferior product or it is simply not meant for my daughter. My solution was simple: I fired ‘Huggies’.

You see, it doesn’t matter who the regional manager or product supervisor or even who the CEO of ‘Huggies’ is - I am the boss. Actually, every individual diaper consumer is. I (we) hire and fire at will.

It is up to the diaper companies to compete amongst themselves to provide me with a product I want to use at a price I’m willing to pay. If they don’t, then I can, say, simply use cloth diapers. Other potential competitors will see my (and my fellow consumers’) unfulfilled demand and come up with a better/cheaper product and we may hire them for a trial run… but they better deliver.

If our diaper choices were instead mandated and/or provided by government, we wouldn’t have that choice. Maybe we’d get a chance to vote for a different brand every few years, or perhaps it’d be up to our elected politician to decide which diaper company was most generous with its campaign contributions. Or it could be like schools in which the non-subsidized choice would be much more expensive. But our choices would be limited, and we, as individuals, wouldn’t have much of a say in the matter.

Happily, the government is mostly out of the diaper business. So instead of trying to please bureaucrats or politicians or simply a majority of voters, they try to please me: the boss.

Posted May 18, 2011 at 9:27pm in ∆ capitalism | comments || home