Yet if in such cases we adopt the policy of making X's decisions for her, using not persuasion but force (including threatened force), then that policy will have two effects that are most likely to lead to disaster in the long run:

By treating X as something less than an adult human being, our policy deprives her of the opportunity to learn to make rational decisions, to acquire experience, and to learn from her mistakes. We thus invite her to stumble into still graver mistakes in all phases of her life.
We are ourselves insulated from the immediate effects of our decisions, which impact Y rather than ourselves. Because our state of knowledge depends on just such experiential feedback (pp. 1.3:56-9), we will tend to make more and more mistakes, the effects of which will again be suffered by consumer X.

This argument assumes that we are well-intentioned authorities, rather like Plato's ideal philosopher-king. For reasons inherent in the nature of regulation and discussed in Section 5, however, such "authorities" tend over time to come under the sway of other influences, often running counter to the consumer's best interest. Section 5 will also show that such "authorities" naturally tend to resist innovation in general, even when such innovation might be of great benefit to consumers. This resistance to change, we shall find, has yet another insidious effect: "authorities" are often reluctant to withdraw products already on the market, even if they are shown likely to be dangerous.

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