bj: *I would disagree. The “market” kept the bear in business. Pissy PC whiners with access to the press and the straw cause of offending the mentally ill put the squeeze on the company. They forced them to take a product off the market that the potentially offended group probably wouldn’t buy or shop for anyway. *
Miller: But I think the whole point of the free market is that, so long as a product is safe and works as advertised, nobody has any business at all trying to force retailers to pull products from the market, or of depriving consumers of access to whatever product they want.
(My emphasis.) Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Consumer activity is not limited solely to individual choices about whether or not to purchase something. Consumers also have the freedom to form voluntary associations to concentrate their purchasing power, to institute boycotts, to generate positive or negative publicity, and in many other ways to pressure the market to get what they want. This is a perfectly legitimate part of market activity.
If the advocacy groups involved here were lobbying legislators for a “Ban Insensitive Toys” law, or suing manufacturers for the pain and suffering caused by insensitive toys, I’d be squalling about it just as loud as all y’all. But they’re not. They’re simply using the free press and the free market to exert pressure on a company to voluntarily change its actions. Good for them.
The only way you can make this sound like a Bad Thing is by inaccurately describing it as “force”, which it ain’t.
Miller: Because what if I want to own that bear? Why does their right to piss and whine about how some toy hurt their feelings trump my right to own that toy? […] What gives them the right to make that decision for me?
Ridiculous. Neither of you has any kind of “right” to get your way in this matter. You don’t have a “right” to own any toy that the manufacturer doesn’t want to sell. And in this case, the piss-and-whiners successfully convinced the manufacturer to change its mind about selling the toy, which they had every right to do.
Of course, you have just as much right to institute or participate in a counter-campaign designed to pressure the company to change its mind back again, so you can get the toy you want. But it looks as though the pro-Crazy-Bear side couldn’t be bothered to mobilize, so too fuckin’ bad. They won. You lost. Nobody violated anybody’s rights. Suck it up, Whiny-Boy.
[Or, in preview, what manhattan said.]