Obligations to consumers

From chapter 5 of "Case Studies in Business Ethics" by Thomas Donaldson:

History reveals marked differences in the ways that cultures treat business obligations to consumers. The Code of Hammurabi, almost 4,000 years old, holds merchants to certain standards of fair dealing and product safety. Seventeeth-century France under the rule of Louis XIV maintained a complex set of regulations and procedures governing product quality. Yet with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the influence of laissez-faire economic theorists such as Adam Smith, there came a dramatic loosening of government restraints. Smith and others argued that efficiency is significantly impaired when government tries to guarantee consumer satisfaction and safety; in turn the doctrine of "caveat emptor," or "buyer beware," dominated the economic scene during the first chapter of U.S. history.

An interpretation of that passage by me as I pretend to be a libertarian/conservative:

All government regulation is inherently harmful! Do you want to follow France's lead? All France knows how to do is drink wine and surrender, and that's not American. Look at the Arabs -- 4,000 years ago they granted consumer rights, and now they're all a bunch of towel-head terrorists! As Reagan once wisely observed, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"