[DVaut1]

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Does a customer buy a hotdog with the expectation of having a dirty or poor quality hotdog? With the knowledge disseminated by the Surgeon General, does he now buy a cigarette with an expectation of a "healthy" cigarette?

Consumers expect a product, and corporations deliver the product they expect to the best of their ability, and you can TRUST them to deliver the product you want. No doubt the cigarette makers would like cigarettes not to cause cancer, but to assign them culpability...

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So when hmk says that because hot dog vendors act on their own-self interest, we can "trust" them -- he doesn't actually mean they won't sell us a product that harms us. What he really means is that we can "trust" hot dog vendors, because when we ask them for a hot dog, they'll sell us a hot dog, and not a pencil, because we expected a hot dog?

If so, I agree. We can trust cigarette manufacturers will sell us cigarettes, and not pencils, if we buy cigarettes from them -- because we expected them to sell us cigarettes. By definition, this almost certainly has to be true. They wouldn't really be cigarette manufacturers if they actually supplied pencils, right? Circular logic FTW.