Do consumer-law violations (or “inefficiencies”) account for 10% or more of what consumers spend?

And would correcting these inefficiencies reduce income and wealth inequality? Read Consumer Law As Tax Alternative by Rory Van Loo to try to find out. Here's the abstract:

The law and economics paradigm has traditionally emphasized tax and transfer as the best way to achieve distributional goals. This Article explores an alternative. Well-designed consumer laws—defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry barrier laws that govern consumer transactions—can make markets more efficient and lessen inequality. Policymakers and scholars have traditionally ignored consumer laws in redistribution conversations in part because consumer laws examine narrow and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Visa or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Those are different microeconomic fields, whereas redistribution is dominated by macroeconomics. Even millions of dollars in reduced credit card fees seem trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. This Article synthesizes the fragmented empirical literature quantifying inefficiently higher prices across diverse markets—called overcharge. To my knowledge, it is the first to conclude that consumer law-related inefficiencies plausibly overcharge more than a trillion dollars, or over ten percent of all that consumers spend. It also analyzes which households pay and earn income from that overcharge. Consumers outside the top one percent likely pay significantly more of their expenditures toward overcharge. A static simulation also indicates that removing consumer overcharge could bring the share of income earned by top one percent of households from twenty percent of all income today, possibly even bringing it to about ten percent, where it was in 1980, before the dramatic shifts that has caused so much concern. Moreover, this massive redistribution would be driven by laws making markets more competitive, rather than tax increases that distort markets. If the empirical literature currently available is right, consumer law merits serious consideration as an alternative to tax. 

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