Antagonism to the market system

From an interview with Nobel prizewinner Ronald Coase, which first appeared in the January 1997 issue of Reason; reprinted in Policy (via Jim Lindgren):

Roughly speaking, when you are dealing with business firms operating in a competitive system, you can assume that they're going to act rationally. Why? Because someone in a firm who buys things at $10 and sells them for $8 isn't going to last very long in that firm. I think that the market imposes a great discipline, and the discipline of the market makes the assumption of rationality in that field correct.

I find that people behave in ways that destroy themselves and their families, produce a lot of hardship, and when it comes to policy do the same thing. I hold the view of Frank Knight: in certain areas rationality is enforced; in other areas it's weakly enforced. You get more irrationality within the family and in consumer behavior than you get, say, in the behavior of firms in their purchases.

...[The University of Virginia] thought the work we were doing was disreputable. They thought of us as right-wing extremists. My wife was at a cocktail party and heard me described as someone to the right of the John Birch Society. There was a great antagonism in the '50s and '60s to anyone who saw any advantage in a market system or in a nonregulated or relatively economically free system.

Then the interviewer asks him about an article of his on the market for goods and the market for ideas:

I said that the arguments for regulation of the market for goods and the regulation of the market for ideas are essentially the same, except that they're perhaps stronger in the area of ideas if you assume consumer ignorance. It's easier for people to discover that they have a bad can of peaches than it is for them to discover that they have a bad idea.

[Interviewer]: So if you think that the consumer, ignorant as he is, ought to be protected by a government regulator, then you should really believe that the government regulator ought to step in and police the speech of professors or politicians or pundits.

RC: That's right. If the government is competent to do the one, it's competent to do the other.

[Interviewer]: Then there ought to be a federal philosophy commission.