Now while I am arguing for significantly reduced regulation around Uber, I would not say markets in general protect or serve consumers better. If markets had their way, anyone could sell a product that claims to do anything else, and if the consumers cannot organize information and catalog what products are fraudulent then people are vulnerable to deception.
That already happens today, in our "tightly regulated" market. Wonder drugs or miracle cures or instant diets or self help books claim to fix everything and do nothing. Drop regulation and it gets worse. Consumers are simply bad at organizing information about businesses, though I would concede that might be partially due to an expectation that "the government will take care of it".
Other things - environmental pollution / destruction (and other secondary costs of business), exploitative employment practices (particularly exploiting the poor and uneducated), using economies of scale to drive out competition, rent seeking, collusion, asset hoarding, and fraud all occur in a natural market and to varying degrees government involvement helps abate some - certainly not all, and certainly not perfectly - these anti-consumer effects of business.
You can look at almost any industry and point at gratuitous and stifling regulation, very often used as shut door tactics by wealthy market players who use force of law to stop competition, because playing in markets usually keeps you honest. Just because Uber is innovative does not exonerate them from how they are playing legal hardball just as bad as many of the companies that preceded them, and if given the opportunity would not erect the same walls to competition their fore-bearers put up. Besides the concerns about workers rights for their drivers, they are actively lobbying cities around the globe to both reduce regulation for themselves and increase it for Lyft or other possible competitors.
I think you're being too narrow in your conception of what markets do. I'm not denying the existence of snake oil salesman--they absolutely do exist--but there are many ways markets combat such behavior. I suspect much of this gets crowded out by the existing regulatory regime, but it's not hard to envision how it would work outside of the status quo (with substantially less cost to consumers).
Underwriters' Laboratories, Consumer Reports, Amazon Reviews, and Yelp are all good examples of effective, though imperfect, market regulation. Producers have no interest in harming their consumers and consumers have no interest in dealing with producers who will harm them. Everyone has an incentive to find ways to ensure mutually beneficial trade. However, when regulatory regimes are monopolized, a new set of incentives emerge which often have nothing to do with consumer safety. Worst of all, consumers and producers have no means to express their dissatisfaction and exit the regime. This is inherently different from companies like Yelp who must fight on a daily basis to continue delivering value to their customers.
Except the whole point of my argument is that while I personally believe in the ethical capacity of fully free markets to work, it requires all participants be informed, intelligent, and educated on how markets work, and they must be rational.
Go walk down the main street of any town in the US and realize how few people are actually educated, or rational, or functional. It is absolutely a product of both culture and the state as it exists that most normal people are raised to become these... zombies? But they are not going to use rational means to pursue products, which is why we have this nanny state consumer production giant looming over everything.
But like I said, we cannot just dissolve those overabundant regulations and growth stifling control with people as stupid as they are. That is just a recipe for pandemic exploitation to degrees even greater than what our current advertising industry pumps out. Just look at how often you hear a story of someone or their kid spending a months worth of wages on some shitty Android game because they were raised to be completely oblivious to obvious swindling.
If we could raise a generation and/or a nation of smart, rational, informed consumers, we could easily replace all the certification and licensing that slows innovation to a crawl with self regulation. Until then we are stuck in a world where people buy self-help books, booze, and Viagra instead of paying off their credit cards.
> Producers have no interest in harming their consumers
If you mean by 'interest' what I think you do, they have an interest only in making money. They have no more interest in NOT harming their consumers than they do in harming their consumers -- and producers of inherently harmful products (cigarettes being the obvious incontestable example) in fact do have an interest in harming their users. But there are PLENTY of producers who have demonstrated an enthusiasm to harming their users, if it sells product.
That already happens today, in our "tightly regulated" market. Wonder drugs or miracle cures or instant diets or self help books claim to fix everything and do nothing. Drop regulation and it gets worse. Consumers are simply bad at organizing information about businesses, though I would concede that might be partially due to an expectation that "the government will take care of it".
Other things - environmental pollution / destruction (and other secondary costs of business), exploitative employment practices (particularly exploiting the poor and uneducated), using economies of scale to drive out competition, rent seeking, collusion, asset hoarding, and fraud all occur in a natural market and to varying degrees government involvement helps abate some - certainly not all, and certainly not perfectly - these anti-consumer effects of business.
You can look at almost any industry and point at gratuitous and stifling regulation, very often used as shut door tactics by wealthy market players who use force of law to stop competition, because playing in markets usually keeps you honest. Just because Uber is innovative does not exonerate them from how they are playing legal hardball just as bad as many of the companies that preceded them, and if given the opportunity would not erect the same walls to competition their fore-bearers put up. Besides the concerns about workers rights for their drivers, they are actively lobbying cities around the globe to both reduce regulation for themselves and increase it for Lyft or other possible competitors.