Yeah. Excellent point. The free market hardliners' counterargument is that "well, it's not in companies' best financial interest to sell poisonous chocolate, so we can trust them not to do it to the best of their ability."
But that assumes consumers can tell when they're being poisoned. If a person drops dead immediately after eating a candy bar... sure, that's pretty obvious. But long-term harms can't be easily attributed to a single product.
The free market is a very very useful tool. So is government regulation. Both of them also are wholly inadequate on their own.
That's a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food'). But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is necessary nor useful.
Someone might even agree with you that this kind of minimal
and general regulation is useful (eg 'no labeling poison as food')
Please consider a more realistic example. We're not talking about taking a jar of rat poison and labeling it "chocolate" and the need to prevent this with a law.
Think of the more general cases of adulterated foods and/or foods with unacceptable levels of harmful chemicals whose like mercury, arsenic, etc. These are things that consumers cannot practically check for.
A reasonable free-market response might be that if consumers really think this is important, they will pay more for products that have been vetted by some trusted third party and therefore the government is not needed. There could even be multiple such third parties and consumers could vote with their wallets for the one(s) that they find best. This already exists in a sense in the form of organizations that certify food as halal, kosher, etc.
I don't totally disagree with this, but I think it is ripe for corruption and monopoly in ways that a well-functioning government is not.
But that doesn't mean that all the other regulation is
necessary nor useful.
Nobody is claiming that all existing regulation is necessary or useful. That is not a good-faith interpretation of anything anybody is saying.
Even that assumes that the bread/chocolate is not poisonous. (Which again is a form of regulation.)