Transparency, consumer protection, and accountability

I am not anti-market. I am anti-rigged market.

Markets only work when there is transparency, real competition, and meaningful consent. When profit depends on confusion, hidden fees, manufactured complexity, or the fact that ordinary people have nowhere else to go, government neutrality stops being neutral. It becomes complicity.

At that point, what we are calling a market is not really a market. It is extraction with better branding.

People live with that extraction every day. They feel it in utility bills they cannot decode, where the line items keep climbing and no one can clearly explain why. They feel it in insurance policies that promise protection and then bury them in denials when protection is finally needed. They feel it in drug prices influenced by middlemen they never chose and cannot see, contracts written to confuse instead of inform, and services that become more expensive even as the quality gets worse.

Too many systems are not designed to serve people. They are designed to wear people down until they stop asking questions.

That is why my approach begins with transparency. You should be able to understand what you are being charged, why you are being charged it, and what alternatives actually exist. Consent is not meaningful when the terms are hidden, the language is deliberately impenetrable, or the only practical choice is to accept whatever a monopoly, insurer, landlord, or corporate middleman puts in front of you.

I support plain-language contracts, hard limits on junk fees, meaningful oversight of insurers and monopoly utilities, and enforcement with teeth. When someone is wronged, there should be an actual path to redress— not a phone tree designed to make them give up, an appeal process that takes longer than the crisis, or a government office with a mandate but no staff, authority, or resources to enforce it.

Transparency must also apply to government itself. Public records, public meetings, regulatory proceedings, development agreements, tax incentives, and major public contracts should default to openness. Secrecy should be the rare exception, not the operating culture. When decisions are made behind closed doors and the public is only shown the finished product, accountability has already been weakened.

People should not need a lawyer, an insider, or months of records requests to understand who asked for a policy, who benefits from it, what it will cost, and who is expected to pay. Government should be willing to show its work. That means accessible records, sufficient time for public review, plain-language fiscal information, and an end to using procedural complexity as a shield against public scrutiny.

Consider what is happening with electricity and data centers. These facilities can require enormous amounts of power, along with new generation, transmission, substations, and other infrastructure. Utah has begun creating a separate framework for large electrical loads, but the promise of ratepayer protection has to become enforceable reality.

Residential customers should not be asked to subsidize infrastructure built primarily for some of the largest and wealthiest corporations in the world. If a company’s operation creates the need for new capacity, that company should bear the cost attributable to its demand. The profits should not remain private while the risks and infrastructure costs are quietly socialized onto households that never approved the deal.

Transparency means the people who could end up paying the bill get to see the assumptions, contracts, forecasts, and cost allocations behind it. Accountability means the companies driving those costs carry them instead of passing them down to families through higher monthly rates.

That principle applies beyond utilities. I am deeply concerned about algorithmic pricing and big-data-driven consumer exploitation. Digital shelf labels alone are not the problem. The problem begins when constantly adjustable prices are combined with predictive analytics, purchasing histories, location data, browsing behavior, loyalty accounts, or other personal information to estimate how much a particular person can be pressured to pay.

That is surveillance pricing. It is old-fashioned price discrimination with more computing power and less public visibility.

The price of eggs for you should be the price of eggs for me. It should not climb because an algorithm predicts that a tired parent shopping after work will pay a little more to get home, or because a retailer has enough information about a household to know that it has run out of an essential product.

People should not have to wonder whether the number on the shelf changed because of ordinary market conditions or because a model quietly decided they could be squeezed harder.

Some forms of flexible pricing may make sense in optional markets such as travel, luxury goods, or entertainment, where timing and demand have long affected prices and consumers retain some ability to walk away. It should not become the norm for groceries, medicine, diapers, hygiene products, and the essential goods families cannot simply choose to go without.

A household should be able to budget with confidence. The necessities of life should not become a real-time experiment in discovering the maximum pressure each person can absorb.

That is why I am pursuing the Utah Essential Goods Pricing Fairness Act. The principle is straightforward: essential goods should not be individually priced according to personal data, inferred desperation, or an algorithm’s estimate of someone’s willingness to pay. Consumers should know the price before they reach the register, and people purchasing the same essential product under the same conditions should be offered the same price.

None of this is anti-business. Honest businesses benefit when the rules are fair, visible, and enforced consistently. Consumer protection does not punish success. It prevents bad actors from gaining an advantage through deception, exploitation, or complexity while undercutting competitors who play it straight.

A functioning market requires trust. Customers need to trust that prices are real, contracts mean what they say, and companies will be held responsible when they break the rules. Businesses need to trust that competitors cannot win by hiding mandatory fees, stealing wages, manipulating personal data, or shifting their costs onto the public.

The scam is not the market. The scam is the thing pretending to be one. Rules on paper are not enough. Accountability requires enforcement. Agencies responsible for protecting consumers must have the authority, staffing, and resources to investigate misconduct, impose meaningful penalties, and make people whole. A fine that amounts to a minor cost of doing business is not accountability. It is a licensing fee for continued abuse.

Whistleblowers must also be protected. Employees are often the first people to see fraudulent billing, dangerous practices, manipulated data, unlawful denials, or deliberate efforts to mislead regulators and the public. They should not have to sacrifice their livelihoods to tell the truth.

Democracy works better when people are not constantly being nickel-and-dimed, misled, monitored, or worn down by systems designed to extract rather than serve. It works better when the rules are visible, the prices are honest, public decisions are made in the open, and someone is actually accountable when trust is betrayed.

My commitment as a legislator is plain: honest prices, honest contracts, honest competition, open government, and real consequences when any of them are violated.

That is not hostility toward business or government. It is the basic standard both should be expected to meet.