The free market is great and all, but I do have an issue with this part, wherecompanies promote 2.5-ton urban assault vehicles to people who can be talked into dropping $100,000grand by telling them it’s big.

That’s the tag line on a billboard Ipassed on Sunday, my daughter in the car, the L plates up, as she learnsto drive. “IT’S BIG,” says the billboard, that’s the whole tagline, and the Ford F150 is all grille,as seen from the perspective of someone small who’s about to go under the wheels.

Not that the tray is big, or the mileage is big, oh no! Those would berational arguments, and it’s all emotional appeals for these cars, like“EATS OTHER CARS FOR BREAKFAST,” that’s another one.

I’m a very reasonable person, so I don’t want to ban big cars. I just think we shouldstart jailing marketing people who decide the target market for steroid trucksis irrational people. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the marketingpeople are personally running down kids in the streets. They just may as well be. Eitherclick Send on your creatives, or trot on down to street leveland take a baseball bat to a pedestrian; either way, you’re going to cause apredictable level of harm.

It’s simple economics: Capitalism demands that we jail those marketers. It’s nota morality issue. Maybe you’re fine with a few broken bodies in the service ofletting fragile men feel alpha, and, well, okay, but the free market demands wecorrectly allocate costs to those who produce them. So if we’re rewarding marketerswith bags of cash for putting murder cars in the hands ofthe people we absolutely least want to have murder cars,we must also present them with the invoice for the ensuing pedestrian bodies.

It’s about setting correct market incentives. You wouldn’t even have to jailthat many marketing people. Well, maybe you would. To send a message. ButI think even a few marketing people in jail, or, you know, heavily fined, orpublicly humiliated, all those are good, would be enough to insert a littlepause into a marketing exec’s thoughts. Just a little pause, right after:“I love the simple emotive pull of this ‘LEAVES OTHER ROAD USERS FOR DEAD’campaign, that’ll speak clearly to dudes who perceive lane changes aspersonal attacks.”Let’s see where that pause gets us.