the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The term "consumer sovereignty" was first coined by William Harold Hutt in his book Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion (1936). However, Hutt himself was always cautious of claiming credit for the term: I am not sure whether I coined the term myself. Marketing literature contains phrases like "the customer is always right", and I am told that a proverbial expression in High Dutch is "De klant is koning" (the customer is king). I first used the term in its present sense in an unpublished article which I circulated in 1931. It first appeared in print, I believe, in an article which I published in March 1934. In 1935 Dr. W. Röpke used the phrase "democracy of the consumers"; and in the same year Professor F. A. Hayek used the phrase "sovereignty of the consumer" in a section heading in Collectivist Economic Planning. Since then the term seems to have been fairly widely employed. Although Hutt did not mean to establish any theory based on this concept, some economists argue that consumer sovereignty does not hold in some cases, for example, in healthcare. When the term was used for the first time by Hutt, it was written as "consumers' sovereignty". In the book's review by Jacob Viner, he used it as "consumer's sovereignty". Later, the term "consumer sovereignty" became generally used. Consumers versus suppliers To understand consumer sovereignty you must also understand consumers and their demand. Everyone is a consumer and demands not only products such as food, or commodities like oil or gas, but also production factors such as time, and all other possible things. When a worker wants to have more leisure time, his demand for leisure is confronted with the demand of the society for his work. Only after the worker outbids the society for his leisure, can he consume it as he wishes. According to Hutt, the poor understanding of consumers and their demand led to some of the early criticisms of this concept: It seems to me that one basic misunderstanding is mainly responsible for all Professor Fraser's criticisms. He says that the "doctrine of consumers' sovereignty implies, perhaps even entails, that preferences on the side of demand