Marmite‑scented deodorant is the kind of idea that makes half the country retch and the other half reach for their wallet – which is precisely why it is such a glorious little case study in how free markets are supposed to work. No committee of wise men would ever approve it, no departmental brief would dare recommend it, and yet there it is on the shelf, asking you a simple, democratic question: “Fancy it?”[1]

No one in charge, and that’s the beauty

Political life is built around the fantasy that somewhere, someone is in charge of everything important. If something exists, it’s because a minister willed it into being; if it doesn’t, it must be because of “cuts”. Marmite deodorant is a small, sticky rebuttal to that entire worldview.[1]

Nobody in Whitehall held a roundtable on “armpit spreads of national significance”. There was no consultation paper on the “olfactory framing of yeast extract in personal hygiene”. There was just a company, a brand, some marketers and a mad little hunch that there are enough Marmite obsessives out there who want to smell like breakfast even after a long day on the Tube.[1]

The right to be gloriously wrong

The point is not that Marmite deodorant is a good idea – the point is that nobody had to agree that it was. In a market, bad ideas die quietly at the checkout, not noisily in a select committee. A product appears; people look at it, laugh at it, or inexplicably buy it; and the tills deliver the verdict.[1]

That is the crucial freedom: the freedom to be wrong at your own expense. If no one buys the stuff, the company eats the loss, the marketing team goes back to launching more sensible cucumber‑scented gels, and civilisation staggers on. No inquiry, no scandal, no ten‑year legacy programme, just a quiet write‑off in next quarter’s accounts.[1]

Taste, snobbery and revealed preference

Of course, the chattering classes cannot leave it there. They must sneer that this is “late‑stage capitalism”, as if civilisation has peaked and is now in the phase where we combine condiments and cosmetics until the barbarians put us out of our misery. But what really offends the critics is not the product – it is the freedom of other people to like what they, the critics, find ridiculous.[1]

Markets are brutally honest in a way politics never is. If enough people want to smell like Marmite, you can call it vulgar, tasteless or a sign of cultural decline, but the sales figures will still be there, quietly tabulating human preference. This is what economists mean by “revealed preference”: in the privacy of their shopping baskets, people tell the truth that they would never admit in polite company.[1]

Planning would never allow this

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which everything had to be centrally planned. Somewhere, a panel would be convened to decide the “optimal” range of deodorant scents for the nation. There would be consultation with stakeholders, diagrams about “aroma diversity”, and eventually a carefully balanced list: citrus, floral, “sport”, maybe an adventurous sandalwood for the metropolitan elites.[1]

On no possible planet does that panel sign off on “concentrated yeast extract beloved by Britons and inexplicably Australians”. It is too weird, too niche, too liable to generate awkward headlines in the quality press. Yet “too weird, too niche, too awkward” is exactly where human creativity tends to live – and where, occasionally, the next big thing hides.[1]

Discovery, not design

That is the deeper point about free markets that a silly spray can illustrates better than a thousand policy seminars. Markets are not an engineering diagram for society, they are a discovery process. They allow millions of tiny experiments – Marmite deodorant, pineapple on pizza, oat‑milk ice cream – most of which fail harmlessly, a few of which succeed spectacularly, and all of which generate information about what people actually want rather than what they are supposed to want.[1]

A planned system, by contrast, has to decide in advance what is “socially acceptable” and then inflict that decision on everyone. It chooses for safety, not discovery; for consensus, not eccentricity. That might be defensible when we are talking about, say, air‑traffic control, but it is pure vandalism when applied to breakfast‑flavoured underarm sprays.[1]

The politics of live and let whiff

There is a political moral here that goes beyond the toiletries aisle. The same instinct that says “no one should be allowed to sell Marmite deodorant” is the instinct that says “no one should be allowed to build that ugly block of flats”, or “no one should be allowed to drive that unfashionable car”, or “no one should read that disapproved newspaper”. It is the itch to tidy up other people’s lives.[1]

A free society resists that itch. It says: if you want to bathe in yeast extract and waft through the day smelling like a Brexit‑themed brunch, that is between you, your loved ones and your dry‑cleaner. The rest of us are perfectly free to wrinkle our noses, move three seats down the carriage, and buy something that smells reassuringly of lemons and focus‑grouped inoffensiveness.[1]

In defence of silly liberty

The serious case for free markets is usually made with graphs about GDP, charts on productivity and stern lectures on incentives. All true, all important – and all slightly bloodless. The frivolous case may actually be more persuasive: free markets are what allow civilisation to be gloriously, hilariously, humanly daft.

Marmite‑scented deodorant is not the end of the world; it is evidence that the world is still free enough for pointless experiments. A society that can tolerate a few shelves of pungent nonsense is a society that still trusts individuals to make their own bad choices – and, occasionally, their own brilliant ones. And that, in the end, is the very point of free markets: not that they guarantee good taste, but that they guarantee it is not compulsory.