To date, disclosure regulation has been concerned with communicating theoretical knowledge to the consumer. Consumer protection legislation from every period of legislative activity in the twentieth century—the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights-Consumer Movement era of the 1960s and 1970s—is characterized by this approach. The Progressive Era’s Federal Trade Commission Act, for example, prohibits false and deceptive advertising and authorizes the FTC to combat this problem through cease and desist orders against the offending advertiser.63 The rationale for this legislation, presumably, is that consumers ought to know the truth; cease and desist orders are designed to eliminate false advertising from the market so that truth will prevail. But the truth that the FTC protects is abstract knowledge, not practical knowledge. It involves some claim about the product that has no necessary relationship to the way that the product is used by the consumer. As an abstract matter, to be sure, there would not appear to be much harm in making sure that advertising claims are true, since false claims are even less likely to be of use to the consumer than true ones. Monitoring of this sort, however, particularly if carried out assiduously, imposes substantial costs on merchants and occupies scarce regulatory resources. The problem is that theoretical knowledge, a substantial component of the truth the statue ensures, is not worth such expenditures.