Comments on: Siren songs

By: Ottowitz Sue

Ottowitz Sue — Wed, 10 Dec 2003 16:47:13 +0000

Perceptions do not limit reality.

By: Will Baude

Will Baude — Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:14:56 +0000

No, no, maybe I’m drawing a silly distinction, but I think there should be no rule about what price you can set to make your telephone number available, or the access code that unlocks your answering machine, or the special number that lets people bypass your ordinary screening mechanisms. That seems like a smart and good and useful application of economics to the telephone market. I also wouldn’t have any problem with people setting up a price to receive any telephone calls, or even with a system where you set up a giant scale of rates and people, and announced the rate you would charge to each person who called you. Aunt Millie, 5 cents, Mom, 20 cents, anybody else, twenty billion dollars. Fine. The trouble is when you set up a list whose criteria aren’t even that clear, and whose application depends on what the caller says. I can call you for free, and expound my political views, but if I throw in a request for money, I’m off to jail or paying a fine. The system attaches to speech content rather than to speaker, and a lot of people who engage in speech might not know exactly which side of the line they fall on because of that. This is as frightening as those signs that say “by parking here you agree to pay me $5,000” that people set up on their own property; it bears a resemblance to a standard contract, but I think Libertarians should be careful about things like that, lest they run into somebody who parks in their lawn with a sign that responds “by ticketing my car you agree to pay me $50,000.”

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 06:25:26 +0000

So there should be government price controls on the price I’m willing to set for people to call me? I’ve heard proposals from Cowen and others for a market in telemarketer calling privileges, but it seems to me as if the vast majority of people in such a market would want to set punitively high prices. Why can’t they be allowed to do that? Should people be forced to sell certain privileges at a low price?

By: Will Baude

Will Baude — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 16:18:07 +0000

No. If the attempt is to place a per-call fee that actually captures the approximate external cost of the telephone call, that’s defensible.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 06:46:06 +0000

Okay… Suppose the government simply adds one proviso to the do-not-call list: you can call anyone you want on the list, provided you pay them $10,000,000 per call. If you don’t, there are criminal penalties for depriving the callee of their rightful property, the $10,000,000. In practice, this would be identical to simply forbidding all callers. But in principle, now it’s just a very high price in the telemarketing market, rather than an outright ban; the ban is on failing to pay the ridiculously high fee. Does this change the situation in any fundamental way? Is it now a legitimate question of property rights?

By: Will Baude

Will Baude — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:14:01 +0000

To the best of my knowledge, most Libertarians don’t applaud efforts to create property rights out of everything—certainly not without compensating those from whom the stuff is taken. Casting the whole thing as property and a market is one way to do it, but might not be the best analogy. As a side question, and maybe somebody here can tell me—how do you find out who is on the do-not-call list? That is, suppose I, tonight, decide I want to sell some stuff and I want to start calling people. But eager not to get into trouble, I want to make sure I don’t call anybody I’m not supposed to. Can I just call up the government and get the do-not-call list complete with telephone numbers and names? Is it online someplace?

By: Jeremy Leader

Jeremy Leader — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:32:59 +0000

Suppose we wanted a market in attention-via-telephone. We want people to be able to sell the right for others to call them unsolicited, and for callers to buy such rights. So we need a way to record the existance of such “property rights”. Now currently, the government (generally at the county level here in the US) operates central record-keeping facilities where ownership of “real” property is recorded. That is, if I own a house and want to sue someone for trespassing within it, one of the things I will probably do to collect evidence for my case is go to the county courthouse and obtain copies of the documents stating that I am in fact the owner of the house, and thus have a right to exclude people from it. So what’s the problem with the government setting up such a registry for this new kind of “property right”? Seems to me like the kind of thing libertarians would applaud. Without property rights, how can you have a market? And for property rights to be enforceable, there must be some way to verify the ownership of the property. Think of the do-not-call list as homesteading in the attention-property domain. By signing up, you’re excluding (some) others from trespassing on your property, which makes it much easier for you to later offer portions of that property in a marketplace.

By: Will Baude

Will Baude — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:09:40 +0000

Brief thought on the doorbell argument—consider that one difference between a doorbell and a telephone is that to ring a doorbell somebody has to physically enter and/or touch my property and use a physical object that i physically possess and own. If I bought a doorbell, put it in the park, and donated it to the city, would it still make sense to retain the right to criminalize pressing it?

By: Michael C

Michael C — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 19:16:43 +0000

Yes, “unless you have specifically told someone not to ring it.” That’s what a do not call list is: the telecom equivalent of “no solicitors” or “no trespassing” signs.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 19:09:48 +0000

I have to say I think Will Baude has a point and the “it’s my property” argument is weak. Your doorbell is also your property, but there is loads of well settled common law to the effect that unless you have specifically told someone not to ring it, themselves, they are presumed to be acting with your permission when they do so, because that’s what a doorbell’s for.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 18:03:08 +0000

Mr. Cowen argues today that a market in willingness to listen to solicitations could emerge, that it may now be emerging in Europe, and that the don’t-call list hinders the development of such a market. This seems precisely backwards to me; once there is such a list, it becomes important to telemarketers to find people willing to listen to them; one way would be to pay them. When there was no way of opting out, there is no reason to convince people to opt in. What am I missing? Why would Telemarketers want to create such a market when people’s ears are available to them for free?

By: Will Baude

Will Baude — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 15:41:22 +0000

Too much here to respond to justly in full, so forgive me if I make a sort of running slalom through a few of the many good points y’all have made: 1: The “I pay for it” argument. Well, yes, you pay for the installation of your phone line, but the mere fact that you let people communicate with you when you don’t have to doesn’t necessarily mean you should be able to enact criminal penalties against people who then communicate with you in ways you don’t like. I’m not sure how y’all would feel about a government rule that gave five years in jail to anybody who talked politics at the dinner table without the host’s permission, or any houseguest who proposed a commercial transaction to somebody who’d put himself on some list. If those seem like reasonable restrictions to you too, then what we have is an interesting disagreement in philosophy of property, although even then I think telemarketing has a right to more protection, not less. Why? Because a telemarketer never comes onto my property, and the only way he influences my property is through a means I open to him. The only reason to have a telephone that rings is to get called. 2: The aggreieved political minority/this isn’t real free speech argument. Firstly, I do think telemarketers are an aggreived political minority. Whatever you think of them, there’s little denying that. Most people support restrictions on telemarketers (thus the democratic telemarketing restrictions we’ve passed) and enact penalties against them through the political process. Now a lot of people think that since telemarketing transactions don’t have artistic or political or scientific or literary value, they shouldn’t be protected. Two thoughts there: Firstly, do to those who think that “Whatever telemarketers are selling, it’s not political, artistic, etc.,” do you therefore think that these telemarketing restrictions should have exceptions for: political organizations (they do), non-political organizations engaged in political speech (Nike urging you to support its corporate PAC, journalists hawking their new book, newspapers and newsmagazines offering your subscriptions, etc.), those hawking art (video subscriptions, davinci prints, playboy) or music, those selling books, or those engaged selling the products of science or learning (my university or some other university soliciting donations, eli lily telling me about the fabulous new things its doing, etc. etc. etc.)? I mean, a lot of commercial transactions do bear on the speech that “obviously” deserves protection. Even so, the greivance against “commercial speech” is one that lots of Libertarians (including Eugene Volokh and Judge Alex Kozinski) fight against. Why is speech worth less just because money is involved? What is it about a transaction to buy, say, cruise tickets, that makes it so much less worthy of protection than a transaction to, say, paint a watercolor? 3: I’m by no means advocating that one has an obligation to open oneself up to telemarketers, or that media providers have an obligation to make their services usable by all. No such thing. Instead what I’m saying is that your “right not to be called” isn’t of the same nature as a property right—it’s not the sort of “right” that we should trot out the police to defend, it’s more like the “right to be free of neighborhood eyesores,” or the “right to be free of annoying KKK protesters in downtown skokie” or even the “right to be free of big advertising billboards that you can see out of your kitchen window.” I understand that some people support these sorts of restrictions, but most Libertarians don’t support most of these, most of the time (yay equivocation!). The first question is whether the phone line running into my house is more like my property or like the outside world, and the second question is whether the person who’s calling it is trespassing it, or whether he’s simply dialing numbers into the public telephone grid, and by hooking up to it, I agree not to throw anybody in jail for the calls that come my way. Yes, screening has its costs, as does turning your ringer off, or hiring a butler. Some people maintain two phone lines (relatively cheap in this day and age), one public accessible line which they screen and one private line which they don’t. An even better solution is to get a pass-code answering machine and no ringer, which screens all incoming calls UNLESS the caller dials the special passcode (which you set and can change). This way, your mom can call you on 9/11 but you don’t have to talk to that guy selling you a new long-distance carrier, AND telemarketers can still place telephone calls without going to jail. Pareto. 4: Consistency. If you believe this, you should be consistent and let me a) spam your e-amil address, b) use your website to talk to you and c) believe no media company has the right to refuse anybody making use of their systems. As I hope I’ve explained, b and c are no-gos. If I set up a “Comments” section on my blog (baude.blogspot.com), I’d have no grounds for throwing people in jail depending on what they posted, but I’d be perfectly in line to delete the comments I didn’t like, to technologically block the people I didn’t like, or to simply not have a comments system altogether (which I don’t), for this very reason (and because I love getting email, which you should feel free to send). As to Spam, again no obligation to make it easy for people to send me Spam email, and I’m perfectly free to have addresses that receive email only from those who know the password (as i do) or to simply take the spam and block annoying addresses, or use a spam filter. Incidentally, feel free to spam me if you feel like it—my address is baude@uchicago.edu and i’m well acquainted with my delete key, so I have no trouble getting rid of the dozens of daily offers i get to naturally increase my breast size. All of this reminds me: David Friedman proposes a solution for Spam that I much like, and I think it could be turned into a solution for the telemarketing problem too. Re-rig phone charges so that anytime person A wants to place a call to person B, he pays 5 cents. The money goes not to the phone company, but from the caller to the callee. No money is lost for people who call back and forth a lot, but those who call millions of numbers a day in the hopes that a few of them will respond will have to face the economic realities of internalizing the externalities they cause. If you want to add a second layer of nuance to this plan, you could also let people set up a list of “friendly” numbers that don’t have to pay the 5 cent fee. Then the only people who would have to pay would be those who you don’t particularly care about talking to. 5 cents is nothing to anybody who’s actually got something to say (and likely to wash out in the end) but a great deal to somebody who’s calling my number at random. There you have it—the real Libertarian answer to the “telemarketing problem”.

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 14:03:44 +0000

“The fact that the list is voluntary lessens the evil but does not eliminate it. A seriously liberty-based belief in free speech should respect the right to speak to those who don’t want to listen, so long as they open themselves up in some way” If you believe this, you should be consistent and let me a) spam your e-amil address, b) use your website to talk to you and c) believe no media company has the right to refuse anybody making use of their systems. Your freedom of speech is balanced by my freedom to not listen. It does not guarantee you an audience. (This neatly illustrates why I believe any political philosophy based on some absolute right breaks down sooner or later, because they don’t provide guidance for what happens when rights conflict.)

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:40:12 +0000

Does the estimable Tyler Cowen really mean that I’m obliged to continue to take and listen to several calls a week for the foreseeable from the same double-glazing company in the name of free speech?

By: Tristan

Tristan — Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:11:59 +0000

Re: Will Baude’s Post: Protecting free speech implies protecting unpopular speech, which means “speech no one wants to listen to”. I also don’t buy the argument that my paying fot the telephone makes telemarketing a form of theft, since the telemarketers pay for their own calls (that argument does hold for email SPAM, though). However, I don’t see why unwanted speech has to be protected on my private communication pathways. When I turn on ad-subsidized television, I make a bargain with marketers – I will sit through their commercials in exchange for free programming. When I walk in a public venue (the street), I make a similar bargain – people have access to me there, and can accost me with their messages. I made no such bargain with the telephone company. When telemarketers, whether commercial, charitable, or political, call me at home, they substantially reduce the value and usability of my telephone. Hanging up, turning off the ringer, and screening with an answering machine (which I do) all interfere with my ability to communicate with associates (for example, when my mother called me from NYC on 9/11 at 7AM California time, I screened and lost the call). Why should anyone have the right to pollute my private communication channels with unsolicited noise? I think that no-call list should include ALL telemarketing, including political and charitable (with a possible exception for telephone surveys, though I recognize the possibility for abuse there – “hello sir, I am calling to do a ‘survey’ on your preferences with regards to buying our new vacuum cleaner”). And add door-to-door sales and noisemaker-based street vending to the list as well – when I’m in my own damned home, I want to be left alone, unless I explicitly choose to use a non-private communication channel such as a television, newspaper, or window. There are hundreds of ways for people to get their messages out. I’m a reasonably open minded guy; I’ll listen to your message if you present it in a legitimate venue (hell, I’m reading this blog, so I must be looking for ideas). Democracy can limp along without telepredators interrupting my breakfast, vendors blowing bicycle horns for an hour at a stretch while walking slowly up and down my street, and scientologists banging at my door. I don’t care if this is accomplished by government mandate or some sort of commercial arrangement (purchasing an ad-free line from the telco, for example). I’d prefer a non-law-enforcement solution, but the overriding concern is that it work reasonably well. Of course, I haven’t even signed up for the DNC list. I’m waiting to see if the charity and political TMs, who are excluded from it, actually purchase the list from the government, and use it as a source of known-good numbers.