Skip Oliva writes:

I’m not entirely surprised that your attack on the Do Not Call list has produced a backlash even among libertarians. It’s not just this issue that produces a blind spot among normally intelligent people, but the agency maintaining the list as well, the Federal Trade Commission.

I study the FTC for a living, so I know where they bury all the bodies, but nobody in the media, even the libertarian outlets, seem to pay attention. Under the Bush administration, the FTC has actually become more adamant in opposing free trade and individual rights, yet whatever press coverage the agency receives is uniformly positive, especially since the Do Not Call list came around.

Here’s one example of how the FTC operates: Last year they sued a small California software company to undo a merger that they had completed *three years* earlier. The FTC said the company unfairly monopolized the market for a particular software product–specifically a software product invented by the company! What makes this case noteworthy is that three of the company’s competitors opposed the case, saying the market worked fine without FTC intervention. The FTC however is composed of antitrust lawyers, and one can’t be an antitrust lawyer unless they know how to govern every sector of the U.S. economy. Needless to say, the pleas fell on deaf ears.

And I have plenty more horror stories where that came from…

But I’m sure the FTC will do a bang-up job managing the do-not-call list, all evidence and prior history to the contrary.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2003 at 3:42 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.