I quote the eloquent uh_clem when I say, “Whaaaa?”

I think a telemarketer should defer some of my cost of having that phone if they want to call me and pitch some product or service. I will gladly accept their calls to alleviate my bills. If I routinely decline to purchase, let that be part of my permanent record and eventually the telemarketers will stop calling.

Where’s Jim? Tell him I need one of those coconut phones.

That was before they started using recordings that couldn’t be talked to for just this purpose. And they started outsourcing to foreign countries, but there’s no real practical way to deal with THAT…

Why are you guys such whiners? Screen your calls yourself, or just pick up the phone and tell them not to call back. I guarantee that the same people complaining about this above are the ones that listen to the telemarketer’s full speech, the rebuttal, and the closing b/c they don’t have the nuts to just say hey, quit f****** calling and leave me alone.

Solveig Singleton the director of Tech at CEI, has written a few op-eds about this that I suggest everyone read.

So the feds instituted the DNC regulations.

Why such bile? Did a telemarketer kill your pa?

If you want to have a discussion, let’s have one. But if your only reason to venture over to my site was to make two lame points and then attack me personally, you’ve really done little more than make yourself look foolish.

Didn’t you get your licks in over at Drezner’s site? Let’s debate like grown-ups. Otherwise, I’d invite you to go elsewhere.

As for your two points:

1) The Do Not Call List prevents private telephone companies from selling numbers to telemarketing firms. At the very least, it diminishes the value of those contracts.

It also creates a federal right to commercial-free phone service. As someone who believes in federalism, I have a problem with that. It is an affirmative right. I don’t believe in affirmative rights.

2) Actually, voluntary speed limits do work, better in fact than enforced speed limits. We have speed limits now. How many people do you know who always drive the speed limit? How many people do you know who ever drive exactly at or below the speed limit?

Accident fatality rates fell across the country after the ’94 Republican Congress relaxed the 55 mph speed limit requirements. And Montana, which has no speed limit at all, has one of the best traffic records in the country.

Speed limits don’t stop people from speeding. Nor do they make the streets safer. They’re revenue generators for city and state governments. Nothing more. They’re completely arbitrary. Check out the National Motorists Association for the numbers to back this up. They’ll tell you that our roads are designed knowing that people speed. They’re designed to facilitate speeding. If everyone drove the speed limit, we’d have gridlock.

As for your general point — that federal coercion works better than voluntarism — I guess I’d merely point you to a couple thousand years of human history for evidence to the contrary. It’s also a dangerous idea. Why not just have the federal government dictate via fiat all behavior it desires from the private sector?

The DMA list has worked pretty well. Not perfect. But given all else the federal government does so well (that’s sarcasm), and given all the loopholes in this law, you’re awfully naive if you think the FTC is going to manage its list any better.