At 7:57 PM -0700 6/8/97, William H. Geiger III wrote:
So what you are saying that if I call up Widgits, Inc. and order product "X" that they advertizes does "Y". They instead send me product "X" that does "Z" not "Y" then I should have no recource? I should atleast be able to get my money back as they have not sold me the product that they claimed to be selling (clear violation of the "contract" between buyer and seller).
Contracts in a free society are a complicated issue. I suggest reading some of the usual literature on the subject, including Benson's "The Enterprise of Law," Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom, "Reason" magazine, etc. In your hypo above, even you are talking about after the fact redress, or contract arbitration. This is quite different from the increasing regulation of commercial speech in blanket forms (such as no liquor advertising within X yards of schools, no cigarette advertising without extensive mandated warnings, limitations on claims for medical products, etc.) In the hypo of ordering a product, an implicit contract is made. Phone orders are for the convenience of consumers like ourselves; corporations usually place "purchase orders," and these P.O.s almost always contain performance requirements. End consumers who are not happy buying from "PCs-R-Us" because they ordered a 200 MHz Pentium and instead received a 66 MHz 486 machine have plenty of recourses. They can almost certainly get their money back from the vendor (without their being laws on speech), they can call their credit card company and cancel the sale, they can take the matter to court or arbitration (not on free speech grounds, of course), and so on. Ultimately, "PCs-R-Us" would last for a short time in a competitive environment, and savvy buyers would avoid them. One of the best protections against the kind of hypothetical fraud William Geiger hypothesizes is _reputation_. Claiming that Big Brother needs to have laws limiting the speech of "commercial" speakers is not the right way to go. (And it wasn't even common until this century, especially the last 20 years.) --Tim May There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws. Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!" ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."