On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 08:42:49AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
In <199706071754.MAA01524@manifold.algebra.com>, on 06/07/97 at 12:54 PM, ichudov@Algebra.COM (Igor Chudov @ home) said:
There is a lot of commercial compelled speech. For example, mutual funds must say that past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Do you find this kind of compelled speech unconstitutional?
Well I don't know how Duncan feels about it but I think it's highly unconstutional.
I can still publish a book and claim that borshch (Russian beet soup) cures cancer. However if I also offer to sell beets my mail order, the FDA can bite me. It's "constitutional" because it protects the olygopoly of the large drug companies with political connections.
Drug regulation muddies the waters quite a bit -- the issue is commercial speech in general. And that issue is a more basic one -- some entity (the government, in this case) is designated as the "enforcer of contracts". Contracts are special documents that by their very nature involve "enforcement". What you say in a contract binds you. What you say outside of a contract does not. What you say in a contract is, therefore, and by definition, not "free". -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html