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Re: Responses to "Spam costs and questions" (long)
On Sun, Jun 08, 1997 at 08:42:49AM -0500, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> "William H. Geiger III" <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > In <[email protected]>, on 06/07/97
> > at 12:54 PM, [email protected] (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",
[email protected] 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