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While it is refreshing to see that our state government has been working on ways to protect us from the nuisance of telemarketers, it is also obvious that our leaders are not going about this in the right way.
At the moment, a coalition that includes the governor, several legislators and some consumer groups is cobbling together a proposed law modeled on laws in Georgia and Florida.
If it were adopted, you could pay a small fee like $10 a
year. Then your name would go on a do not pester
list, and those who called you anyway could be fined.
In other words, the burden is on the citizen, rather
than on the violator. It's like telling women Unless
you pay $10 a year to put your name on a list of people who
prefer not to be raped, then the law will assume that you
are making yourself available.
The burden should go the other way, since telemarketing is a vile and loathsome enterprise.
At the least, it is a form of trespassing. I bought the phone from an electronics store -- the telemarketer didn't. I pay US West for the line every month -- the telemarketer doesn't. When other people use my property without my permission, they're trespassing just as much as if they were parking their cars in my yard without my permission.
In that case, the burden is on someone who wants to use my property -- he's got to get my permission first, or else he's committing a crime.
We might even consider telemarketing a form of theft. Nearly every day, it steals otherwise productive time from me, and there's no way to get around it.
Even if I slam down the phone as soon as I've answered
it and discovered that it's an aluminum-siding salesman or
an agent for a long-distance company making a misnamed
courtesy call,
I've still been interrupted, and my
time -- the only thing I have to sell -- has been stolen by
an unproductive activity which I did not invite.
Even if I let the answering machine grab the calls, then I've still got to play them back, and the spiels don't improve for being recorded.
And if it's after the workday and I'm eating dinner or
playing a game or watching TV or otherwise spending time
with my family, well, let's put it this way. Any candidate
who really cares about family values
should be proud
to sponsor legislation that imposes severe penalties for
those who intrude on family time -- especially for
commercial gain.
If the state was truly trying to protect us, telemarketers would be required to get a permission form, signed by everyone in the household, that consents to receiving calls from a given firm.
The consent would be for a limited time -- say one year -- and could be revoked upon 10 days' notice by anyone in the household. It would not be transferable, of course, and violation would be a felony with at least a two-year prison sentence for the first conviction.
This sounds extreme, but it's the only way that will work. A relatively toothless regulation might force Colorado companies to clean up their act a little, but what's to keep them from moving to Nebraska and continuing to violate Coloradans? How much effort would Colorado put into enforcing the law then?
But if it were a major felony, then law and order
candidates could start bragging on how much money they
appropriated for the attorney general and the Colorado
Bureau of Investigation to pursue these violators, and of
how many prisons they built to hold telemarketers. All
this energy that goes into protecting us from hemp farmers
would go toward some constructive purpose.
The law should apply to the people who actually made the call. I know they're just trying to make a living, but the same can be said of a lot of other people now in prison.
It should also apply to their supervisors and to the corporate officers -- they're part of the conspiracy. And why stop there?
Any local phone company that gets an order for 50 lines to be installed in a site that has no obvious other business purpose -- that is, there aren't any goods or services being produced or offered there -- is also part of the conspiracy, and its responsible officers should go to prison while its lines and switches should be subject to civil asset forfeiture.
Some might object to this on constitutional grounds, that such a law would be an infringement on free speech. It isn't. Free speech means I can carry a sign down the street. It doesn't mean I can walk into your house without your permission and shout at you.
So it should be possible for Colorado to protect its citizens from telepredators. But will it?
Kathy Oatis, who lobbies our legislature for the Direct
Marketing Association, said that telemarketing is a huge
industry in this state.
So I think we already know the answer.
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