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It was refreshing to read that the Colorado General Assembly is considering legislation to protect Colorado citizens from telephone solicitors.
Until I got past the headline, that is.
My own state senator, Republican Ken Chlouber of
Leadville, has teamed up with Steve Johnson, a Republican
representative from Fort Collins, to introduce a bill that
is supposed to allow Coloradans to decide for themselves
whether they want these calls.
Fine by me, but what they propose is business as usual for Republicans. They want to tax you and me for the benefit of big business.
That's not quite how they explain it, of course.
Instead of calling it a tax,
they're calling it an
annual subscription.
You'd pay $1 or $2 a year to
put your name on a do not call
list, and if some
telemarketer did call, there would be a fine of up to
$2,000.
The first thing that is wrong with this is that it puts the burden on the wrong party. I already pay for the line and the telephone; why should I pay more to prevent their misuse by obnoxious, greedy corporations?
If they want to try making money by using my telephone, then they should be paying, not me. The burden should be on the telepredators to produce lists of people who enjoy getting such calls.
This is like charging a yearly fee to put your name on a
list of people who don't want their cars stolen. When the
private sector does this, it is known as extortion,
not consumer protection.
So, instead of requiring you to go out of your way and to pay to be on a list, it should work the other way. Once a year, your friendly local telephone monopoly should send a form with the bill.
It would read something like this:
Yes, I would enjoy having people who can't pronounce
my name summon me from the shower, interrupt my dinner, or
disrupt my favorite television program in order to offer me
a great deal on aluminum siding or building lots with
360-degree mountain views. And I really like it when,
after I've raced to the phone, all I get is silence
followed by a dial tone because the first 12 calls were
already answered by the machine that dialed 24 at once. So
I hereby give my permission:
Only those people could be solicited by telephone, assuming the law had any meaning.
The part about $2,000 fines has to be a joke. Just how will this law be enforced if the telemarketer is calling from Omaha or Richmond?
I'm trying to imagine it. After getting a call, I'm supposed to call the sheriff, perhaps? And he's going to dispatch a deputy to Nebraska or Virginia to enforce a Colorado law? And find out whether the responsible party is the company with the product or service for sale, or the marketing company that it hired, or some list broker?
This law would have a minuscule effect, if any, on the businesses that can afford to hire telemarketers, but it would cost us to get on the list. Some deal.
As I've written earlier, the legislature could deal with this problem by expanding Colorado's criminal trespass laws -- the telepredators are using your line and your telephone without your consent. Make it a felony, put the fine for the first offense up to a deterrent level, like $100,000, and for the third conviction -- well, three strikes and they're out, with all their corporate officers serving life without possibility of parole.
Perhaps this sounds unduly harsh, but it's similar to how we treat drug dealers in this country, and no drug dealer has ever interrupted my work or my dinner, or started yelling at me when I said I wasn't interested.
But there's an easier way to do this, one that won't clog our courts and prisons.
All they have to do is modify the state's contract law,
so that any agreement based on an unsolicited telephone
call will not be enforced by Colorado courts, and further,
that no credit agency can report failure by a Colorado
resident to pay for something offered by a stranger calling
on the phone.
Coloradans could then launch a merry spree of ordering whatever we're offered, then canceling the charges, and propelling the telepredators toward bankruptcy.
Word would soon get out in the telepredator community, and their dialing machines would be programmed to avoid the 719, 970, 720 and 303 area codes.
That's how the legislature could protect us if it was serious about doing the job. Instead, they want us to pay while permitting the telepredators go about business as usual.
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