Like Oscar the Grouch, “I love spam.”
OK, not exactly. But, my position is a far sight different from Russ Roberts’s.
First, it is not entirely clear how to separate unsolicited commercial email offers from the dreaded category of “spam”. Being in the chemical engineering profession, I often receive email announcements regarding used pumps and vessels, courses on obscure engineering topics, enticements to order the latest saftey videos, new computer simulation products, etc. At what point does it become “spam”? Unfortunately, I think we can only apply the Stewart obscenity test: “I know it when I see it.”
Secondly, from an economic perspective, we should see the value in “spam”. Yes, it can be annoying. But, I much prefer to get a new credit card offer via email than in the mail or over the phone — I think a click to delete is less annoying and time-consuming. And, one should not overlook the information content. I have been advised via unsolicited commercial email, of offers of products and services that I didn’t even know existed. A few of these have interested me. The campaign against spam is partially a campaign against advertising itself, so the free-marketeer should guard himself accordingly. For a very brief but great overview of this topic, I recommend chapter 13 of Jim Cox’s Concise Guide to Economics.
Thirdly, I am decidedly against shunning or shaming folks who respond to “spam”. A sends to B and to C an unsolicited commercial offer to their respective boxes. B hates this and calls it spam. C likes this, and engages in mutually beneficial trade with A. What has C done wrong? For that matter, what has A done wrong? To send B a message he doesn’t want? How is A to know, a priori? If A did, he wouldn’t bother with the email to B. Even if A knowingly sends to B email that B does not want, C is not implicated in this offense.
Of course, all of this applies to the three boxes via which we regularly receive commercial offers: postal box, telephone box, and email box.
To summarize, I actually look forward to the increased use of “spam”. No, I don’t want to change my anatomy, but because of the stigma endorsed by Roberts, I don’t get circulars from my local grocery stores or gas stations when they have price reductions (but look here!), I don’t get Easton Press offers via email, or new insurance or security service offers, etc.
It is the height of civilization that I am bombarded with competing offers from many companies to better my life.
{ 8 comments }
It is not difficult to distinguish spam from mere unsolicited advertisements. Spam uses techniques to thwart spam filters (which an e-mail recipient must deliberately turn on or off, thus signaling their wish to receive or not receive it), and is almost universally delivered through someone else’s computer without their permission (to hide its true origin and prevent blocking).
Any system administrator of a machine on the internet can show you long logs of attempts to break into that machine to use it as a spam forwarder. The purpose of many computer viruses is to compromise the security of home machines to allow them to be used to forward spam or even serve as distributed ‘content’ servers. One would think that legal arguments against spamming would be straight-forward from this point-of-view, but I’ve never seen it argued this way.
“It is the height of civilization that I am bombarded with competing offers from many companies to better my life.”
I find it hard to believe that you really believe this. It is not an obligatory free market position to embrace spam. If you’re like most people and don’t like it, there are market solutions to the problem, as Lew Rockwell has already written about. You don’t need to favor silly legislation or email taxes.
Thant,
If you define spam as email that is delivered in violation of property rights, I agree in condemning it. However, the term tends to be wider, encompassing all unsolicited commercials offers received via email.
Jim,
I am indeed happy to receive many commercial offers. I actually like email offers better than phone or snail mail offers because they take less time for me to process.
Gil writes: “If you define spam as email that is delivered in violation of property rights, I agree in condemning it. However, the term tends to be wider, encompassing all unsolicited commercial offers received via email.”
Yes, it is exactly the tendency to phrase the argument in terms of free speech instead of property rights that confuses the issue. As we know, the right of free speech is derived from property rights. It is not something separate. My point is that if one categorizes spam as e-mail that is delivered in violation of property rights, you automatically pretty much match the “I know it when I see it” definition of spam. It also happens to be an astoundingly accurate rule-of-thumb for judging wheter the spam itself is likely to be fraudulent.
My cynicism toward government leads me to think that there are political interests that don’t want the issue of spam addressed in such straight-forward legal terms.
The real question to ask is “do we not have control over our own mailboxes/telephones/etc”?
What we need to get is a tool that puts up a “No Soliciting” sign in front of our mailboxes/telephones as a default. That way, each individual can choose to “opt into” the advertising stream. That way an action is required on the part of each individual to decide what is best for him/herself. The advertisers can broadcast all they want. We just do not have to listen. Nor do we have to put up with junk mail, telemarketers, nor spam if we choose not to!
All that would be needed in this case is for the government to enforce property rights law. Those who advertise (use spam/junk mail/telephones) to the people with the “No soliciting” option would have to face fines for violating the property rights of the individual they contacted without permission.
And here is a nice article by Michael Judge on the meat product called Spam and the museum in Austin, Minnesota, dedicated to it. Actually the article could have been improved with more focus on the wonderful entrepreneurial innovation that Spam represented. No refrigeration available and no farm animals around? You can still eat meat. Here is a spam-related gift shop.
I just commented on this here
I have to change my email address every year or so, since I get so much spam. At 400 to 500 a day, and given that many now include large graphics files, spam can quickly fill up your quota at the ISP. It’s not so bad if you download your email regularly, but what if you want to go on vacation for two or three weeks? Should I have to leave my computer running at home so that all that mail can be downloaded and not fill up my quota? If I don’t, then after a day or so, my quota is full, and any further mail gets bounced back to the sender. So mail that I may very well want to get won’t ever come through because of the spammers.
I can go to the Post Office and ask them not to deliver mail while I’m away. I can do the same with UPS and Fedex. But there’s no way to do it with email.
As has been written elsewhere, spam is a violation of property rights. Spammers go to great lengths to defeat efforts to block their email. You can set a filter in your software to block mail from a particular address. If a spammer was considerate of my property rights, he would always use the same “from” address. That way, if I wanted his email, it would come through. If I didn’t want it, I could set a filter to block mail from that address. But spammers constantly change the “from” address of their email, defeating the filters. It’s as though everyone in my neighborhood has an almost identical key to their house. The keys can fit into every lock in the neighborhood. But there’s a bit of electronics in the key that identifies each key. And every lock can be set to accept or reject each key in the neighborhood. If I want everyone but Mr. Smith to be free to enter my house whenever they please, I set my lock to deny only Mr. Smith entry. That could work quite well, unless Mr. Smith figures out a way to defeat my block on his key. Now Mr. Smith can enter my home whenever he wants, along with all the other neighbors. But whereas all the other neighbors are welcome in my home, he is not. So when he enters, he is violating my private property rights. What he has done is directly analagous to the spammer changing his email address after I set a filter.
Comments on this entry are closed.