All people with IQ>80 would prefer to avoid mega-sites like Facebook, MySpace, Tweeter, and the like - except of course when their potential customers are using them. Putting that much content in the hands of a few government-worshiping corporations is a very bad thing for individual freedom. Once you become addicted it's very hard to liberate your content or change your communication habits, and "the powers that be" can throw any content they don't like down the memory hole at any time. Instead of being the great network of freedom the Internet may become nothing more but a centrally-planned dungeon of entrapment and deceit!
Down with Big Brother! Long live small self-hosted Web-sites, independently hosted blogs, small forums, and so on!
The only site I want to see with >5% of total Internet usage is Wikipedia, and even that should be more decentralized with more static mirrors and diff-script forks.
The Linux kernel, Firefox, and graphical toolkits (and things built on top of them) are running on their momentum (i.e. the "viral" effect), but have you noticed how newly successful projects overwhelmingly tend to have permissive licenses like Apache (as is the case with Cassandra), BSD, MIT, PHP, Python, and so on?
In won't be government agencies that will develop the first successful seasteads (and someday spacesteads), it will be the people trying to get away from them!
Why must his picture be attached to every story about science as if he was a messiah of some sort? Yes, he was a great scientist, but not far-and-away greatest, and he had many personal faults as well. Much of his pop culture and media hype is simply created due to his socialist politics and nothing more!
Taxation, inflation, and other forms of THEFT will be used to pay for this involuntary "service" to the detriment of the voluntary (aka private) sector, and it will further empower the government to control the Internet.
I'm a big fan of free broadband WiFi provided by neighborhood associations, local business alliances, charities, etc, etc, etc - but not by an overgrown mafia organization with a monopoly on violent force!
They are forcing a nag on users to Microsoft's disadvantage. If you ran a successful local business, like a restaurant, how would you feel if the government made you hand out brochures or menus for all your competitors to everyone who walked through your door, even though you worked hard all your life to build up your client base and those competitors just opened shop?
And they're not forcing Google for example to put up a select-box asking if their visitors want to search Yahoo or Bing instead! Government interventionism is never fair or logical, government is like mafia - they reward their friends and punish their enemies. Empowering the government to think for the consumers encourages a culture of helplessness, and it's like hiring the fox to guard the hen-house!
Those people already chose to buy / pirate Microsoft software, or to buy computers with Microsoft software pre-installed. And they were always free to download any other browser or operating system they want. Forcing this ballot screen on them was nothing but tyrannical socialist interventionism to make government bureaucrats look good and nothing more!
Using government force to hurt the competent and benefit the incompetent is unfair, immoral, economically destructive, and contrary to the values that make a free society possible. Remember that the only type of monopoly that has ever existed in history is government - for everything else marketplace always provides a choice. Governments don't give you a ballot screen with individual choice - they point a gun at your head and tell you what to do!
Yet another bullshit statistic Euro-socialists like to throw in our faces bites the dust! (Click here for some others...) USA isn't perfect, but it's still one of the freest economies in the world.
Socialism / liberal democracy in Europe is a failure, as it is all over the world. Any European countries that are doing OK are wealthy not because of socialism, but in spite of it, and at the cost of a massive demographic collapse. You can't reject the immutable laws of economics, which all point to free market capitalism as the ideal, any more than you can reject the laws of physics!
One would think that a company like Sony would be able to make money in the free market without the use of government force (i.e. patents), but you can't really blame them for using them. Their use of patents is the natural and unavoidable evolutionary result of having to work in a business environment where if they didn't use government force their competitors would, so instead of Sony, Microsoft, etc you'd simply have other nearly-identical companies, just with a different name.
Whenever you read a story about a company using government force to get its way (patents, copyright, "eminent domain", pork barrel contracts, corporate welfare, bailouts, military / prison / security industrial complex, etc, etc, etc) don't blame them - blame the government instead!
It's amazing that the mainstream public can be this economically retarded, but it isn't very surprising given that their education is controlled by the government - the very entity that benefits from these sorts of regulations.
Individuals, including children, choose to work in "sweatshops" because that is better than other alternatives available to them: backbreaking subsistence agriculture, crime, prostitution, etc. Simply outlawing free market in labor will not make schools, hospitals, and personal wealth rain from the sky! Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks and skyscrapers in just a couple of generations, while the "well-intentioned" socialist cesspools remain poor except for the handouts of others (often too through government force).
... archiving (i.e. anonymous cache proxy) and extending the old, with 100% private locally-owned "last mile" underground wiring, or better yet wireless mesh infrastructure that would be very difficult for the government to subvert and control. Of course such a project would benefit from a sufficient density of liberty-loving individuals habitating in close proximity to each-other, but luckily we a already have the Free State Project gradually taking shape in New Hampshire.
Only the fools are being fooled by the governments. Sooner or later, Atlas will shrug!
Freedom of speech does cover ALL speech (any possible quality or quantity of information coming from the speaker's body or other property), as is evidenced by the logical possibility of any speech taboo being misused as a vehicle of further government repression, and passing laws to the contrary does not change that fact any more than a law redefining the value of Pi will change the basic facts of geometry!
If you don't want to be harassed then don't use e-mail, don't go outside, disconnect all your electronic devices, and just hide under a table with your head between your legs and chant "nee nee nee, can't hear you, nee nee nee". If you want to deal with the outside world that has other people in it, however, then you do have to come to terms with the fact that some people want to waste your time trying to sell you useless crap, and you, as a self-owning adult, are expected to be able to deal with those annoyances. I never had any problems applying effective spam filtering, and an organized campaign of boycotting all products and services advertised through spam could eradicate it completely. As mentioned numerous times before, there are technologically-superior alternatives to the current e-mail protocols that make spamming next to impossible. It is merit-based competition of ideas that solves problems like spam; the use of government prohibitionism only empowers criminals and unaccountable bureaucrats while weakening everyone else in the process!
Putting blind faith in Mommy Government to wipe your Inboxhole for you is too costly, too unreliable, and has far too many dangerous consequences for us all!
---
I just wanted to offload the above message, because I typed it last night before discovering that I was limited to 2 posts per 24 hours again. Slashdot is a cesspool of socialist censorship, and no serious person should ever waste his or her time trying to debate here while there are plenty of better forums where they can go instead!
I stand by my previous statements about Natural Rights, as well as my previous conclusion that Slashdot is not an ideal place for a deep philosophical debate - my karma can fall through the floor at any time (GNU sucks!), leaving me unable to respond. If you want to discuss the issue of Natural Rights you can come to a libertarian / Objectivist / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead.
There is a clear difference between sending an e-mail and damaging someone's physical property. The first involves use of a server / protocol / e-mail account that you yourself created and left open for connection. It is your responsibility to define the automatic rules under which other mail servers are able to send you mail, just as it is your responsibility to decide who you let into your home or place of business. You are free to put a fence around your yard and an "all trespassers shot on sight" sign, but most people choose not to do that because they do enjoy an occasional visitor now and again. (And being an antisocial creep just doesn't pay in the long-run.) If some Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door, you are free not to let them in, and you are free to ask them to leave later, and you can sue them if they do any physical damage to your property, etc, but you cannot just sue them for wasting your time or space inside your house - it was your decision to let them enter in the first place!
You are free to live in a neighborhood that doesn't have any contractual restrictions, and you can free to live in the middle of nowhere - that is your choice. But government is very different - pretty much every municipality has tens of thousands of pages of legal code all its residents are automatically subject to (often homogenized from above), and many Federal laws (i.e. taxation) apply to you no matter what continent or planet you are on! Getting rid of your citizenship is next to impossible, except maybe to be transferred to another plantation that is no less tyrannical. It's like that dialogue from the film Braveheart...
Executioner: William Wallace, you stand in taint of High Treason.
William: Against whom?
Executioner: Against your king. Have you anything to say?
William: Never in my whole life did I swear allegiance to him.
No, it's not "window dressing", it is the difference between acting with your rights and having your rights violated, like the difference between lovemaking and rape!
There is such a thing as a social contract (see my rant about Natural Rights above), but it is based on empiricism, not semi-elected (local election turnout percentile is often in single digits) demagogue bureaucrats! Noise levels are subjective and they represent a value trade-off: do you want to pay a little more to have the garbage trucks soundproofed or do you want to save money and endure a little noise, etc. That decision can be made on an individual, family, or neighborhood association level, and, yes, in some cases municipality-wide laws do make sense. What we're talking about with CAN SPAM is completely different: an empire that has spread itself by the sword "from sea to shining sea" and beyond!
Democracy doesn't scale very well beyond a few dozen people, and it definitely doesn't scale to three hundred million!
A spammer can't just connect to your computer and place advertisements there against your will, the appearance of spam on your computer is a consequence of your own actions, including your choice to use the Internet and e-mail in the first place. You choose to use a technology where anyone can send you a message, you deal with the consequences. Use a more privacy-oriented technology, and the ways of spamming you are greatly reduced.
Natural economic laws on which the concept of Natural Rights is based are not imposed by anyone - they simply exist, like the laws of physics. No one just decided that "murder is wrong", but it has been demonstrated by evolution that a society that fails to punish arbitrary murder (i.e. recognize the natural Right to Life) can't even establish a stable agrarian society, much less achieve the level of civilization that we have today! The same demonstrably applies to the Rights to Liberty and Property, Parents' Rights, Free Speech, and so forth. Furthermore, Natural Rights are self-enforcing, because you don't need to rob Peter to pay Paul to recognize Paul's Right to Life - Paul himself and the vast majority of his friends and neighbors are incentivized to protect Paul's negative rights, lest the murder shall come after them next! You were born into this reality which is subject to these natural laws, and if you don't like it then you should free to kill yourself at any time.
You DO have the Natural Right to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater IF you have that theater owner's permission, though the theater owner will have a hard time finding customers if he neglects their comfort and safety on his premises. "Deliberately and maliciously spread damaging falsehoods" may in fact constitute fraud, in which case many libertarians believe you should be able to sue the perpetrator for damages, but this is not what this CAN SPAM regulation is all about.
All forms of government intervention in individual freedom have negative consequences, though in our still-barbarous times examples of government dysfunction are so many they all overshadow each-other. Freedom of Speech is an essential right not because every idiot deserves a soapbox (or access to your Inbox), but because the government is not an institution that can be trusted to regulate speech in any conceivable way. Even laws passed with the best intentions can become corrupted and misused over time, if not now then ten generations from now, and they can be selectively enforced by government thugs to reward their friends and punish their enemies. An elite Chinese Communist Party official can watch all the government-confiscated "kiddy porn" he wants and get away with it, while an innocent dissident can have it planted on his computer as an excuse to vilify and arrest him!
There are many better ways to protect yourself from undesirable 1's and 0's without resorting to government force!
Any good residential neighborhood should have contractual obligations placed on its residents as a prerequisite to moving in. Don't like the rules, live somewhere else. This is an issue of contract law, very different from this travesty of government interventionism that neither I nor the people sending me spam have ever signed. It would become a criminal matter only if I can prove actual damage was done to my property by an outside source, but that just isn't feasible for matters like spam e-mail.
You do not have a positive "right" to peace and quiet, that is a right to force other people to shut the hell up on their own property. Peace and quiet, as well as privacy, are a luxury that you have to pay for - good soundproof windows with blinds that close when you want privacy, a home in a less densely populated place or a neighborhood with explicit noise rules, spam filters, and so forth.
Once again, it is your power and responsibility to make sure your e-mail server is configured to act with your consent, accepting or rejecting messages based on your own criteria. If you don't like what some idiot is shouting on his or her own property, then don't listen to him. The involvement of government force is completely unnecessary, and will have very dangerous consequences in the future.
Natural Rights is an empirically-provable concept based on economic behavior of self-interested actors with capacity for individual thought - regardless of their race, gender, religion, nationality, or even species! The issue of foreign government-controlled corporations is, once again, a problem of government, which I oppose in all its forms, not an issue of people who unite into voluntary corporations and their Natural Right to Free Speech!
Thomas Jefferson meant precisely this in his quote about "corporations" - European government-enforced monopolies like the East India Company. And Thomas Jefferson is not the latest word on the science of Natural Rights - I'd recommend Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and the so-called Austrian School of Free Market economics. Corporations would still exist in a 100% free society, but without "limited liability", "corporate welfare", and other benefits governments bribe them with today. Without those ill-gotten benefits, there is virtually no difference between the commonly-vilified concept of a "greedy corporations" and any other social institution - a small shop, a charity, a church, a residential neighborhood, a Web-site, and so on. And every family is a corporation too!
The Natural Right to Freedom of Speech is needed precisely for unpopular speech such as "spam" and even "kiddy porn" - a canary in the coal mine for more egregious government assaults on your freedoms!
It is your responsibility to decide what means you use to communicate with other people, and if you choose to use a ridiculously poorly designed protocol like e-mail then it is your (or your e-mail hosting provider's) responsibility to control who connects to your mail servers and how messages are to be accepted or rejected. There are many better technological solutions out there, and the CAN SPAM bull will only help proliferate the bad technologies at the expense of the good, while also hurting legitimate communication needs, and resulting in a corrupt and inefficient bureaucratic cesspool that will cost tax-victims billions!
Getting the government involved is the very worst thing you can do, and it has horrifying consequences down the road - spam today, other unpopular speech tomorrow, total tyrannical thought control the day after that!
And what data would you feed into this hypothetical Holodeck simulation that would skew the results in your favor? Virtually all historical examples demonstrate the comparative triumph of Free Market Capitalism over all alternatives every single time! From the anthropogenic analysis of early cavemen tribes to the present-day correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, you will find that hard econometric facts will fall in my favor, precisely because they are the very basis of my philosophy. If economic facts had pointed to communism or fascism as a better solution, then I'd be a communist or a fascist instead.
A society becomes an oppressive dictatorship (like every society is today to some degree) when there exists a power gap that the tyrants are able to fill. Modern Free Market libertarianism is the only political philosophy (or rather a group of similar but distinct political philosophies) that closes that gap tightly by empowering those who should have rightful power over their lives in the first place - the individuals themselves. Sure, "everybody wants to rule the world", as the song goes, but everyone will encounter billions of well-informed well-armed individuals who don't want to be ruled by others. The various "Bill Gates will take over the world" nonsense scenarios have been debunked ad nausium. Only a centralized government can ever accumulate (i.e. steal) enough capital to build and maintain a legal liability like a nuclear warhead or an aircraft carrier and get away with it! Only the "divine right of governments" delusion makes tyranny possible in the modern age!
Free Market Capitalism doesn't mean "no rules", it is based on very strict and universal rules, but they are grounded on well-established scientific facts, not arbitrary whim of corrupt political demagogues. Natural Rights (life, liberty, property, parents' rights, freedom of contract, etc) are things that haven't been made up by men, but they were discovered as being essential components to a stable human society, and in many cases this discovery has been recognized for thousands of years. Natural Rights come from the principle of competitive advantage: a society that violates Natural Rights the least would have an empirically-observable materialistic advantage over other societies that violate them more. It's almost as clear-cut as penicillin, except of course you can't observe human societies through a microscope, and the lenses of history are blurred by pro-government bias that funds and controls most knowledge-related institutions. Violating Natural Rights is no different than trying to violate the laws of physics - it simply won't work in the long term.
Most specific rules beyond that would come from the legitimate authority of private property owners: your house, your rules. A neighborhood-owned road or a for-profit toll road will likely still have stop signs and speed limits, but it will not be a monopoly - you will have a choice whose roads you drive on and pay for (and in absence of the government-induced artificial energy famine we've had for the last century most people would have flying cars anyway). And whether you are allowed to to "yell fire in a crowded theater" should be entirely up to the owner of that theater - don't like the rules, don't go to the establishment, go somewhere else instead. Modern information technology makes it ever-easier to automatically inform people whose property they are approaching and what their rules happen to be.
Granted the Minarchist / Anarcho-Capitalist debate remains a relevant issue, as it probably will for a very long time, but that disagreement is over whether the government needs to be shrunk by 99% or 100% in the long term. Ayn Rand, a Minarchist, believed that the ideal government should be so small that at peacetime it could be funded entirely
Slashdot Mirror
All people with IQ>80 would prefer to avoid mega-sites like Facebook, MySpace, Tweeter, and the like - except of course when their potential customers are using them. Putting that much content in the hands of a few government-worshiping corporations is a very bad thing for individual freedom. Once you become addicted it's very hard to liberate your content or change your communication habits, and "the powers that be" can throw any content they don't like down the memory hole at any time. Instead of being the great network of freedom the Internet may become nothing more but a centrally-planned dungeon of entrapment and deceit!
Down with Big Brother! Long live small self-hosted Web-sites, independently hosted blogs, small forums, and so on!
The only site I want to see with >5% of total Internet usage is Wikipedia, and even that should be more decentralized with more static mirrors and diff-script forks.
Looks like all the e-mails I've recently sent Theo went straight to his head...
lulz
The Linux kernel, Firefox, and graphical toolkits (and things built on top of them) are running on their momentum (i.e. the "viral" effect), but have you noticed how newly successful projects overwhelmingly tend to have permissive licenses like Apache (as is the case with Cassandra), BSD, MIT, PHP, Python, and so on?
In won't be government agencies that will develop the first successful seasteads (and someday spacesteads), it will be the people trying to get away from them!
Why must his picture be attached to every story about science as if he was a messiah of some sort? Yes, he was a great scientist, but not far-and-away greatest, and he had many personal faults as well. Much of his pop culture and media hype is simply created due to his socialist politics and nothing more!
It does have to cost a lot of money and create a lot of crony jobs.
It does NOT have to provide a return on investment or tangible benefit of any kind.
If you don't agree with how the government spends you money, then you're just a flat-earth creationist cannibal child rapist who needs to STFU.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!
Taxation, inflation, and other forms of THEFT will be used to pay for this involuntary "service" to the detriment of the voluntary (aka private) sector, and it will further empower the government to control the Internet.
I'm a big fan of free broadband WiFi provided by neighborhood associations, local business alliances, charities, etc, etc, etc - but not by an overgrown mafia organization with a monopoly on violent force!
They are forcing a nag on users to Microsoft's disadvantage. If you ran a successful local business, like a restaurant, how would you feel if the government made you hand out brochures or menus for all your competitors to everyone who walked through your door, even though you worked hard all your life to build up your client base and those competitors just opened shop?
And they're not forcing Google for example to put up a select-box asking if their visitors want to search Yahoo or Bing instead! Government interventionism is never fair or logical, government is like mafia - they reward their friends and punish their enemies. Empowering the government to think for the consumers encourages a culture of helplessness, and it's like hiring the fox to guard the hen-house!
Those people already chose to buy / pirate Microsoft software, or to buy computers with Microsoft software pre-installed. And they were always free to download any other browser or operating system they want. Forcing this ballot screen on them was nothing but tyrannical socialist interventionism to make government bureaucrats look good and nothing more!
Using government force to hurt the competent and benefit the incompetent is unfair, immoral, economically destructive, and contrary to the values that make a free society possible. Remember that the only type of monopoly that has ever existed in history is government - for everything else marketplace always provides a choice. Governments don't give you a ballot screen with individual choice - they point a gun at your head and tell you what to do!
Yet another bullshit statistic Euro-socialists like to throw in our faces bites the dust! ( Click here for some others ...) USA isn't perfect, but it's still one of the freest economies in the world.
Socialism / liberal democracy in Europe is a failure, as it is all over the world. Any European countries that are doing OK are wealthy not because of socialism, but in spite of it, and at the cost of a massive demographic collapse. You can't reject the immutable laws of economics, which all point to free market capitalism as the ideal, any more than you can reject the laws of physics!
Seriously.
FreeStateProject.org
LQ = libertarian quotient.
Those who stay deserve whatever they will get.
One would think that a company like Sony would be able to make money in the free market without the use of government force (i.e. patents), but you can't really blame them for using them. Their use of patents is the natural and unavoidable evolutionary result of having to work in a business environment where if they didn't use government force their competitors would, so instead of Sony, Microsoft, etc you'd simply have other nearly-identical companies, just with a different name.
Whenever you read a story about a company using government force to get its way (patents, copyright, "eminent domain", pork barrel contracts, corporate welfare, bailouts, military / prison / security industrial complex, etc, etc, etc) don't blame them - blame the government instead!
It's amazing that the mainstream public can be this economically retarded, but it isn't very surprising given that their education is controlled by the government - the very entity that benefits from these sorts of regulations.
Individuals, including children, choose to work in "sweatshops" because that is better than other alternatives available to them: backbreaking subsistence agriculture, crime, prostitution, etc. Simply outlawing free market in labor will not make schools, hospitals, and personal wealth rain from the sky! Free market economies are able to go from child labor and sweatshops to banks and skyscrapers in just a couple of generations, while the "well-intentioned" socialist cesspools remain poor except for the handouts of others (often too through government force).
... archiving (i.e. anonymous cache proxy) and extending the old, with 100% private locally-owned "last mile" underground wiring, or better yet wireless mesh infrastructure that would be very difficult for the government to subvert and control. Of course such a project would benefit from a sufficient density of liberty-loving individuals habitating in close proximity to each-other, but luckily we a already have the Free State Project gradually taking shape in New Hampshire.
Only the fools are being fooled by the governments. Sooner or later, Atlas will shrug!
Freedom of speech does cover ALL speech (any possible quality or quantity of information coming from the speaker's body or other property), as is evidenced by the logical possibility of any speech taboo being misused as a vehicle of further government repression, and passing laws to the contrary does not change that fact any more than a law redefining the value of Pi will change the basic facts of geometry!
If you don't want to be harassed then don't use e-mail, don't go outside, disconnect all your electronic devices, and just hide under a table with your head between your legs and chant "nee nee nee, can't hear you, nee nee nee". If you want to deal with the outside world that has other people in it, however, then you do have to come to terms with the fact that some people want to waste your time trying to sell you useless crap, and you, as a self-owning adult, are expected to be able to deal with those annoyances. I never had any problems applying effective spam filtering, and an organized campaign of boycotting all products and services advertised through spam could eradicate it completely. As mentioned numerous times before, there are technologically-superior alternatives to the current e-mail protocols that make spamming next to impossible. It is merit-based competition of ideas that solves problems like spam; the use of government prohibitionism only empowers criminals and unaccountable bureaucrats while weakening everyone else in the process!
Putting blind faith in Mommy Government to wipe your Inboxhole for you is too costly, too unreliable, and has far too many dangerous consequences for us all!
---
I just wanted to offload the above message, because I typed it last night before discovering that I was limited to 2 posts per 24 hours again. Slashdot is a cesspool of socialist censorship, and no serious person should ever waste his or her time trying to debate here while there are plenty of better forums where they can go instead!
I stand by my previous statements about Natural Rights, as well as my previous conclusion that Slashdot is not an ideal place for a deep philosophical debate - my karma can fall through the floor at any time (GNU sucks!), leaving me unable to respond. If you want to discuss the issue of Natural Rights you can come to a libertarian / Objectivist / Anarcho-Capitalist forum instead.
There is a clear difference between sending an e-mail and damaging someone's physical property. The first involves use of a server / protocol / e-mail account that you yourself created and left open for connection. It is your responsibility to define the automatic rules under which other mail servers are able to send you mail, just as it is your responsibility to decide who you let into your home or place of business. You are free to put a fence around your yard and an "all trespassers shot on sight" sign, but most people choose not to do that because they do enjoy an occasional visitor now and again. (And being an antisocial creep just doesn't pay in the long-run.) If some Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door, you are free not to let them in, and you are free to ask them to leave later, and you can sue them if they do any physical damage to your property, etc, but you cannot just sue them for wasting your time or space inside your house - it was your decision to let them enter in the first place!
PS: tax resisters don't drive.
You are free to live in a neighborhood that doesn't have any contractual restrictions, and you can free to live in the middle of nowhere - that is your choice. But government is very different - pretty much every municipality has tens of thousands of pages of legal code all its residents are automatically subject to (often homogenized from above), and many Federal laws (i.e. taxation) apply to you no matter what continent or planet you are on! Getting rid of your citizenship is next to impossible, except maybe to be transferred to another plantation that is no less tyrannical. It's like that dialogue from the film Braveheart...
Executioner: William Wallace, you stand in taint of High Treason.
William: Against whom?
Executioner: Against your king. Have you anything to say?
William: Never in my whole life did I swear allegiance to him.
Executioner: It matters not. He is your king.
No, it's not "window dressing", it is the difference between acting with your rights and having your rights violated, like the difference between lovemaking and rape!
There is such a thing as a social contract (see my rant about Natural Rights above), but it is based on empiricism, not semi-elected (local election turnout percentile is often in single digits) demagogue bureaucrats! Noise levels are subjective and they represent a value trade-off: do you want to pay a little more to have the garbage trucks soundproofed or do you want to save money and endure a little noise, etc. That decision can be made on an individual, family, or neighborhood association level, and, yes, in some cases municipality-wide laws do make sense. What we're talking about with CAN SPAM is completely different: an empire that has spread itself by the sword "from sea to shining sea" and beyond!
Democracy doesn't scale very well beyond a few dozen people, and it definitely doesn't scale to three hundred million!
A spammer can't just connect to your computer and place advertisements there against your will, the appearance of spam on your computer is a consequence of your own actions, including your choice to use the Internet and e-mail in the first place. You choose to use a technology where anyone can send you a message, you deal with the consequences. Use a more privacy-oriented technology, and the ways of spamming you are greatly reduced.
Natural economic laws on which the concept of Natural Rights is based are not imposed by anyone - they simply exist, like the laws of physics. No one just decided that "murder is wrong", but it has been demonstrated by evolution that a society that fails to punish arbitrary murder (i.e. recognize the natural Right to Life) can't even establish a stable agrarian society, much less achieve the level of civilization that we have today! The same demonstrably applies to the Rights to Liberty and Property, Parents' Rights, Free Speech, and so forth. Furthermore, Natural Rights are self-enforcing, because you don't need to rob Peter to pay Paul to recognize Paul's Right to Life - Paul himself and the vast majority of his friends and neighbors are incentivized to protect Paul's negative rights, lest the murder shall come after them next! You were born into this reality which is subject to these natural laws, and if you don't like it then you should free to kill yourself at any time.
You DO have the Natural Right to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater IF you have that theater owner's permission, though the theater owner will have a hard time finding customers if he neglects their comfort and safety on his premises. "Deliberately and maliciously spread damaging falsehoods" may in fact constitute fraud, in which case many libertarians believe you should be able to sue the perpetrator for damages, but this is not what this CAN SPAM regulation is all about.
All forms of government intervention in individual freedom have negative consequences, though in our still-barbarous times examples of government dysfunction are so many they all overshadow each-other. Freedom of Speech is an essential right not because every idiot deserves a soapbox (or access to your Inbox), but because the government is not an institution that can be trusted to regulate speech in any conceivable way. Even laws passed with the best intentions can become corrupted and misused over time, if not now then ten generations from now, and they can be selectively enforced by government thugs to reward their friends and punish their enemies. An elite Chinese Communist Party official can watch all the government-confiscated "kiddy porn" he wants and get away with it, while an innocent dissident can have it planted on his computer as an excuse to vilify and arrest him!
There are many better ways to protect yourself from undesirable 1's and 0's without resorting to government force!
Any good residential neighborhood should have contractual obligations placed on its residents as a prerequisite to moving in. Don't like the rules, live somewhere else. This is an issue of contract law, very different from this travesty of government interventionism that neither I nor the people sending me spam have ever signed. It would become a criminal matter only if I can prove actual damage was done to my property by an outside source, but that just isn't feasible for matters like spam e-mail.
You do not have a positive "right" to peace and quiet, that is a right to force other people to shut the hell up on their own property. Peace and quiet, as well as privacy, are a luxury that you have to pay for - good soundproof windows with blinds that close when you want privacy, a home in a less densely populated place or a neighborhood with explicit noise rules, spam filters, and so forth.
Once again, it is your power and responsibility to make sure your e-mail server is configured to act with your consent, accepting or rejecting messages based on your own criteria. If you don't like what some idiot is shouting on his or her own property, then don't listen to him. The involvement of government force is completely unnecessary, and will have very dangerous consequences in the future.
Debunked elsewhere.
Natural Rights is an empirically-provable concept based on economic behavior of self-interested actors with capacity for individual thought - regardless of their race, gender, religion, nationality, or even species! The issue of foreign government-controlled corporations is, once again, a problem of government, which I oppose in all its forms, not an issue of people who unite into voluntary corporations and their Natural Right to Free Speech!
Thomas Jefferson meant precisely this in his quote about "corporations" - European government-enforced monopolies like the East India Company. And Thomas Jefferson is not the latest word on the science of Natural Rights - I'd recommend Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and the so-called Austrian School of Free Market economics. Corporations would still exist in a 100% free society, but without "limited liability", "corporate welfare", and other benefits governments bribe them with today. Without those ill-gotten benefits, there is virtually no difference between the commonly-vilified concept of a "greedy corporations" and any other social institution - a small shop, a charity, a church, a residential neighborhood, a Web-site, and so on. And every family is a corporation too!
The Natural Right to Freedom of Speech is needed precisely for unpopular speech such as "spam" and even "kiddy porn" - a canary in the coal mine for more egregious government assaults on your freedoms!
It is your responsibility to decide what means you use to communicate with other people, and if you choose to use a ridiculously poorly designed protocol like e-mail then it is your (or your e-mail hosting provider's) responsibility to control who connects to your mail servers and how messages are to be accepted or rejected. There are many better technological solutions out there, and the CAN SPAM bull will only help proliferate the bad technologies at the expense of the good, while also hurting legitimate communication needs, and resulting in a corrupt and inefficient bureaucratic cesspool that will cost tax-victims billions!
Getting the government involved is the very worst thing you can do, and it has horrifying consequences down the road - spam today, other unpopular speech tomorrow, total tyrannical thought control the day after that!
And what data would you feed into this hypothetical Holodeck simulation that would skew the results in your favor? Virtually all historical examples demonstrate the comparative triumph of Free Market Capitalism over all alternatives every single time! From the anthropogenic analysis of early cavemen tribes to the present-day correlation between economic freedom and prosperity, you will find that hard econometric facts will fall in my favor, precisely because they are the very basis of my philosophy. If economic facts had pointed to communism or fascism as a better solution, then I'd be a communist or a fascist instead.
A society becomes an oppressive dictatorship (like every society is today to some degree) when there exists a power gap that the tyrants are able to fill. Modern Free Market libertarianism is the only political philosophy (or rather a group of similar but distinct political philosophies) that closes that gap tightly by empowering those who should have rightful power over their lives in the first place - the individuals themselves. Sure, "everybody wants to rule the world", as the song goes, but everyone will encounter billions of well-informed well-armed individuals who don't want to be ruled by others. The various "Bill Gates will take over the world" nonsense scenarios have been debunked ad nausium. Only a centralized government can ever accumulate (i.e. steal) enough capital to build and maintain a legal liability like a nuclear warhead or an aircraft carrier and get away with it! Only the "divine right of governments" delusion makes tyranny possible in the modern age!
Free Market Capitalism doesn't mean "no rules", it is based on very strict and universal rules, but they are grounded on well-established scientific facts, not arbitrary whim of corrupt political demagogues. Natural Rights (life, liberty, property, parents' rights, freedom of contract, etc) are things that haven't been made up by men, but they were discovered as being essential components to a stable human society, and in many cases this discovery has been recognized for thousands of years. Natural Rights come from the principle of competitive advantage: a society that violates Natural Rights the least would have an empirically-observable materialistic advantage over other societies that violate them more. It's almost as clear-cut as penicillin, except of course you can't observe human societies through a microscope, and the lenses of history are blurred by pro-government bias that funds and controls most knowledge-related institutions. Violating Natural Rights is no different than trying to violate the laws of physics - it simply won't work in the long term.
Most specific rules beyond that would come from the legitimate authority of private property owners: your house, your rules. A neighborhood-owned road or a for-profit toll road will likely still have stop signs and speed limits, but it will not be a monopoly - you will have a choice whose roads you drive on and pay for (and in absence of the government-induced artificial energy famine we've had for the last century most people would have flying cars anyway). And whether you are allowed to to "yell fire in a crowded theater" should be entirely up to the owner of that theater - don't like the rules, don't go to the establishment, go somewhere else instead. Modern information technology makes it ever-easier to automatically inform people whose property they are approaching and what their rules happen to be.
Granted the Minarchist / Anarcho-Capitalist debate remains a relevant issue, as it probably will for a very long time, but that disagreement is over whether the government needs to be shrunk by 99% or 100% in the long term. Ayn Rand, a Minarchist, believed that the ideal government should be so small that at peacetime it could be funded entirely