Extremely Lame

Laissez faire capitalsm. Basically, letting the market regulate itself. We’ve seen what happens when we let the market regulate itself. Look at working conditions during the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the 20th century. Go read some Upton Sinclair. Just as with communism, capitalism works great until you actually inject a human element to it. Because there’s a human element to it, I don’t think any economic philosophy will work as well as it’s designed because humans are greedy by nature (as opposed to Naughty by Nature).

What brought on this spat? I went to upgrade my Verizon service to FIOS, since it’s now available in my apartment complex, and look what I found:

Look at how they have those Terms of Service. How can you expect anyone to read pages upon pages of a Terms of Service when you’ve got a window that’s two lines by twenty characters? That is just beyond absurd. How can this be anything other than designed to dissuade people from actually reading it? (Answer: crappy web design). Even the “printer friendly” portion is just awful to read. The left and right-handed quotation marks are in a form that is unreadable by Firefox. I’m not using some obscure antiquated browser like Lynx, we’re talking a browser that’s got something like 18% marketshare, more than that in industrialized countries. That’s tens of millions of computers.

But I digress. Upon reading that nonsense, I found that they can change the privacy policy at any time with no clause saying that they have to inform you of such a change or allow you get out of said contract should they decide to sell your information to spammers or other undesirables.

Think of all the contracts and terms of service agreements and end user license agreements (EULAs) you go through in a year that probably have things just like this and worse. Just think of all the legalese, the technical mumbo jumbo, the business speak, and the barely recognizable English. Now think of the pressures put on you when you do this in person to not ingest it and take your time, to just sign it. If you sign something that you don’t understand or misunderstand, it’s your own fault. On some scale, I can agree with this. On the other hand, it’s my fault that I have the audacity to not have the MBA, the law degree, and the advanced degree in Computer Science to fully understand the overwhelming percentage of these agreements? What percentage of people, even in one of these advanced fields, would be able to completely comprehend these agreements?

One argument is to just refuse to sign any agreement that you don’t understand or find objectionable. Oh yeah, that’s a realistic approach. If you did this, you couldn’t rent an apartment, you couldn’t buy a house, you couldn’t get electricity delivery or internet access to the place you can’t live in, and you couldn’t get an account at a bank to store your money, and you couldn’t buy a car because you are required by law to register it.

If you refused to sign any agreement you didn’t understand or find objectionable, you’d have to go completely off the grid. Getting paid completely under the table in cash (or taking your check to a seedy check cashing service), live somewhere where the landlord asked no questions and accepted payment in cash, and never signing up for anything, anywhere. Barring that, you could go all Ted Kaczinsky and live in a shack out in the woods and eating only what you can grow or kill.

It seems that when libertarianism isn’t highjacked by neo-anarchists who want privatized fire departments and privatized roads (making everything a toll road), it’s highjacked by people who want to hold individuals to blame for being duped but have no problem absolving different individuals for unfairly duping millions of people because they can afford to hire the legal and entreprenurial representation to muddle and obfuscate what they are really trying to do in a quagmire of paperwork that most people cannot understand.

Can I please find a middle of the road party? One that’s for things like privacy and gun ownership, against things like drug legislation and censorship, but isn’t completely insane?