From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 1997 - 23:59:15 MDT
> I wonder if the founding fathers in declaring the right of free speech
> imagined multi-national companies with huge advertising budgets, ...
No need to wonder, just go look up their actual words. Yes, they did
indeed imagine just that; large multi-national trading companies and
advertising existed then just as they do now, and Jefferson himself
said that he preferred the advertisements in a newpaper to the editorials
because they contained more truth.
Becoming wealthy does not cause one to lose human rights. Advertising
is free expression, and always has been, even of the court has only
recently started to recognize that plain fact (the Coors case, etc.)
It is an insult to the human mind to suggest that it is not capable
of judging for itself the value of information it receives, and a
exercise of boundless blind faith to suggest that any government is
more capable of such judgment than anyone with >80 IQ. I, for one,
am capable of judging for myself, and I refuse to concede my right
to do so to any government. Caveat Lector.
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