If you don't care about the plight of these workers, there may be one other reason for you to consider putting up with the annoyances of telemarketing -- it probably makes many services cheaper for you. If companies that currently market their services over the phone are forced to now get to you in another, costlier way, there's a chance that the price you pay for goods and services will edge up slightly. For example, Avery Abernethy and Randolph Beard, professors of marketing and of economics at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., theorize that telephone service has probably become cheaper and better for Americans in part due to telemarketing. In a research report they submitted to the FTC, they point out that people who subscribe to long-distance telephone service often receive calls from other companies offering them better deals. The possibility that you could be so easily snatched away by a rival forces your own phone company to keep your rates low and your service quality high -- which means, essentially, that everyone's rates stay low.

The theory is applicable beyond just long-distance telephone service, Beard says. In general, "advertising is a tool that companies use to raid their rivals' customers," he says. "Making advertising more expensive" -- which is what the telemarketing rule will do -- "makes raiding customers more expensive, and that reduces one of the incentives for firms to provide quality service."

It appears that lawmakers considered few of these arguments when they were deciding to institute the do-not-call list. Congress took just a few days to debate the Do-Not-Call Implementation Act, the law that allows the FTC to collect from telemarketers the money to set up the registry. In February, the law passed the House with just seven members opposed, and it passed the Senate unanimously.

Lawmakers basked in the opportunity to show voters that they were actually doing something to make people's lives much better. In one committee hearing on the bill, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., was pointing out that consumers were "plagued by unwanted, intrusive, unsolicited telemarketing" when, according to the Associated Press, "Markey's remarks were interrupted by the loud ringing of his cellphone. Answering the call, he said, 'No, I don't want to change my phone service. How did you get my cellphone number? I'm in a congressional hearing right now.'" The AP added that "Markey's staff said after the briefing that the congressman had turned up the volume on his phone and arranged to receive the call to make his point about intrusive telemarketing."

When he signed the do-not-call bill, President Bush, too, played up the idea that people have a right not be bothered at home. "Unwanted telemarketing calls are intrusive, they are annoying, and they're all too common," Bush said. "When Americans are sitting down to dinner, or a parent is reading to his or her child, the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch. So we're taking practical action to address this problem."

What Bush did not mention, though, is that under the new regulations, he and every other politician will still have the right to call you whenever they want to ask you for money or votes. Some members of Congress had objected to this idea. Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who heads the Congressional Privacy Caucus, had proposed an "opt-in" model that would have prohibited all unsolicited calls, even calls from politicians, unless you added your name to a kind of "do call" list. "He feels like if we're going to pass a law we can't exempt ourselves," said Samantha Jordan, a spokeswoman. "You have to make it across the board." Not surprisingly, Barton's idea didn't fly; most lawmakers seemed to be OK with limiting sales calls, but they considered their own calls too good for voters to miss.

Telemarketers say this exemption is the height of hypocrisy. "What they've done is taken a huge interstate of commerce and closed it down to one lane and reserved it for themselves," said Searcy, of the American Teleservices Association. Hamilton said, "Since the start of telemarketing legislation they've always exempted themselves because it's their most powerful fundraising tool. It's a very powerful tool, and they know it."

Bulmash, the critic of telemarketing at Private Citizen, says that people who hate sales calls aren't likely to appreciate political calls. "Under the law, George Bush can walk into my home and summon me to the phone as if I were nothing more than his Pavlovian dog," he says. "I don't care if it's fundraising or political or sales. When I cross the threshold of my front door, I'm in my home. That's one place in the world where a person has supremacy, and nobody can present any speech to me. It's a fundamental right. I define the right to privacy as Justice Louis Brandeis did -- it's the right to be left alone."

The ostensible justification for allowing politicians to bother you with their phone calls is that their right to free speech trumps your right to be left alone. Political speech is sacred, they say, and limiting it would have a deleterious effect on democracy. That is not an entirely self-serving argument. It's probably true that the courts would be unwilling to uphold a law that prohibits politicians from calling voters. Courts have already cited the First Amendment in rulings about laws that place limits on charity fundraising calls.

But if politicians and charities have a First Amendment right to call you, don't corporations have the same right, too? Courts generally accord more limited protection to "commercial speech," so it's possible that judges will have no problem with the FTC's new regulations; but several trade groups and companies have filed separate lawsuits against the commission over the new rules, and many say that the law is not "narrowly tailored" enough to protect their rights. The industry says that the government is charged with regulating fraud, but the do-not-call list sweeps up many lawful telemarketing firms into the net. Searcy says that the ban on sales calls "is an unlawful intrusion on legitimate commercial speech that breaks the First Amendment."

"Does anybody like to get a phone call at dinner?" asks Errol Copilevitz, an attorney who's fought many telemarketing laws on behalf of nonprofit organizations. Of course not, he says. But unless the government gives us the opportunity to opt out of all of life's annoyances, why single out telemarketing? "I don't like to be bothered at the airport by people with unusual religious persuasions," Copilevitz says. "But there's some price that you pay for all kinds of freedom."

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