It is a fact that advertising in all its forms is the only driving force that makes or breaks an economy.

The old Soviet Union treated advertising as a capitalist decadency that was supressed as much as possible. The only things advertised in the USSR were the Communist Party and all its economic programs. Products and services were only promoted by word of mouth (which is of course the best form of advertising). The resulting USSR economy was only a fraction of what it could have been if all other forms of advertising had been tolerated by the Communist Party. Communism and socialism hate any form of advertising because it is a capitalist tool for selling the products manufactured by capitalists. All forms of advertising are despised by the vast majority of the public and politicians at all levels of government create laws and regulations to depress or outlaw many forms of advertising.

The very fact is that without advertising economies suffer immensely and the suppression of advertising depresses the economy to the degree to which advertising is suppressed. This fact seems to have evaded legislators and economists everywhere because the majority of the vocal public is mostly young and has socialist leanings and perceives advertising as the very annoying, vocal and visible manifestation of capitalism.

Every small instant of suppression of advertising is a small cost to the economy as a whole.

Most forms of advertising are disliked by people everywhere. As such they are legislated against in many countries and that depresses the economies in each of these countries. Examples:

1. Billboard along the highways are disliked because they despoil part of the beauty of the natural landscape.
Result: Laws and regulations against billboards. That depresses the economy by the amount of business that would have been developed by bilboard advertising.

2. Television advertising is very annoiying and it is legislated against in some countries. In Germany for example it is all compacted into successive ads that run conseculatively in 15 minute segments before and after a program or programs. As such the ads can be completely ignored and lose their effectiveness. New Tivo television recording equipment can effectively eliminate TV ads completely. That depresses the economy by the amount of business that would have been developed by television advertising.

3. In various countries there are citizen initiatives to reduce paper useage to save trees and to reduce receycling stocks. This invariably leads to legislation or local government regulations that will reduce printed advertising. This includes regulation imposed on Yellow Page book publishers, advertising handouts, mass mailings etc.

4. Famously the anti printing paper movement also attacks the distribution of multiple telephone yellow page books to the same residence and business addresses. The duplication of multiple yellow page books seems a reasonable target but it totally disregards the importance of competition and the selfregulation of markets through free enterprise. The competing multiple phone book distribution has led to a very important improvement in the quality of the various competing yellow page books. It leaves the choice to the consumer to retain or discard the books and it also gives the consumer newer sets of data within the books that have been most recently published. All the competing books typically issue at different times during the year.

4. Radio advertising is very much disliked by people and some countries have none.

5. Magazine advertising is very annoying in that it interferes with the reading of the content.

6. Email spam has been legislated against. All forms of other internet advertising opportunities are suppressed by legislation as well.

The fact is that any form of suppressing legislation proposals and arguments in courts around the globe find very good reception with legislators and judges anywhere because they themselves dislike advertising as much as the average consumer.

The nature of advertising is that it is designed speciffically to DIVERT a person's INTEREST from other things that a person is doing it is designed to deliberately confuse people and get their attention re-directed:

1. Roadside billboards try to DIVERT INTEREST of the driver's attention away from the road and onto the products or services advertised on the billboards. That potentially could cause traffic accidents and that then would be a nice excuse for legislators to outlaw billboards.

2. Television ads will very effectively divert the attention of the viewers by stopping the regular programming every 10 minutes or so to force a few minutes of advertising onto the viewers. People are very annoyed with TV advertising and they will do everything to get rid of it. Little do they realize that it is the advertising that led them to purchase many a product or service the existence of which they would not even have known about without all the annoying advertising.

3. Radio advertising interrupts the regular programming and is therefor equally annoying as TV advertising. FCC laws may be called for by the general public to incrementally reduce the radio advertising annoyance by reducing the number of minutes per hour in which ads may be broadcast.

4. We all hate those flyers that people put under our windshield wipers. You just get in your car and now you have to get out again and remove that annoying flyer. There should be a law against that, right? Not really, because if there were a law against it the economy would shrink a little again and we would create another barrier for small business people to enter into free enterprise self employment.

5. What about those disgusting cards and hard pages that we encounter in magazines and then all those ads that interrupt our reading pleasure and make the magazines much bigger than they need be. Outlawing all that would certainly improve my reading pleasure and it would save millions of trees. But again it would lower the economy another notch.

So what is the bottom line?

The bottom line is that we should leave free enterprise alone and enable advertising as much as possible and not disable it with well-meaning legislation that slowly destroys the economy. When the economy runs well then private enterprise can be persuaded to think about the environment and ways to make advertising less annoying.