The US is full of door-to-door magazine salesmen, operating as "independent contractors" for companies that hardly pay them, or even keep them in debt slavery. Many of these companies defraud the people who purchase subscriptions, too.

Several aspects of these companies' practice ought to be banned. I see no harm in prohibiting the practice of contracting non-employees to do this kind of work.

However, the root cause of this problem is the spreading poverty in the US, the cutbacks in welfare, and lack of work through which people have a chance of supporting their families. In other words, dooH niboR.

That's what makes people so desperate that they will come back to this exploitative work.

The laws against public sitting or lying down, aimed at punishing homeless people, were strangely ignored when people queued up to spend money on iThings.

Chicago may compensate the victims of 30 years of torture by thugs.

Torture is not an effective way to get true information, but in Chicago as elsewhere it works well for extracting false confessions.

It's illegal for lobbyists to give material gifts to a congresscritter, but not apparently illegal for the lobbyist to go to bed with one.

Edwin Lyngar explains how, when he was poor, he voted for politicians who wanted to crush the poor — because he thought poverty was a sign he deserved to suffer.