I looked into Paypal’s parent company–Ebay’s politics just over a year ago. Based on their political donations, you might guess that they are pro-gun. You can see what I wrote here:

http://www.njcsd.org/forum/showthread.php?t=66

Those figures are a year out of date and it would be interesting to revise them this late into the 2006 election cycle. But at that point in time, their political contributions went to predominantly pro-2nd Amendment legislators.

It still doesn’t mean their service doesn’t suck for shutting down accounts for even gun related transactions. They have to cover their asses. They have been sued for allowing weapons transactions to go through. They’ve even been sued for handling stun guns.

The obvious explanation is that they’re in California and it simply doesn’t occur to them that the rest of the country isn’t California.

Here in Oregon, none of that stuff’s illegal (except, of course, a live hand grenade outside of NFA approved situations, but they ban NFA items in a separate entry), nor are switchblades, which they also ban.

So evidently you can sell any legal weapon you want, as long as it’s not in that arbitrary list of bad things. Which includes dummy grenades you can buy as novelties in any surplus store.

This is not so much “evil” as “staggeringly stupid and incompetent”.

(It would be interesting to see the PayPal people attempt to make a rational defense of the entire policy, including the part prohibiting the sale of permanently deactivated guns, which under federal law can be sold to anyone at all – minors can buy them by mail, but PayPal won’t dirty its hands with them! Their policy appears to be simply a weird “personal problem” with weaponry… which is fine, but it’d be nice to see the arbitrariness of it made explicit.)

Funny story: Several of the friends of the “big” guys that went under were sore about it, and accused us puny guys (who lived off something like 8 thousand dollars per year at the time) of “grabbing up all the business”.

Yeah, we were real, evil, small business tycoons, working out of a garage, stomping on the poor, far bigger guys and crushing them. Shame on us.

So when I say start you own business and kick my (or payPal’s) ass, I mean it seriously.

When government gets into the act, they make it illegal to compete with them, or they charge (extort from) you anyway (public education) even though you took your business elsewhere. They put up artificial barriers to entry into the market (licensing and permits) etc., etc..

There is no comparison. Frankly this is a pet peve of mine– the apparent confusion of free market with force. You have choices, and the businesses have choices. No one is going to force you to buy from Wall Mart, and no one should force Wall Mart to accept your money.

“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” is a phrase commonly posted in small businesses around the U.S. and as fas as I’m concerned it is a symbol of Liberty. Learn to love it.

Anyone who chooses to be a bigot in a free market is merely creating a market niche for someone, even someone “small” who is not a bigot. I have said to many complainers, “If you don’t like the way I’m doing business– if you have a better way, then start your own god damned business and kick my ass in the marketplace.”

Unfortunately, there’s no other options in many cases besides paypal, and they will continue their unpublished phone numbers for customer service, support via email using robots, pass the buck phone transfers, etc until forced by the market to do otherwise.

Google has made noises about a competing service, but ebay, (the owners of paypal), as soon as it was announced banned that form of payment on auctions.

This is where my libertarian leanings get stuck in a lurch, does ebay have the right to dictate terms on how the buyer and seller ought to settle the bill?

On one hand, they merely bring together the buyer and the seller, and take an arms length approach to the transaction, deliberately disclaiming responsibility for the transaction itself. So why should they get to dictate terms?

OTOH, it’s their company, and I’m loath to ask the government to tell ebay how to conduct business.

Any thoughts?

Clicked the boxes stating that I was closing the account over “Paypal’s policies / acceptable use agreement” and “Paypal customer service was unprofessional” and for the comment box, put “Paypal’s continued harrassment of customers making legal transactions involving items Paypal does not approve of is unacceptable to me.”

They should be perfectly OK with that.

Or try things like “Nazi memorabilia” “KKK hood” or “Turner Diaries” just to see what their scanning monkeys do.

Suckers.

Heh.

Sorry about that. I wish you had a Preview option.

Check out Google’s Adsense policy. Your site may not contain:

Sales or promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles

There was a thread on AR15.com a while back about PayPal taking thousands of dollars from people that made legal transactions of firearms.

EBay prohibits legal firearm sales.

I tried to place Google adsense ads on Boomershoot.org and was refused.

Bigots. They are all bigots and we need to make that point somehow.

See also:
Now what?
Google gets a letter on ethics
Google responds on AdSense and the 2nd Amendment