Libertarian Girl

It’s certainly true that people shouldn’t discriminate. Should we make laws so that they can’t? Do the laws actually make discrimination worse than it would be otherwise?

Most people would jump at the chance to say that laws should exist to prevent discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, for private organizations or establishments… or should they? What if a church wants to hire a secretary who believes in God… or a pastor who does, for that matter? Should the discriminating church be stopped by force of law? What if Barack Obama’s black-centered church wants to hire a black pastor or a black Sunday School teacher? Should that be allowed? Should Hooters be able to hire buxom women as waitresses, or should their small-chested counterparts be given equal access? Should Donna Karan be forced to hire the first person who walks through the door rather than fashion models chosen based on looks or age or gender?

If I start a company in which I want to hire only homeless people or only mentally disabled people or only physically disabled people, should the government be allowed to step in and say, “No, you must hire people with houses, and healthy people, too?”

If I own a vegetarian restaurant, can I only accept vegetarians as waitstaff… if I have an Indian or Mexican restaurant, shouldn’t I be able to only hire natives as authentic cooks? It’s discrimination against Americans, sure, but shouldn’t it be that person’s right?

Those who argue for anti-discrimination laws often point to previous days in which discrimination was rife as evidence that we would immediately go back in time as if we never left Jim Crow times if those laws were repealed. The laws could end tomorrow, and little to nothing would actually change. Discrimination against almost any type of individual (except perhaps in the ways outlined above) is not well-tolerated in today’s society, and anyone who is discriminated against in hiring or patronage would find many more places of business willing to hire or serve them. Lost profits would quickly show that anyone discriminating against a racial or ethnic group was not engaging in a practice appreciated by society at large, and the discrimination would stop to avoid that type of stigma. In fact, the very fact that the Civil Rights Act passed with flying colors through Congress shows that popular sentiment had already changed prior to the institution of a federal law, while no such law existed!

In addition, Jim Crow laws (the government, in other words) systematically allowed such discrimination to flourish because they mandated exclusion of a certain race, made free association among races illegal, and made it costlier for employers to hire black people. No laws of this type would exist in a libertarian society.

“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcome – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality”. -Milton Friedman

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business’s workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge’s defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.” — Congressman Ron Paul

Anti-discrimination laws, Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination laws, racial discrimination, religious discrimination, free association, free market, government regulation

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Free market economics, Non-free market, libertarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.