Discrimination III

Yes, it's discrimination weeks at Road to Rothbard's. Today's special menu will be this fallacious argument:

If we repeal affirmative action legislation, people will be left free to give in to their bad prejudices and we could witness a renaissance of segregation of black people in the South, or a reawakening of systematic discrimination against other minorities in other parts of the country/world. Affirmative action is a check and balance against such behavior and should thus remain intact.

As is the case with many "right on first sight" arguments, this one starts out with a correct premise, but employs too little thought in drawing conclusions.

Indeed, a repeal of anti-discrimination legislation would restore property owners' rights to invite and refuse anyone to/from their property, just as they see fit. Theoretically, this means that these property owners could give in to their bad habits and act stupidly in denying people access for silly reasons.

It is, however, a noteworthy fact that whenever discrimination against a certain group of people occured on a wide scale, there was legislation backing it. Be it Jim Crow laws directed against black people or the infamous Nuremberg Laws, among many other pieces of legislation, to expel Jews from German society, methodic discrimination, as it seems to me, exclusively happened with the help of the state apparatus.

Why is this so? Why wouldn't racists or anti-Semites just keep on raving about their enemy of choice, refuse to trade with them, and leave everything else as it is?

You see, with every further discriminating employer/property owner/customer, the cost of discriminating for a "non-discriminator" increases. Suppose there are 3 employers, you and two competitors. These competitors suddenly decide to lay off all Jews they employ. The pool of Jewish workers seeking employment suddenly increases which enables you to hire Jewish workers at a lower price than before. This will grant a Jewish applicant a possible advantage compared to a non-Jewish contender. Furthermore, among those laid-off workers there might just be a number of potentially indispensable talents nobody would fire in their right mind. These geniuses will be glad to work for someone who judges them according to their abilities, not their religion, and will thus give your enterprise a head start.

The same principle applies for housing, restaurants, liquor stores and everything else. Every practicing hater will only increase revenue for open-minded and tolerant folks, thereby willingly disadvantaging himself.

It should also be mentioned that not only will the discriminated minority avoid doing business with a discriminating businessman, but sympathizers of the disadvantaged group might decide to spend their money elsewhere as well. Depending on how apparent and how devoted somebody discriminates, this may cost the discriminating person a business, workplace or social reputation in no time.

Employing legislation to force one's own discriminatory views on everyone else socializes the cost of discriminating. If hiring Jews is banned, nobody may take advantage of an anti-Semite's behavior. Overall revenue is likely to decrease due to this policy, but it decreases for everyone equally and thus makes discriminating parties better off than they would be on a free market.

Affirmative action legislation, however, grants the moral high ground to people who shouldn't be in charge of it. A practicing anti-semite or racist may now say: "Look, force is used against me to prevent me from living my convictions. This is highly immoral. Compared to this, my racism/anti-Semitism/whateverism isn't much of a problem, is it?" Instead of effectively targeting haters by ostracizing them and refusing to support their businesses and endeavors, we allow them to play the role of martyrs. Nothing short of undermining our own efforts if you ask me.

In conclusion, we might say that government power is the origin of, not the solution to widespread discrimination. Free markets provide huge incentives not to discriminate according to race, religion, gender or other personal characteristics, and punish those who do. However, banning such discriminatory practices by law allows those with despicable attitudes to play the victim. That shouldn't be our objective at all.

Discrimination II

I attempted to demonstrate in my last post why the practice of discrimination is not the infathomable evil that it is often being portrayed as, and how one can combat unjustified discriminatory practices without employing government force. Today I'll address an "anti-discrimination argument" I've been hearing a good many times lately:

Sure, people may discriminate against others in their own houses or flats. But if you open a business, you tie yourself to the general public by offering a service that everyone might want to enjoy. You're accepting a certain liability to further the general welfare (since this is what a national economy should be about), and thus can't just discriminate randomly as you please.

I'm not trying to water down this argument by making it appear strange or foolish. I was surprised myself that people would sputter this plethora of non-sequiturs. But they did, in different varieties, so I'll gladly comment.

The first sentence is most certainly correct. Property owners have a right, and even a responsibility, to discriminate. If property owners didn't discriminate carefully as to who they grant access to their property or who they entrust with taking care of it, they would effectively promote morally hazardous behavior. Noisy, shameless, violent and reckless behavior would become more common as there would be no incentive to temper these bad aspects of human nature. Civilization relies to a certain extent on the practice of discrimination.

However, the dichotomy between private-private and private-public property is false and philosophically unsustainable. Either you own a piece of land and act as sovereign, or you don't. It's irrelevant if you design this property to be specifically yours or a place for others to congregate.

One reason why this confusion occurs might be the somewhat subtle way of contracting in social environments such as restaurants, bars etc. When a restaurant owner opens the door to his property for everyone to step in, he's not automatically granting everyone access. He's signaling his willingness to enter negotiations as to whether he wants to serve a requesting customer or not. These negotiations are resolved by the first impression of the potential guest to avoid embarassing conversation. It is next to impossible for a restaurant owner to know the curriculum vitae of all potential customers, so he needs to discriminate according to superficial factors. This discrimination is necessary for two reasons:

1) The desire of other customers to dine in a quiet and relaxing atmosphere.
2) The desire of restaurant owners to serve the least troubling customers. It's a big relief if you don't have to watch the behavior of your clients all the time and may instead focus on doing your work.

Obviously, discrimination practices vary according to the setup of the business. A bikers' bar might have different demands when it comes to customer selection than a noble lounge. Some places may not discriminate at all. The point here is that it's not necessarily bigotry or hate that drives discrimination, but plain and simple business reasons or worries about general customer satisfaction.

Secondly, "social service businesses" like restaurants are not giving out general permissions to use their facilities when they open their doors. They merely express a desire to enter contract negotiations. The style of these negotiations may not resemble its general perception, but it is a negotiation nevertheless. No tie to the general public made, except the wish to enter contract negotiations with them.

To further the general welfare is indeed your objective as a restaurant owner, but probably not in the meaning that's most often talked about. You're supposed to offer goods and services in a manner which pleases potential customers so much that they are willing to trade certain amounts of money for it, which in turn lets you gain a profit. By that, you're contributing a whole new niche or segment to the local economy which, should it be making a profit, represents an achievement people value and may thus be described as your "fair share" of the great collective whole. The means to achieve this goal may involve discrimination as we've pointed out above.

Discrimination in privately owned places is therefore legitimate, no matter whether these places are private houses or private hang-out-places.

Discrimination

Certain words in the English language are picked from time to time to completely distort their original meaning and make a negative buzz word out of them. "Climate" is one example. A couple of years ago, talking about climate meant describing certain weather conditions. Today, climate is some kind of code word for heralding the impending doom. "Climate deniers" are those who'd prefer not to drink the kool-aid, to be cast away and scorned. "Climate policy" means laws regulating the weather. You know, laws regulating the economy and people's personal lives worked so well that you might just try to wisely guide "the climate" as well.

But I'm digressing. Another famous example of restructuring the meaning of a word is "discrimination". A discriminating tradesman would denote a hard to please market participant in earlier times, today you'd rather think of a hypocritical white evangelical racist bigot who refuses to sell to homosexuals.

Of course, "discrimination" may legitimately be used in that sense as well. What bugs me is the automatically negative reaction connected to this meaning of discrimination.

Shockingly enough, you discriminate all the time every day of your life. Reading this blog instead of others discriminates against them. Using the internet browsers you do discriminates against all the other browsers available. Buying at the grocery store with that cute little blonde working at the counter discriminates against all the other grocery stores that decided to hire less attractive personnel.

No big deal, you say? That's discrimination based on quality as opposed to discrimination based on hypocritical white evangelical racist bigot factors? But where's the difference? Some people eat with spoons made by their kids in crafting class even though these might obviously lack quality compared to spoons created by professionals. Here you have discrimination based solely on emotion, still nobody would consider banning such behavior.

Let's take another step forward: Isaac Goldbaum (don't we all love stereotypes?) just migrated from Israel to the US where he opens a little bakery. He needs an assistant to do minor tasks for him. The only applicant is a muslim. Unfortunately, Mr. Goldbaum's family has been killed by a muslim suicide bomber which makes Mr. Goldbaum decide to refuse the applicant and do it all by himself instead. Would anyone want to force poor Isaac to act otherwise?

And now we put the icing on the cake. Rick Redneck runs a shooting range. Due to his personal preferences concerning people, he's put a big sign on the perimeter that reads "Only white evangelical bigots allowed".

If you consider that to be obnoxious behavior of Mr. Redneck, you're probably right. Still, you lack philosophical ground arguing for a ban of such actions if you didn't mind browser discrimination, shop discrimination, emotional discrimination or discrimination due to personal history. You yourself might want to discriminate against Redneck's shooting range so he'll run out of funds in due time. But using government force against Rick to bar him from using his property according to his wishes would grant him the moral high ground. You don't want this to happen, do you?