'Right To Discriminate' Bills

Ziggurat said:
Unless government intervenes to prevent alternative remedies, then your local real estate agent can't actually stop anyone from buying or selling a home to or from whomever they wish to, and it wouldn't be hard to convince an outside agent to come in if you really want the help on a sale. Pharmacies are a little trickier because of licensing requirements, but again, government restrictions on the free market are still enabling discrimination.

Discrimination on the basis of factors which should have nothing to do with the product or service in question will always hurt the person doing the discriminating, because they will lose out on opportunities. That's why hard-core racists always try to get government intervention: by making discrimination not just permissible but required, that forces everyone to pay for the cost of discriminating, so that the people who want to discriminate are not longer at a competitive disadvantage because of it. And some forms of government intervention which don't require discrimination (such as minimum wage laws or rent control) still enable it by reducing or eliminating the cost of discrimination. So government isn't the most reliable partner when it comes to ending discrimination.

A totally free market does not prevent discrimination, but it does relentlessly punish it. And outlawing discrimination doesn't necessarily make it go away either, nor do such efforts come for free.
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I understand that there were many Jim Crowe laws that enforced segregation in the public sphere ( separate schools, separation in the military, same race marriage, etc..) but I always thought things like "white only" lunch counters were a product of the decisions of the management/ownership of the business in question. Am I wrong about that? Was it actually against the law somewhere to serve a black customer? Was redlining mandated? Because, if they were not, your argument that the free market would punish segregation kind of gets turned on its head- these businesses obviously believed that they could be more profitable by excluding certain groups.
 
Ziggurat said:
What on earth are you talking about? Legalized slavery is the epitome of government-enforced discrimination.

{snip}

Again, racial discrimination was legally required during much of this period. Why do you think they passed those discriminatory laws, if businesses were voluntarily discriminating to the satisfaction of the racists?
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So, what you're saying here is that there wouldn't have been slavery or racial discrimination if the government hadn't forced it on the people?
 
Upchurch said:
So, what you're saying here is that there wouldn't have been slavery or racial discrimination if the government hadn't forced it on the people?
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Maybe Zig is correct. In that case, we went too far making it illegal for a restaurant or hotel to refuse service to minorities. All we really had to do was repeal the laws that made it mandatory to do so.
As those business owners were undoubtedly clamoring for us to do.
 
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Upchurch said:
So, what you're saying here is that there wouldn't have been slavery or racial discrimination if the government hadn't forced it on the people?
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How do you keep a plantation full of slaves without government forcing slavery on them? If your point is that slave owners were not forced by government to own those slaves, that's true but it's also a nitpick: everyone else was legally obligated to treat those slaves as slaves (they had to turn them in if the slave ran away, they couldn't hire the slave without the master's permission, etc), so that status was being forced on the market as a whole by government. So unless it's your contention that slavery as it existed in the South could have existed without active government enforcement, then your example really doesn't contradict what I'm saying.

As for racial discrimination, I already explicitly stated that the free market will not prevent discrimination. Why would you ask a question when I already provided the answer?
 
Distracted1 said:
Maybe Zig is correct. In that case, we went too far making it illegal for a restaurant or hotel to refuse service to minorities. All we really had to do was repeal the laws that made it mandatory to do so.
As those business owners were undoubtedly clamoring for us to do.
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First off, I never said we went too far, though I do think we need to keep in mind that it's possible to do so. Second, you seem to have missed my point entirely. People who are happy to discriminate when it is cost-free may not find themselves so willing to do so when it does cost them. So whether or not they were clamoring for repeal of segregation laws is beside the point to my argument.
 
Ziggurat said:
How do you keep a plantation full of slaves without government forcing slavery on them?
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That is so sweetly and innocently naive, I kinda regret telling you otherwise.

I'll let you make the decision if you really want to know.


Ziggurat said:
And for every bit of science too. Which makes this response irrelevant.
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No, science provides the theory and the evidence. It doesn't say, "If you look, ye shall see!"
 
Redtail said:
Yes, seriously. Go.
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It's pretty much part of the definition of a totally free market. In order to prevent someone from discriminating, you need to remove their right to do so, in which case the market isn't totally free. Is that honestly confusing to you?
 
Upchurch said:
This is the part I would like to see evidence for.
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How do you maximize your economic benefits in a free market, Upchurch? You sell as much of your product to as many people as you can for as much money as you can, and you buy what you want from whomever will sell it to you for the lowest price you can get.

If you're discriminating on the basis of other factors, then you cannot pursue that strategy. You must forgo selling to buyers who would make you a profit, and you must buy what you don't want as much or at a higher price.
 
Upchurch said:
Originally Posted by Ziggurat View Post
A totally free market does not prevent discrimination, but it does relentlessly punish it.
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This is the part I would like to see evidence for.
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It seems like the kind of assertion that depends, "no true Scotsman"- style, on the "totally" part; just the sort of thing that makes religious assertions so hard to refute, because it makes them so hard to pin down.
 
Distracted1 said:
I understand that there were many Jim Crowe laws that enforced segregation in the public sphere ( separate schools, separation in the military, same race marriage, etc..) but I always thought things like "white only" lunch counters were a product of the decisions of the management/ownership of the business in question. Am I wrong about that? Was it actually against the law somewhere to serve a black customer? Was redlining mandated? Because, if they were not, your argument that the free market would punish segregation kind of gets turned on its head- these businesses obviously believed that they could be more profitable by excluding certain groups.
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Oh yes there were definitely Jim Crow laws that codified how private business could interact with their customers based on race. Having separate waiting rooms, separate rest rooms, even separate ticket offices were required in certain states for privately owned business in some states or localities.

Jim Crow laws were always there to try and prevent the "mixing" of races as much as possible. I don't believe it was ever illegal to serve only blacks, or only whites. Its when your business catered to both, that certain laws had to be followed.

The law in Alabama if you don't believe me: "It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment."
 
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Ziggurat said:
How do you maximize your economic benefits in a free market, Upchurch? You sell as much of your product to as many people as you can for as much money as you can, and you buy what you want from whomever will sell it to you for the lowest price you can get.

If you're discriminating on the basis of other factors, then you cannot pursue that strategy. You must forgo selling to buyers who would make you a profit, and you must buy what you don't want as much or at a higher price.
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Unless, of course, members of the majority in your potential client base won't purchase from you if you also sell to members of a minority in your potential client base. In which case, you must choose between not discriminating and having a smaller customer pool and discriminating and having a larger customer pool.

Regardless, this is conjecture, not evidence.
 
Ziggurat said:
First off, I never said we went too far, though I do think we need to keep in mind that it's possible to do so. Second, you seem to have missed my point entirely. People who are happy to discriminate when it is cost-free may not find themselves so willing to do so when it does cost them. So whether or not they were clamoring for repeal of segregation laws is beside the point to my argument.
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Not beside the point at all.
It has been shown in real world application that without legal penalties, businesses have found it to be in their interests to discriminate.

Had Woolworths believed that they were losing money by discriminating at the lunch counter they would have (in free market fashion ) obviously stopped doing so. Since, (in spite of your assertions that the government was responsible for it), they were under no legal obligation to prohibit black customers from dining alongside white customers, it must have made sense to their bottom line to continue to discriminate. Thusly, your argument that the market will eliminate, or even reduce, discrimination has been shown to be false in real world applications.

EDIT. I was wrong. I have been told that in some instances such mixing was indeed prohibited by law.
I retreat to the sounder portions of my argument, limiting the assertion that free markets can indeed make it profitable, and in fact have done so, to discriminate based upon the evidence of the localities where such discrimination was carried out without legal mandate.
 
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