In societies that have full respect for private property, I should be able to refuse to do business with you for any reason, including the color of your shoes, the kind of music you listen to, or your marital preferences. Whether it is wise or rationally self-interested to do so is a different question.
Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things. Otherwise you're permitting the government to forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things (murder, threaten, steal, etc.) - see the concept of "negative rights."
In a your version of a free society, what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service because random-reason? They sure as heck aren't murdering, stealing, nor threatening you. They're just refusing to sell you anything because of random-reason, forever. Those services include sales of any food, water, shelter.
Taking it further, what if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can? Not serving minorities wouldn't really impact their bottom line all that much. The minorities would literally die off.
It's easy to talk about "rights" as if they exist in a vacuum i.e. my rights are mine and they do not affect anyone else, ergo my rights should be absolute. They are not, and should not.
Reality is usually a tenuous balance of rights (usually tilted towards the majority) that people participating in civil society share.
> what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service
If I'll ever find my self in a situation like this - I'll pack my things and run. I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
> if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can
That means anyone entrepreneurial enough will have access to an underserved niche market.
Unfortunately, packing your things and running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation because borders are enforced and countries will find any excuse possible to avoid granting refugee status. The "you could've slept in a forest, never interacted with anyone, and foraged for plants for survival" kind of excuse that LGBT folks fleeing from countries where they're likely to get murdered get.
An underserved niche market of people who have significantly less money because they can't find work - and your company won't hire them because your other customers who actually have money will boycott you - isn't worth much.
> I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
This is an important point that those in disagreement with these kind of arguments often under-emphasize or ignore entirely. When a government makes it illegal to behave in a racist way, the racists don't go away, and they might even be amplified within those communities in a similar way to the Streisand effect.
If everyone in a community is racist, you can't simply make it illegal to be racist to fix the problem. They have to make that decision on their own - anything else is fundamentally authoritarianism, which doesn't have a great history of long-term success.
In this fictional scenario every single community member has become a racist but the government legislative and enforcement bodies are immune from this trend?
Making something illegal may feel good, but if 100% of the population (by the terms of your scenario) are against it, legislation is hardly going to move the needle.
I would actually suspect that in this kind of society -- the state isn't there to enforce discrimination, but it's also not there to redress it -- there would still be civil rights movements, and protests would probably be pretty vigorous. Businesses that discriminate would find themselves, their customers, and their suppliers put under a great deal of pressure. Sit-ins. Blockades. Rallies painting them, specifically, as villains.
As an aside, the relative absence of that kind of movement in libertarian thought experiments has always bemused me; I think there's a somewhat utopian "everything gets better when you take the state out of the equation" notion at play. Everything doesn't automatically get worse, but it doesn't automatically get better, either. If the society still has discrimination, prejudice, and unequal justice, it's still going to face pressures to reform; most of us would rather see where we live be made "better" in our understanding of the term than be forced to move somewhere else to find that "better," even assuming we have the resources to make such a move.
I mean this in the nicest possible way; have you ever faced discrimination based on the colour of your skin, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities or anything else which is protected by law in most civilised countries?
If, like a significant portion of the HN audience, you are straight, white, middle class and male it's probably easier for you to dismiss the right to fair treatment than it might be for individuals in those categories.
I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me. I'm much happier knowing that the people that operate that business were racist jerks (instead of, say, them being forced to serve me and spit in my food, which would be a health concern), and I have dissuaded probably on the order of a hundred people from going to that place, and that was in the era before social media.
> I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me.
I'm not you, and I can't imagine what your situation is, but I'll bet whatever precious little civil rights laws that are enforced wherever you are has probably has helped you more than you know.
Some people thought pandemic response teams are a waste of money, until a pandemic happened, then they realized perhaps there wasn't a pandemic previously because that team was doing their job.
I have had the same experience (although it was not race-based discrimination). Theoretically there were laws to protect me, but, practically, asserting my rights under those laws would have been too costly and time consuming to be worth it.
I don't agree with discrimination, and would never seek to engage in that myself.
With that being said, in the private sector, there really is no "right to fair treatment" with exceptions for anything required by law for affirmative action. By forcing fairness (where a business must provide service to someone it doesn't want to), you are simultaneously removing the freedom of association [0].
[0] While not explicitly stated in the US constitution is argued to be a fundamental human right.
>Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things.
You know, in free societies, there is society. That is very different from "wild reign of every impulse going through the head of an individual", which of course would be impossible anyway as an individual is itself permanently full of conflicting impulses.
Not to do things and do things is only a matter of wording. Forbidding to kill people is equivalent with compelling to do something: people are compelled to repress their possible will to kill other people. Accepting to follow an interdiction is doing something. Only something that doesn't exist won't act in any way or an other.
> In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things
Well, how about "don't discriminate"?
I am not saying it is the perfect solution, but if you want to refuse a service you can always terminate your commercial venture. I do not necessarily see this a clear cut case of positive/negative right.
Similarly to how the state can compel you to get a driving license to drive. You can just give up on driving.
HOw do you reconcile not forcing someone to do something with depriving another of life & liberty? The entire reason for protected classes is to prevent the majority from harming the minority.
>> forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
...as has been SOP in even the most permissive of societies throughout history. I'm all for classical liberal ideals influencing the world, but these extreme libertarian rules and values have never existed outside the minds of their most zealous believers and you don't have to get too far into the details to see their contradictions.
You are completely right. In a free society you should have the liberty to do business with whomever you want (no matter how politically in-correct your reasoning is).
The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
> is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
That is a childishly simplistic understanding of how free markets work. There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population who are wheelchair users for example, when they could easily make their stores considerably more efficient by making the aisles a little narrower.
> There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population
Slow down there, you're going to need more evidence than that to claim that an underserved segment of the population isn't an attractive commercial target.
I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
> The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
Except that every other business can now refuse to serve that business services, because that business serves people nobody else likes.
Given even time and systematic discrimination, that business owner and everyone they serve will be driven to destitution and cease to be a meaningful market segment. They, along with the people they serve can't afford to buy anything anyways.
Should society should just let them die because of the magic of capitalism and (???) rights?
If this type of situation happens, I think these would be symptoms of a much larger issue.
I think there will always be places that exist that help everyone. First in mind are churches, who often will help people even if the people they help have differing views.
If public property (streets, society built around cars, tax incentives) is being used to provide access to your business, for the mutual aid of both your business and the public, then you should not be allowed to deny access to the public for anything other than a business reason.
That is completely true, indeed the purpose of the law ought to be not to compel respect, but to allow vulnerable individuals access to society.
The intended outcome is not that people that want to discriminate stop existing (well, long term also...) but that non-discriminatory interactions can be allowed to flourish.
Sexuality is getting closer and closer to being a fully-protected class, so they are going to have to suck it up, just like the bakers who didn't want to serve black people decades ago.
They can deny service to anyone, so long as it does not run afoul of discrimination laws. ICE is not a protected class.
I think this comment is reasonable if they're simply saying that it's plausibly true that not everyone who is gay is born gay - some choose to live their life that way, others are born that way.
I think this is a fair read on sexuality especially given the "spectrum" understanding of sexual preferences. If you're born 50% interested in men and 50% interested in women, you can very well choose to live your life (and identify) as a straight person or a gay person (or a bisexual person!).
That doesn't mean that others aren't born with a 0/100 ratio (one way or the other), though.
I vouched for this comment for a very specific reason:
Civil rights of for the LGBT should not predicated on "being born that way", they should be predicated on the fact that it is an acceptable and dignified way to be human.
Simple: anti-discrimination laws only apply if you're being discriminated on the basis of being in a protected class. being gay is a protected class. Being ICE isn't.
In some jurisdictions being gay is a protected class, in others it is not. Even the USSC ruling today doesn’t create a new protected class; it simply (and correctly) determines that discrimination based on gender nonconformity (whether sexual orientation, gender identity, or other) is discrimination based on sex, which is already a protected class.
Of course you can. One rule for me another for you because I think these two things are different is easily understood by two year olds. Lawyers are perfectly capable of coming up with justifications for anything they like and if the judges feel sympathetic the power of the state will enforce it.