[jobeirne]

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.

[the-dude]

You are carefully tiptoeing around race & gender here.

[jobeirne]

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."

[code_sloth]

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.

[0-O-0]

> 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.

[vertex-four]

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.

[rdgthree]

I think your parent comment is neither here nor there on actually leaving, but rather just using hyperbole to demonstrate that this isn't a problem easily fixed with laws.

A food establishment forced to serve you might serve you food that's gone bad, a mechanic might not fully tighten the nuts on your brake pads, or any other variety of horrible things that people could do to harm you while leaving room for plausible deniability.

At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing. And to that end, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that less money means there would be no businesses to serve that group of people. If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.

The "pro-regulation" argument is valid with regard to a less commoditized market though, which is interesting. For example, I wouldn't want the only company that makes a life-saving drug to be able to legally discrimate who they sell it to.

It's a challenging problem and I certainly see both sides. My gut goes to regulations affecting large businesses but not smaller ones. It feels like there are probably some difficult edge-cases within there though.

[0-O-0]

> running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation

AFAIK there is no strict control on US state borders, citizens are allowed to move freely. In many cases running away is as easy as purchasing Greyhound bus ticket. It's great that you deeply care about prosecution of LGBT people in places like Middle East, but it's not really relevant to a discussion of anti discrimination laws in US.

> isn't worth much

You don't have to be big to be successful. This scenario means that you have very low barrier to enter this market and will have to spend close to nothing on advertising. But what's more important - this scenario is unrealistic. If you live in a country where it's possible to pass anti-discrimination laws - you don't need those laws, since majority of your country already finds discrimination unacceptable.

[rdgthree]

> 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.

[astrodust]

Pack your things and run to where, exactly?

What if the government, which issues identity documents that allow you to "run", decides they just don't like you and declines to produce them?

[manigandham]

Then why don't all those people who hate this country just leave? If it's really that simple?

[incadenza]

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.

[chipotle_coyote]

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.

[VBprogrammer]

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.

[dnautics]

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.

[code_sloth]

> 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.

[pmiller2]

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.

[monocasa]

Why didn't that strategy work for black people in the 1960s? Or LGBT more recently?

[dnautics]

My claim is it didn't. You don't think black people were discriminated against in private locations well past the 1960s? What absolutely worked in the 1960s, was the banning of government REQUIRING segregation in private entities by law (which by the way, many companies absolutely chafed at, because quite frankly segregating your business is a cost-sinking pain in the ass to arrange and enforce). Nobody is disputing that CRA I and CRA II were much needed reforms.

[kuzimoto]

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.

[psychoslave]

>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.

[afiori]

> 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.

[nogabebop23]

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.

[kuzimoto]

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.

The same case can be made for hiring practices.

[VBprogrammer]

> 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.

[roenxi]

> 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.

[VBprogrammer]

Based loosely on 1.2 million wheelchair users in the UK for a population of 50 million it's in the right ballpark.

Honestly, I think the claim that the free market would solve this is so outlandish that the burden of proof is on those who believe it.

Maybe, just maybe, in a dense population centre like London their needs would be met by a few specialist 'accessable' stores. But what about some rural town of a few thousand people?

[toby]

Your argument from first-principles makes sense, but I just don't think a lot of us are comfortable living in a world where disabled people have to pay twice as much (or whatever the additional cost would be) for groceries. The fact that there's no movement to repeal the ADA would suggest most people feel that way.

[webmaven]

> 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.

That is true, but it most likely leaves wheelchair users paying a premium on goods and services for the privilege of even being able to enter the establishment, and probably having a smaller selection of lower quality to choose from to boot.

That is what generally happens with captive markets, you know.

[kuzimoto]

If someone can still get groceries without physically going into the store, is it still discrimination?

[jlokier]

I've had to deal with such issues a little.

Whether it's the kind of discrimination the store is obliged to deal with is going to come down to principles of reasonable accomodation.

So, say you had an extremely boutique store up some rickety stairs, where the way it's used is you go up the stairs and meet the chef who will take your order for a wedding cake and you can collect the cake next week.

I would expect, in that case, if the chef is willing to meet you at your home or another place with a menu of options and discuss your order, and then have it delivered next week, that would meet the bar of reasonable accomodation for someone who couldn't use the rickety stairs.

On the other hand, a large grocery store, where browsing the goods is part of the experience and is also significant to product discovery, and maybe pricing and access to better fresh ingredients and different bargains, and where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost, that is clearly inadequate of the store; they have no good excuse and could reasonably accomodate by changing that door.

On another hand, the same large grocery store may find it difficult to accomodate people who cannot tolerate bright illumination (that other people need, to see clearly), and large numbers of people moving around them. In that case, it is not at all obvious that the store can do much to accomodate. I would expect that if the store also provides online ordering with delivery, that it has performed reasonable accomodation for that situation.

[VBprogrammer]

Honestly, if you can't see a hundred reasons why that isn't a fair way of treating people then their is no point in me trying to convince you.

[code_sloth]

> 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?

[kuzimoto]

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.

[eropple]

Unless, say, they're trans, in which case plenty of those will turn them away.

At some point you will run down all these dead-end alleyways and you will realize that the perfect spheroid does not exist. For your moral sake I'd hope it's sooner than later.

[tenebrisalietum]

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.

[afiori]

And let's not forget another fundamental contribution of the state: the currency itself.

[drekembe]

Maybe, but I would rather live in a society that has full respect for people than full respect for private property.

[kuzimoto]

Unfortunately you can't make everyone have respect for one another. If you force them via laws, that would probably just make them more resentful.

[afiori]

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.

[pmiller2]

Forcing everyone to act as if they have respect for one another is good enough. They can resent it all they want, for all I care.

[afiori]

Property is private, but the market is public.

I am not sure how much legal barter is, but in many sense the currency is intrinsically linked to the public space of the state.

[Kaze404]

This is why nobody listens to libertarians.