[randyrand]

Consider this - If the conservative farmers and distributers individually decided not serve the bay area anyone, they are well within their rights.

Political ideology is not protected, regardless of how important you perceive basic accommodations like shelter, food, or communication are.

[gameman144]

Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Sure, the Bay Area could start their own farms to meet that need, but I could hardly imagine the whole population living there saying "This is fine, they're well within their rights."

This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?).

To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.

[munificent]

> Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area.

Now consider that this exact scenario is currently affecting 23.5 million people in the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[gameman144]

This is a great example, I think it exemplifies the problem well. Individually, farmers/distributors absolutely have (and in my mind, should have) the right to avoid shipping to areas which would actively lose them money.

When everyone avoids those areas, though, bam: food desert.

I honestly don't know the right balance to strike here. On the one hand, I fervently believe that businesses shouldn't be forced to act against their interests. On the other hand, though, the sum of these individual actions produces an unacceptable outcome.

I'm sure there's some balance of regulation, incentives, and public-private partnerships that would strike a good balance here, but both the extreme solutions (Groceries can locate wherever they want vs. groceries have to establish branches in food deserts) seem to be totally unsatisfactory, at least in my mind.

[travisoneill1]

At the time the constitution was written "everyone" in any given industry was thousands of small businesses each of which was only subject to the public pressure of the people in the town in which they were based. So it was literally unthinkable that a whole industry could deny service to one person. I bet if the founders had envisioned an entity as powerful as Amazon, they would have written in constraints for private entities too.

[rcurry]

It’s not so much the farmers as it is truckers. CA has a lot of agriculture but some places like NYC have a very limited food supply. For some reason a lot of people have no idea how dependent they are on rural areas. I never forgot this tweet from some politician from out East who was flying back from Denver or somewhere and posted a picture of the ground below the airplane (farm fields with patterns from circular irrigation systems) and he says “No idea why the ground looks like that!”