[thecoffman]

In a free society all of those things WOULD be allowed. And most of us sane, rational people would opt not to give those discriminatory companies money. That's what freedom actually is. Its having the freedom to be an asshole, bigot or racist, and its my freedom not to support that kind of behavior with my wallet.

But yes, I agree, there isn't a big difference there, and personally I'm of the opinion that the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating any of it.

[dodo53]

it pushes a lot of work on consumers - you need a lot of information/research to know who you can buy from (and if you're being strict you'd have to follow their supplier chain also for your opinion to affect all the B2B companies).

I feel like that already with sweatshops/child labour already - you hear a couple big companies when it hits mass media, but it's no doubt widely spread, so boycotting scandalised company of the day might not be effective (and just incentivise better PR/press control).

[dablya]

"And most of us sane, rational people would opt not to give those discriminatory companies money."

I still remember all those "whites only" stores going out of business in the 50s...

[mrj]

Sounds nice but look at the history of business. Laissez faire was attempted and didn't work out so great.

Sometimes there need to be rules and they need to be applied evenly so nobody has an advantage that others don't. If one business has to build wheelchair ramps or close caption while another doesn't, that's an unfair advantage.

You can dislike government all you want, but don't pretend these things we have would magically occur without some kind of intervention.

[thecoffman]

Obviously this isn't the forum to get into an economics debate, so I'll just leave it at this: we have never, ever had true "Laissez faire" free markets. We have always had corporatism/corporate capitalism. There is a very distinct difference between the two. I am arguing in the theoretical "given a truly free market" but we don't have such a thing, and never had, so it truly is theoretical. Given the current situation I largely agree with you - given the right circumstances however, I do think true freedom would work.

[woodson]

"Rational people" would weight the costs and benefits of finding out which companies have discriminatory policies and might decide that they just don't care enough for spending their time on it.