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 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.
> At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing.
Assuming that refusal-of-service is a sort of relief valve is wildly optimistic.
Overt but relatively passive forms of racism effectively give pervasive comfort and encouragement to those who would engage in more active acts. Indirectly, this is also why "dog whistle" speech is so dangerous.
Per your example, in an environment where simply refusing service to you was common and widespread, you might find that someone who does agree to serve you is doing so just for the opportunity to spit in your food (at best).
> 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.
Depends on how spread out the population is - black folk, maybe (but I don't have a simulation on me to work it out for sure and in what situations that theory might collapse), the subset of trans folk who're still working out how to blend in and not be seen as such in a rural area, not so much.
There's entire countries where some products are just not available commercially due to the lower income meaning nobody wants to put in the effort to work out how to provide them cost-effectively.
> 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.
US states share significant amounts of culture, including attitudes towards minority groups, and moving between them doesn't make as much difference as you'd expect if they did not.
The majority of a country finding discrimination unacceptable isn't necessary to pass anti-discrimination laws - just that most people don't care whether someone gets discriminated against or not. If you don't care (or need the job to survive yourself), you'll do whatever your boss tells you to do, and you're hardly going to boycott a store for discriminating against someone else, which means a subset of the population has disproportionate impact.
> 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.
In the mid 80s, My parents took me to a diner, specifically BOB AND EDITH's on columbia pike, in Arlington VA. During the 80s, Asian Americans were very rare in the Washington DC area, and moreover, there was a trade war going on between the US and Japan. It was fashionable at the time for short fiction to feature dystopian US futures where the active currency was the Yen. We arrived at the diner, and sat at the diner for three hours before leaving without having been served. I'm not sure that I would have preferred being served and had my food spat in, which I know happened, because friends in high school told me stories of that kind of stuff happening in the food services industry.
What else do you want to know? Do you want to know that while working for the federal government, my Father was basically ignored and had zero work friends except for the only Jewish coworker, and so I grew up in the DC area observing Jewish holidays and attending Bar and Bat Mitvahs?
Do you want to know that I was rejected for admission to MIT, despite having gotten AP CS and Calculus scores of 5 in the 9th grade, and placing at the International Science Fair, though someone else at my school (a friend, btw) got lower grades than I did and did get admission to MIT [0]? Do you want to know that my father pressured me to ask a family acquaintance (who happened to be the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, I carpooled with his kid to elementary school) but I told him not to (and thus don't owe anything to the author of the PATRIOT act?)
Do you want to know that my father was passed over from promotion "no leadership potential" within that same government unit (the Veterans Administration) despite, in his part-time job with the US Navy, he rose to the rank of captain (O6) and in his last stint was in charge of a group of programmers (despite not being one himself) who implemented the US Navy's first fully-digitized inventory database, ahead of schedule and underbudget?
Do you want to know that while working for the VA, he identified that asian american veterans in hawaii, some of whom were medal of honor recipients, disproportionately did not seek the benefits they were entitled to and initiated outreach to them (via his personal desk) make sure they got the care they were entitled to, then was slammed for being racist, despite the fact that his personal outreach also helped black, white, and latino veterans in Hawaii? Is it also ironic that this was brought down by Democrat appointees and he found redress and correction of the situation by a Republican appointee?
Do you want to know that my father identified elder neglect and a dangerous health situation (black mold) at a veterans facility (long before the very public scandals at Walter Reed, btw), and instead of having the issue dealt with he was rubber-roomed into a windowless room in the same veteran's facility, exiled across the campus from the main office where decisions were being made?
Honestly for all of the secondary effects that systemic racism had on my dad, and indirectly, on the stress it put on our relationship, I at least got some solace when a (white, not that it matters) marine corps colonel that I'd never met before got up at his funeral and gave a fire and brimstone speech about how my dad was a victim of low grade corruption and racism in the federal bureaucracy and in was ultimately a hero in the American spirit, in his military job and more importantly in his activism in his civilian job as a bureaucrat.
Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with, which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard. That's not in the same league as worrying about not coming home because of an asshole cop. But we do face similar situations in the "not being served" at private establishments. And having to work twice as hard, or, for African Americans, "having to code switch", or for both our classes, being taken seriously in leadership roles, is not something any legislation is going to correct.
And forgive me for having low trust that this is a problem that government can solve, since quite literally government can't get its own shit straight.
[0] there's a good chance thinking "oh there weren't any extracurriculars, this guy just looked like every other Asian American candidate" but also I performed on stage with the Washington Shakespeare company and directed/produced a full-length play.
Imagine if in addition to all you also couldn't even live in the place you do, because until recently it was legal to write on a deed of property that said an Asian-American couldn't own that property or live there.
The fact that racism exists doesn't mean that civil rights protections are useless to you.
You've listed an impressive set of adversities associated with being Asian American, some of which I can also relate to as an Asian American, but then the motivation behind your posts becomes clear with:
> Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with
and then making the following wholly unsubstantiated statement:
> which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard
How do you know how hard an African American has to work to get the the same place as you? How do you know how hard it is to work against the type of racism that is so much greater than that faced by Asian Americans, that it is in your own words "not in the same league".
I'm not saying you've had it easy by any stretch, but your attempt to blur the lines between the experiences of Asian and African Americans in an attempt to cast aspersion on efforts to provide protection under the law for African Americans' human rights - which is what Black Lives Matter is advocating - seems to show that you value "freedom from legislation" more than you value their human rights.
I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
You're missing my point. I'm saying that I don't trust government to make "black lives matter". There might be a chance that government can self intervene and stem the bloody police abuse against African Americans (I'm also not terribly optimistic about this since cops are abusive to plenty of non African American citizens, too, e.g. Kelly Thomas, albeit at much lower relative rates). In general, if we want black lives to matter, we have to do the hard work in communities and among individuals, and, separately IMO, asymptotically with racial admixing to make the whole thing pointless, not paper it over with legislative interventionism, though at least in the realms where government tries to regulates itself I'm not opposed to giving it the old college try, as they say.
Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism. Well so let's get to work on it.
> I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
The point still stands. How do you know you have to work twice as hard as white people? Which white people? Wealthy who got admitted to elite Private universities on legacy? How about working class white people with non college educated parents?
This question does not deny it all that there is workplace discrimination against Asian Americans, and that depending on educational institution, admission may have a higher bar, but your use of blanket hyperbole doesn't help advance a critical discussion of whether or why that should be the case.
> Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism.
That's a straw man. Nobody is suggesting "making racism illegal", because it is impossible for legislation to achieve. Racism itself is a cultural issue.
What people are suggesting is removing legal protections that allow law enforcement to disproportionately violate the human rights of African Americans. That is very possible. That is exactly how you get started on tackling the problem of racial injustice in policing.
I think if you read what I wrote carefully and with a clear mind, you will see that I very much support efforts by the government to self regulate and reduce violence against African Americans, even if I'm pessimistic that it will work in the case of police violence. Indeed, I've been following the subject for over a decade now and have also put my money where my mouth is on this subject.
It's government regulating private citizen's racism that I abjectly disagree with because I think there will be very bad unintended consequences for a strategy that will not work.
So summarizing, a waiter was terrible 30+ years ago, and your dad ran into tons of politics in the VA, and you didn't get into the school you think you should have in your otherwise extremely privileged upper middle class life that had you interacting with high level government officials as a child, so protected classes were a mistake?
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.
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.
If that were the case, then de facto segregation wouldn't be increasing even to this day. Without the government enforcing segregation, people started separating themselves physically. Schools for instance are more segregated than they were in 1975.
Segregation wasn't a case of the government pushing these ideas on to unwilling populace.
This could actually be because of forced busing of whites to black schools.
Many parents want to send their kid to the best school and were willing to move to avoid their kids going to worse schools.
White parents were more likely to be able to afford to move which resulted in them leaving. Minorities tended to be poorer and could not leave and stayed in the areas with the worse schools. Kids who go to worse schools are less likely to get out of poverty so they stayed in the same poor areas and had kids in the same area repeating the cycle.
Since schools are typically given money based on property tax it meant that the schools in poor areas tended to receive less funding. There are also issues with teachers getting lower pay if they were in a poorer school. I think these issues are fixed in some states but there are still issues related to this in various states.
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.
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?
In the global pandemic recently, I spent a week not leaving my apartment even once. I had no trouble getting goods and services because everything was delivered to my door.
It isn't that outlandish that the market will sort it all out. I doubt anyone is going to be unhappy if business get a bit of a prod to remind them that wheelchairs exist, but the idea a free market would ignore 2% of their potential customers is just not true. Greedy capitalists have incentives to be thorough; 2% of the market changing hands is enough to get the attention of any CEO.
Most businesses would notice 2% of their customers disappearing, let alone 2% of the broader market.
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.
Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. In this version of reality do employment protections still exist for disabled people or do they all magically earn there living in multilevel marketing from the comfort of their living rooms in their bespoke built homes (because most homes aren't build with accessibility in mind because the free market will fix that...).
Disability protection law uses the idea of "reasonable accomodation", which mediates between the tensions in this issue.
So disabled people don't get an automatic job, say. But an employer can't just decide not interview someone because "it's inconvenient to interview you due to your disability".
Another: It's not acceptable to say "sorry we can't interview you if you can't climb stairs, because there is a staircase between our interview room and the downstairs offices", because there is a reasonable accomodation possible, namely interviewing in a different room.
A shop is required to make reasonable accomodations, such as provide an entry ramp if that makes sense, and a wheelchair compatible toilet if that makes sense (i.e. it has other toilets).
That prevents shops from saying "we don't care about the 2% so we can't be bothered with a ramp even though the cost is negligable to us".
On the other hand, reasonable is relative. An organisation with no funds would not be required to do the same things as an organisation with plenty of funds. A club open to the public is expected to do more than a private gathering of people where nobody in the group has particular needs. And accomodation doesn't always have to be pre-emptive. For a public facility, anticipating needs of a broad spectrum people is expectecd, but for a small, private workplace it may suffice to react to the particular needs of individual people as needed.
(Note, disability is complicated because there are so many kinds, many of them invisible but cause much difficulty for the persons affected, and people without experience do not recognise the signs. I've used wheelchair here because everyone recognises that, but even with those, a lot of people seem to not understand that if a person can stand up and walk a bit, it doesn't mean they don't need a wheelchair.)
> 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.
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.
> 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,
It wouldn't be the only obstacle. Let's take wheelchair-accessible parking spots for example. We have to convince the store that sacrificing regular-sized parking spots (and the ones closest to the store, at that) in order to make room for a smaller number of larger parking spots that are reserved for 2% of their customers (and not exactly the most profitable 2%, either) is a reasonable accommodation.
Bear in mind that some of those spots we're asking them to convert might already be reserved for the store manager, some senior employees, and the employee-of-the-month as perks, rather than for customers. You will have a lot of convincing to do, and should expect significant pushback from the local chamber of commerce.
I don't think it's fair. But I also believe that people should run their businesses how they see fit, and that freedom of association is a human right.
I bet most businesses would make their stores accessible (within reason) since you need room in isles for carts, etc.
> 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.
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.
