February 21, 2006

WRTA

Brown Shoes Diary

Fighting Discrimination: The Wrong Battle

According to a report on WRTA, state Treasurer Bob Casey says if he defeats Senator Rick Santorum, he'll fight discrimination wherever he finds it.  Trouble is, the job description of U.S. senator is to protect discrimination.  Senators are supposed to protect discrimination?  Well, yes.  According to the U.S. Constitution, which every senator swears to uphold, government's job is to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity." 

It's a simple matter of logic that liberty only exists where people are free to discriminate.  Freedom of association with whomever we please also entails freedom to avoid whomever we please.  No justification is required; no permission needs to be sought; no license needs to be obtained.  The U.S. Constitution is written in plain English and it is clear that the government's job is to protect our God-given right to liberty and that includes our right to discriminate.

Now the fact that each of us personally is permitted to discriminate against whomever we please is no license for the government to do it.  In fact, the government has a clear obligation to provide "equal justice under law" and therefore it is appropriately prohibited from discriminatory practices.  Not that anyone remembers, but that was the point of the Civil Rights movement.  State governments and the national government were treating people differently just because of the color of their skin.  That was a manifest violation of the government's duty to all citizens.

On the other hand, in a free society no private citizen should have a legal obligation to any other private citizen.  If I choose to let pink people into my house, but ban blue people, that's none of the government's business.  If I want to rent my downstairs bedroom, but don't want a tenant of a particular characteristic or one that engages in a particular behavior, that's my business.  It's my property and in a free society, the owner of private property is its king.

The same is true on the job.  All the anti-discrimination employment legislation put out by the national and state governments is un-Constitutional and un-American.  The employer owns the business and the jobs that go with it.  If an employer prefers and hires younger workers rather than older workers or vice versa, he or she is Constitutionally entitled to do so and, more important, is morally free to do so.  I'm not saying that all discrimination is morally correct, though much of it is, but we ought not be trying to legislate morality if we don't have to.

And we don't have to in the private sector.  The nice thing about a free society is that freedom raises the cost of irrational discrimination.  If I'm an employer who refuses to hire a particular group of people strictly out of bigotry, I necessarily will be paying more for labor than those competitors who are willing to hire anyone.  Pretty quickly I'm out of business.  Bigotry is a real albatross in the free market.

Another example: Suppose I want to operate a restaurant that caters to smokers.  Shouldn't I be free to do that?  Absolutely, and I should be free to operate a restaurant that forbids smoking too.  But by what right does government get involved in this decision?  You might say that a restaurant is a public place, but that doesn't make it public property.  Each restaurant is owned by somebody and it is most definitely private property.  The king here is the owner of the property and the owner gets to make the rules in a free society.

I'm no fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but his comment that "we have nothing to fear, but fear itself," is worth noting in this context.  Americans live in all kinds of fear and simply don't trust freedom any longer.  We're scared beyond reason that something terrible, something offensive might happen if we allow people to be free.  Until we recover the moral courage to let everyone run their lives as they see fit, so long as they do so peacefully, we'll never have the freedom to run our own lives.

Mr. Casey, you need to do a 180 to be a senator worthy of the American heritage of liberty; otherwise, your oath to uphold the Constitution will be an outright lie.

Contact John D McGinnis

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