So, yesterday we had a slightly fractious conversation about when it was or wasn’t acceptable to discriminate against people in the course of your commercial life. The position was presented that anyone should be able to refuse business with anyone and not give reasons – it was the right of people to trade with who they wanted. The problem with this position of course is that it leads to structural exclusion. Imagine a situation where one race controls all the methods of power generation and refuses to business with (i.e. sell electricity) to people of the race B in the country. These people in Race B cannot even set up their own electricity supply chains because the wholesale supply and delivery chains are controlled by Race A. In this instance the “power of the market” fundamentally breaks down. How to respond? Well, one person suggested praying, but frankly I don’t think that is a sufficient answer (even if it is a necessary answer). It’s a bit like the following conversation: A: Do you see the starving homeless orphan over there? Why don’t you let her have some of the huge stockpile of tinned goods you have? B: I’m praying to God to help her. That’ll fix it. A: Why don’t you stop praying and start giving? Praying by itself isn’t good enough. True religion adds in action as well. Some suggested that the Government legislate to decide what essential goods were. The issue with this is as follows: a) It’s a bit perverse to say it’s wrong to legislate for freedom of commercial access to goods X but not to goods Y. Why is it right in one instance but not another? b) Where do you draw the line between what is and isn’t essential? Who decides? What if the people deciding are racist? c) Legislating in this way doesn’t tackle the structural exclusion of the economic system. It creates a two-tier economic hierarchy –“You’re allowed to have commercial access to everything because you have the same colour skin as most retailers, but you, since you have another coloured skin, just have to accept that your children will never be able to have a few luxuries in life (and will have to live in the lowest quality housing that the law permits). But the most perverse part of this whole conversation is this. In order to support the right of a Christian retailer to refuse to do business with gay people, we end up condoning institutional racism. Really, that’s what the conversation did. We dressed it up in the language of rights and freedoms, but at the end of the day there were people who seemed to support the idea that in order to defend our right to do business with who we chose (and to be able to refuse business with who we chose) we would have to have a society where structural inequality was permitted and where racist decisions were acceptable and expected. What have we become? Seriously folks, what have we become? In order to defend our right not to do business with gay people we are prepared to let children suffer, to let families be discriminated against, to allow restrictions on access and expectations. Do we seriously think this is a moral argument? Seriously? Seriously? If this is the level of our argument then as conservatives we have lost already. If you want to comment below, to defend this economic model, I will only permit comments that address the structural exclusion issue directly. I will not accept comments that claim it doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem (it is), and I will not accept comments that attempt to avoid the issue. Address the flaw in this libertarian idyll, or accept that your societal economic premise is fundamentally flawed.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 08:25:27 +0000
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