Should We Be Free To Discriminate?

A case has recently been in the news and is being decided by the Supreme Court. It concerns a cake designer who doesn’t want to bake cakes for homosexual “marriages.” Is the cake  designer free to refuse, on grounds of freedom of religion—the designer’s religion doesn’t recognize such “marriages” as legitimate, or must homosexuals be served, because the cake-making service is a public accommodation that must be open to any customer who can pay for the service provided? This question frames the basic issue the wrong way. If you offer a service or sell a good, you should be free to sell it to whomever you want, or to refuse it sell it.  A sale and purchase is a voluntary transaction that requires the consent of all the parties to the deal. Thus, if a cake designer doesn’t want to sell cakes to homosexuals, he should be free to refuse. He isn’t required to claim that selling the cake goes against his religion. What if he just doesn’t like homosexuals, but doesn’t allege that his religion backs him up in this dislike? He should be free to “discriminate” in any way he wishes. In arguing in this way, we are following the principles of the greatest twentieth-century theorist of a free society, Murray Rothbard.

Exactly the same principle applies in employment. You should be free to hire and fire any workers you want in your business, regardless of your reason. As  Murray points out in his great book Power and Market, “A very common criticism of the libertarian position runs as follows: Of course we do not like violence, and libertarians perform a useful service in stressing its dangers. But you are very simpliste because you ignore the other significant forms of coercion exercised in society—private coercive power, apart from the violence wielded by the State or the criminal. The government should stand ready to employ its coercion to check or offset this private coercion.

In the first place, this seeming difficulty for libertarian doctrine may quickly be removed by limiting the concept of coercion to the use of violence. This narrowing would have the further merit of strictly confining the legalized violence of the police and the judiciary to the sphere of its competence: combatting violence. But we can go even further, for we can show the inherent contradictions in the broader concept of coercion.

A well-known type of ‘private coercion’ is the vague but ominous-sounding ‘economic power.’ A favorite illustration of the wielding of such ‘power’ is the case of a worker fired from his job, especially by a large corporation. Is this not ‘as bad as’ violent coercion against the property of the worker? Is this not another, subtler form of robbery of the worker, since he is being deprived of money that he would have received if the employer had not wielded his ‘economic power’?

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