Forget So-Called Religious Liberty Laws
I’ll bet you know what I’m talking about.
It’s antidiscrimination law, or “public accommodation.” Oh my goodness, do they not want to talk about that.
Legalizing pot is A-OK, but if they said business owners shouldn’t be forced to engage in transactions against their will, they’d be off the 3×5 card of allowable opinion — and they’re going to hold on to that thing if it’s the last thing they do.
Wouldn’t want the Fed chairman to stop accepting their speaking invitations, you understand.
Yes, this is an unpopular position. But once we abandon the idea that property owners decide what takes place in their establishments, we wind up with the perverse, litigation-crazy situation we have today.Meanwhile, the Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken just released an article on public accommodation and the real history of minority advancement that will knock your socks off. I’ll pass it along to you in the coming days when I have Ryan on the show.
What the issue boils down to is this: in our view, when only one party to an exchange wants that exchange to take place, it doesn’t take place. Only when both parties favor it does it happen.
That’s what voluntary interaction is all about.
The obsession with these laws poisons everything. It poisons public discourse, because what should be a debatable issue becomes a club with which to beat people the state considers moral reprobates, but who simply don’t believe in state-enforced interaction.
It poisons legal studies, because law professors make sure they teach the Constitution in such a way that it gets the result they want: public accommodation.
It poisons historical studies, too, because it leaves out how ethnically based capital accumulation and entrepreneurship historically led to the advancement of disfavored groups — a topic I’ll take up on the show in the coming days.
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