Tag: discrimination

Categories
free trade & free markets

Bigots Hate Competition

Apparently, economics is hard. But some things are pretty straightforward.

For example, both parties to a trade gain: it’s called “mutual benefit through exchange.”

Another basic principle? Employers hire labor expecting productivity. Businesses don’t hire workers who can’t produce enough to more than cover their wages — and managers fire workers when they prove they aren’t productive enough.

And yet another? Competition for trade increases the quality of products, reduces price, or both and tends to equalize prices for goods of the same quality.Gary Becker: 1930-2014

An appreciation of late economist Gary Becker on reason.com shows the consequence of the latter principle in a perhaps unexpected area: discrimination.

A company that pays someone less than they are worth encourages worker flight, “jumping ship.” Companies that refuse to hire qualified women or minorities when they could underbid similarly productive workers (demanding higher wages) could find themselves out-competed by less discriminatory businesses. Indeed, studies suggest they could find themselves less profitable and even out of existence.

Nobel Laureate Gary Becker saw this, and realized that free markets impose a check upon bigotry. Regulations that limit competition in industry also stifle gender workforce participation and increase inequality. “[C]ountries such as Japan that have avoided deregulation, shareholder capitalism, and open markets,” summarizes Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “tend to lag in both productivity and workplace gender equality.”

There are many good reasons to favor free markets. They not only make us wealthier, they discourage prejudicial behavior. Competition punishes bad behavior even while it emphasizes win-win scenarios.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom judiciary

Refusal of Service?

“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

Not a sign of the times.

Businesses, in these United States, may not discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion . . . and now, in nearly half of the states, because of sexual orientation.

This came up in New Mexico, recently. Elane Photography had refused to visually record the civil union ceremonies of a gay couple. The couple sued, and a court ruled in their favor: “[A] commercial photography business that offers its services to the public, thereby increasing its visibility to potential clients, is subject to the anti-discrimination provisions” of New Mexico’s Human Rights Act, and “must serve same-sex couples on the same basis that it serves opposite-sex couples.”

The old idea was that governments were not to discriminate against this person or that, because all are owed justice. But businesses do not sell justice, and, since no one is owed a particular service, private persons and groups, including businesses, were allowed to discriminate in ways forbidden to governments.

This changed with 1964’s Civil Rights Act. Not only did it repeal the evil Jim Crow era public mandates for discrimination (further enforced by organized private violence), but the Act forbade private business discrimination, enforcing open access . . . leaving us with what B.K. Marcus calls “the right to say ‘I do’” but without any “right to say ‘I don’t.’”

The case will be appealed. “We believe that the First Amendment protects the right of people not to communicate messages that they disagree with,” say the photographers’ lawyers.

The ACLU declares this notion “frighteningly far-reaching.”

Well, yes. Justice is supposed to be that. Far-reaching.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The Left Discriminates

The political “left” dominates a number of institutions, including, most famously, Hollywood entertainment and up-market journalism. But perhaps even more striking is the heavily “liberal-progressive” bent observed in many academic fields, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, far in excess of the leftist percentage in America at large.

And this certainly deserves an explanation.

Could it be the result of bias and discrimination?

It’s long been fun to listen to academics defend their heavily leftist cut of the higher ed pie using arguments that have nothing to do with bias. Why “fun”? Because similar arguments trotted out in other fields receive nothing but scorn from academics.

Now there’s a study showing that social psychologists, at least, self-admit to an anti-conservative bias in grading papers, awarding grant proposals, inviting symposium speakers, and accepting job applicants. And here’s the kicker: “The more liberal the survey respondents identified as being, the more likely they were to say that they would discriminate.”

Those who are already sharpening their ad hominem retorts should note that the study was not conducted by folks on “the right.” Co-author Yoel Inbar described himself to Inside Higher Ed as “‘a pretty doctrinaire liberal,’ who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008 and who votes Democrat. His co-author, Joris Lammers of Tilburg, is to Inbar’s left, he said.”

The most interesting aspect of bias uncovered in the study, however, is that interviewed academics estimated that their colleagues were twice as likely as themselves to discriminate on ideological grounds.

The “other guy” is always worse than oneself.

Which is where bias and prejudice begin, perhaps.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.