Discrimination: a Libertarian Viewpoint

"liberty can even be explained as discriminating as you wish with your person and...property"

discrimination  In its basic sense, to discriminate is merely to make distinctions. This is often for the purpose of making choices. The more useful distinctions people can make and act on, the better off they are likely to be. The whole of social or interpersonal ^*liberty can even be explained as discriminating as you wish with your person and ^*legitimate—i.e., ^*libertarian—^*property (including any businesses). All ^*initiated impositions interfering with such discrimination reduce people’s liberty for the purpose of increasing the ^*license or illiberal ^*power of other agents; whether this be the ^*state itself or ^*privileged groups.

Genuinely arbitrary discrimination in the ^*free market, that does not reflect any underlying reality of ^*demand or supply, is very likely to be competed away by businesses that do not thus discriminate and that thereby make more ^*profit. Any remaining discrimination is likely to be ^*efficient; such as that based on a market reflecting differing ^*consumer preferences, or insurance companies having differential rates based on the varying statistical risks of identifiable groups. It was only state intervention that imposed such uneconomic institutions as ^*apartheid in South Africa (which was resisted by many white-owned businesses) and ^*racial segregation in the ^*USA.

Notoriously, however, the word “discrimination” is also used by the ^*politically correct (PC) and ^*woke as a pejorative for any social discrimination to which they object. These currently include discrimination on such bases as ^*race, ethnicity, sex, so-called ^*“gender”, sexual orientation, ^*religion, ^*disability, ^*national origin, age, weight, etc. PC and woke objections to these discriminations include that they are ^*prejudiced, ^*bigoted, ^*irrational, ^*unfair, ^*unjust, ^*oppressive, ^*morally arbitrary, ^*harmful, and ^*disrespecful. But once it is understood that private-property discrimination promotes both individual ^*liberty and ^*economic efficiency, it becomes clear that all of the criticisms of discrimination actually apply to the state’s initiated imposition of anti-discrimination (at least, insofar as they even make sense). However, such is the moral and intellectual confusion of current state-dominated ^*academia that the immorality of discrimination is often held as a ^*dogmatic axiom. See, for instance, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “discrimination”: how discrimination is wrong is all that is discussed (in over 15,000 words). There is not even a passing mention of the possibilities that discrimination might not be wrong or that authoritarian restrictions of it might be wrong (presumably even such mentions would be ^*“thoughtcrimes”).

The issue also arises of whether the state itself, at least, should not discriminate in any of these listed ways. The most important point for the libertarian ^*anarchist is that there should be no state-provided, or subsidised, services financed by ^*tax-^*extortion, and so the question is ultimately redundant. But given that the state does intervene, there seems no reason to assume the legitimacy of a non-discrimination ^*bias (as even many, PC-influenced, libertarians assume). A more directionally-libertarian state-approach as regards its employees, immigration policy, etc., might be to see what the market and ^*charity tend to do and then copy that. This might well result in some diverse possibilities rather than the state’s normal ^*procrusteanism.

(This is an entry from A Libertarian Dictionary: Explaining a Philosophical Theory [draft currently being revised]. Asterisks indicate other entries.)