5 ms·

Employers and landlords should be able to deny access to anyone they please. It's their company and their property, after all.

• jacalata 9y ago
  A company that doesn't rely on the resources and services of society can argue that. But a company that wants to rely on any infrastructure like roads or electricity, and a landlord relying on the socially enforced theory of property, is not in that group.
  • smsm42 9y ago
    That's a bad argument. There's no choice but to use roads, there's no way to create roads without government permission, there's no way to build any infrastructure without complying with myriad of expensive regulations (and for many things there are no way at all - try to build something where government doesn't want to permit something to be built) and they are paid with taxes that aren't exactly voluntary too. So the logic goes is "we control all the environment, we take money from you to create infrastructure the way we want and we ban you from competing with us - and then we demand from you compliance because you have no choice but to use the infrastructure". If there were an option to use government infrastructure or create and use independent one, then demands on the users of the government one could be justified - our infrastructure, our rules. But instead, there is no choice and the government actively suppresses the possibility of choice arising - in this case, making some demands for using the only possibility available is hypocritical at best.
    • afastow 9y ago
      It's not a bad argument. You are describing a feature not a bug. You are free to vote for policies and candidates that will make things the way you want them to be. I'm sure you have. Luckily a majority of us over time have voted against you and decided housing discrimination is wrong and made it illegal. The fact that you lack the choice to do it anyway is intentional.
      • smsm42 9y ago
        > Luckily a majority of us over time have voted against you Luckily, since we're a majority, we can force anything on you with impunity. But that's not enough for us - we'd also like to feel morally superior when we're doing it!
    • cortesoft 9y ago
      Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules. If you don't like it, feel free to find somewhere else to live... although sadly, every spot of land is already taken. Sorry about that.
      • smsm42 9y ago
        > Yep, one of the costs of living in society is that you have to follow some rules. Another bad argument. Nobody argues agains having some rules. But that does not make every rule necessary. Especially ones that are justified by "since we have these rules that force you to use our services, you also owe us to abide by other rules". That's not a good justification, that's just circular logic.
• 5ilv3r 9y ago
  It's absolutely morally indefensible to refuse services because of what someone was born as.
  • npstr 9y ago
    Any company or landlord who does such a thing will go out of business, since any clever competitor will snatch those great deals that those companies and landlords are missing out on.
    • mrkurt 9y ago
      That is ... not actually true. It'd be great if that's what happened, but we have several decades of discriminatory housing/credit policies that haven't put companies out of business. _Equifax_ started primarily as a tool to help people discriminate.
    • Larrikin 9y ago
      Or other racist will seek them out, which is what used to happen before regulation was passed to prevent people from blatantly discriminating.
    • pwinnski 9y ago
      I would love to live in the world you describe, but that is not this world.
    • s_kilk 9y ago
      Were you... born yesterday?
• InitialLastName 9y ago
  Not if that property benefits from any public services. Once the public is subsidizing something (like roads, mail, utilities, education, emergency services, etc), the public gets some say in who gets to be included.
  • npstr 9y ago
    I agree with this, but as long as the public services are a forced upon monopoly this doesn't really work.