8 ms·

If it's so good for business why does he think we need a legal structure to punish companies that just hire whoever they want?

• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• 21echoes 13y ago
  because oftentimes you need external pressure to force the issue. to some employers, they don't even care if it's potentially better for business, they're "not gonna hire a bunch of fags". additionally, the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market is ill-equipped to encourage good employment behavior.
  • alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    That a policy recommendation does not result in utopia is not a counter argument.
• erichocean 13y ago
  Many people believe that the greatest good for everyone simply cannot be achieved without some degree of violence actively directed towards a few.
• icambron 13y ago
  Do you think that discrimination against blacks and women was good for business? I submit that it was not, but companies did it anyway, because they were not rational. I'm not sure we should expect them to be now. I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women was good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we really need to act.[2] [1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were. [2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.
  • verteu 13y ago
    Discrimination imposes an extra cost on the discriminator. In a free market, firms that engage in irrational discrimination will be driven out of business. This is a central thesis of "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman.
    • interg12 13y ago
      It took the government to intervene into a very long running and prosperous "free market" to bring an end to discrimination, and nobody was making a economic case for it.
      • pdonis 13y ago
        There was no such "free market" before the Federal government intervened; there was an entrenched system of state and local governments not providing a level playing field. IMO the biggest mistake the civil rights movement made was to ask the Federal government for affirmative action, instead of asking it to guarantee a level playing field, so that minority-owned businesses could simply out-compete businesses run by bigots.
        • djur 13y ago
          Why do you assume that minority-owned or nondiscriminating businesses would run discriminating businesses out of the market? You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market.
          • pdonis 13y ago
            You're assuming, at the very least, that the competitive benefit of nondiscrimination exceeds the barriers to entry in the market. Tim Cook was making the same assumption in the article when he said that workplace equality is good for business. Also, the "barriers to entry" came from those state and local government regulations I referred to; asking the Federal government to provide a level playing field would have meant asking the Federal government to force state and local governments to remove those barriers to entry.