Discrimination and Property Rights

Conceivably, all of these decisions may be “justified.” Perhaps employers are more powerful or have better bargaining power than employees.145 Even if this is so, this is unrelated to racial or gender discrimination. If this is legally offensive, per se, then mere wealth should be irrelevant. After all, the rapist cannot defend his actions on the ground that his victim is richer than himself. In any case, it is the customer, not the owner of the restaurant, “who is always right.” If there is any imbalance of power in that scenario, it presumably cuts in precisely the opposite direction. For example, since the patron of an eating establishment holds a thumbs up or thumbs down vote, then it should be, if anyone, the owner and not the customer who would have the right to freely pick and choose.

This court’s finding is also philosophically flawed in that it ignores the fact that private property rights are in effect a license to exclude. The entire point of such rights is to draw a line between “mine” and “thine.” If a man cannot exclude others from his premises, then there is a strong sense in which they are not his premises at all.

From Walter Block's book, The Case for Discrimination.