For this diary, I am only referring to laws against discrimination in the private sector, in hiring, in pay, and in customers. I am not talking about discrimination by government. Like many, I find discrimination anywhere to be completely repugnant and stupid, and I would love for discrimination to end. The question is, do antidiscrimination laws help in that process?
I supported antidiscrimination laws for a long time because I thought they, as they sound, helped end discrimination. Eventually, I realized that like many things politicians propose, sound great on the surface, but are counterproductive in practice. When a policy turns out to work against the intended goal, that has to be taken into account when deciding policy.
When making any policy, the first question to ask is, "What are the current incentives, and how does this policy change them?" In the case of antidiscrimination laws, the question is what incentive do people have to discriminate based on race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, or any other impersonal characteristics? They have no incentive. If they exclude based on impersonal characteristics, they are losing potential gains from trade.
If no one has an incentive to discriminate, why do we need laws against it? The common answer is people still do it. That may be true, but they have to then accept they will lose business to a competitor who doesn't discriminate.
Let's go to the extreme and say we have a neonazi as a store owner, who only accepts straight white Christians as customers. Then let's say I have a store that sells the same things, and I treat everyone equally. Who is going to get more business? I will. The neonazi is doing me, the competitor, a favor by discriminating, as he gives me more business and a greater market share. He's being stupid and suffering the consequences. If we enact an antidiscrimination policy, the neonazi will get more business assuming he complies with the law. Why would we want that?
The same idea works with hiring and pay. If the neonazi is only hiring straight white Christians, he is limiting his selection of productive employees, and essentially handing some to me. With pay, let's say a white person and a black person are equally qualified (i.e. both make the company $8/hour). The white person demands $7/hour, and the black person demands $5/hour. Who would the employer be best off hiring? The black person. But, if he wishes to indulge his prejudice and choose the white person, he is paying $2/hour to do so. He has also handed me someone who produces the same and costs less, giving me an advantage. Since he only requires $5/hour, I could either make a bigger profit, or reduce my prices and drive the neonazi out of business.
If we then enact an equal pay law, where they both would need to be paid $7/hour, the neonazi is now paying $0 to discriminate. Equal pay laws, though well intended, take away the one weapon the person being discriminated against has: the ability to produce the same or more and require less money.
Discrimination is repugnant, the question is how to best combat it. Laws against it, though well intended, end up doing nothing at best, work counterproductively at worst. I want discriminators to pay a price for discriminating, and laws against discrimination help them avoid that.