There’s No Such Thing as a “Private” Business

Economic engagement is an inherently public endeavor.

It’s become a recent political fad to engage in law-making that empowers privately-owned businesses from denying service to gay customers based on “sincerely held” religious beliefs. These discriminatory “anti-discriminatory” laws are designed to shield homophobic, religious business owners from interactions with gay people, but they are completely unfounded since economic activity is an inherently public endeavor, and therefore discrimination of any sort, even by privately-owned businesses, cannot be allowed.

Obviously public interactions don’t happen in people-less, emotion-less vacuums, but theoretically, from a business perspective, the wisest thing for you to do is sell things to customers who walk through your door regardless of their identifying factors. Of course all people have prejudices or biases of some sort, so as a blanket “policy” we accept that we won’t allow people to discriminate based on inherent identifying factors (skin color, sexuality), but will allow people to discriminate based on behavior (you act like an ass, you leave, or more commonly “No shoes, no shirt, no service”).

This makes sense, since again, the whole endeavor is inherently public. Even a privately owned business, by virtue of being a business, has engaged in this public affair, and in 2016 with the global economy as complex and interwoven as it is, this is more true than ever. Late medieval cottage industry was in charge of its entire supply chain from raw material to product, but think of the pizza store in Indiana recently that didn’t want to serve gay customers: is that establishment growing its own tomatoes for sauce; milking its own cows for cheese; and killing its own pigs for sausage? To take ownership over that final exchange of the economic process — the sale/purchase — and deny it to someone because of their identifying factors seems to me to be a bit of cognitive dissonance. It stands to reason that if you don’t want to serve gay customers, you don’t want gay tomato pickers touching the ingredients before they get to you. So why can you deny a gay person a product because of their sexuality, when A) that isn’t in your economic best interests, and B) there is no way for you to know, let alone guarantee that this product — and the money you’ll accept for it — hasn’t been through the hands, factories, ships, etc of not only gays, but all sorts of different types of people, some of whom are likely morally corrupt regardless of their inherent identifying factors.

So unless you are able to certify that your product is — from start to finish — “gay free,” just as some food and other products today are certified as environmentally friendly/safe, then you’re not allowed to deny service to gay people. The same would go for any identifying factor. Don’t want to serve Blacks, Muslims, women, whomever? Fine, as long as you can prove that from the time you began collecting the resources to begin constructing your product/service to the time you sell it that no one of that identity group has at all been involved in the process. Otherwise his/her labor is involved, and he/she deserves to be privy to the process at hand.

It’s quite easy, then, to see how the whole process falls apart quickly and immediately, and why business leaders — even if they’re not necessarily good people — are opposed to such laws. Inserting any kind of prejudices into the process stagnates the process and shrinks the whole pie. Our entire system is predicated on the pie growing, and for it to grow, it must literally and ultimately be accessible to everyone, ergo economic activity is a public endeavor.

Finally, and most pragmatically, expanding — rather than contracting — economic access to everyone is beneficial to all of us. Nothing can foster sustainable peace and stability better than prosperity and opportunity, and so it is the best interest of anyone who wants those things to spread economic opportunity offer participation in the economy to others.

#DomesticAffairs