Wednesday 6 January 2010

Democracy: The God That Failed - On Discrimination

Thinking about discrimination as discussed in Hoppe's work, "Democracy: The God That Failed", I came to the following:


The nature of discrimination (i.e. excluding someone from using one's property, of refusing to do accept an exchange with someone), while of course being a prerogative of private property as argues Hoppe, is different whether the property is a consumption good or a capital good.


For consumption goods, discrimination is essentially a characteristic related to the subjective preferences of the consumer, whether he likes cold tea, and discriminates against hot tea, or he wants to live in a neighborhood with Germans, Catholics, or not.


This is essentially the discrimination that Hoppe is referring to.


But most goods and exchange in an advanced market economy are not consumer goods, but capital goods, or goods of higher order.


As such, the discrimination being performed by the capital good owner is targeted towards its role in contributing to the production of the final the consumer good.


A factory owner, for example, will discriminate against drunk employees in his factory, while discriminating against, say, homosexuals, makes no sense whatsoever


My point is that Hoppe overlooks completely the discrimination in capital good industries (or rather the lack thereof against "Germans, Catholics, homosexuals", or anything not related to the actual production of the final consumer good), which is a powerful forces towards promoting tolerance and peaceful cooperation between people of different cultures, opinions, etc...


Being intolerant of other people has a steep price in a free society, and Hoppe's assessment of the natural order based radical segregation of "counter cultural" individuals is incorrect.


If anything, a free (anarcho-capitalist) society would have a higher division of labor, and a higher work-force integration that exists at the moment.

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