November 24, 2025
Many people today think that it should be illegal to discriminate against other people because of their race, sex, or religion. Applied to blacks, the view I'll be discussing claims that people should not be allowed to "discriminate" against blacks by refusing to hire them, by refusing to rent to them or to sell property to them, or to reject them in business transactions. If a customer comes into your store, you are not allowed to refuse him service. You are required to be "colorblind", and, if you aren't, you can be fined or jailed.
An alternative view is that you are allowed to or even required to give them preferential treatment. If, for example, two of your employees, one black and the other white or Asian, are eligible for promotion, you should promote the black employee, even if the white employee has more seniority. You can't test people who want a job or a promotion if blacks don't do as well on the test as whites or Asians, because this outcome shows that the test is biased against them. You are subject to be fined or even jailed if you do give such a test.
Murray Rothbard rejected all of what I have described in the preceding two paragraphs. He had a simple solution. All transactions in a free society are voluntary. You are free to associate, or not to associate with anyone who wants to associate with you.
As he puts it in For a New Liberty: "Fundamental to the libertarian creed is every man's right to choose who shall enter or use his own property, provided of course that the other person is willing. 'Discrimination,' in the sense of choosing favorably or unfavorably in accordance with whatever criteria a person may employ, is an integral part of freedom of choice, and hence of a free society."
He thought that most people wouldn't discriminate, because there is an economic cost to doing so. You must bear all the costs of your choices: "Suppose, for example, that someone in a free society is a landlord of a house or a block of houses. He could simply charge the free market rent and let it go at that. But then there are risks; he may choose to discriminate against renting to couples with young children, figuring that there is substantial risk of defacing his property. On the other hand, he may well choose to charge extra rent to compensate for the higher risk, so that the free-market rent for such families will tend to be higher than otherwise. This, in fact, will happen in most cases on the free market. But what of personal, rather than strictly economic, 'discrimination' by the landlord? Suppose, for example, that the landlord is a great admirer of six-foot Swedish-Americans, and decides to rent his apartments only to families of such a group. In the free society it would be fully in his right to do so, but he would clearly suffer a large monetary loss as a result. For this means that he would have to turn away tenant after tenant in an endless quest for very tall Swedish-Americans. While this may be considered an extreme example, the effect is exactly the same, though differing in degree, for any sort of personal discrimination in the marketplace. If, for example, the landlord dislikes redheads and determines not to rent his apartments to them, he will suffer losses, although not as severely as in the first example. In any case, anytime anyone practices such 'discrimination' in the free market, he must bear the costs."
Some people object to the example of redheads. They point out that most people don't have negative views about redheads; and, even if they do, redheads can easily find someone else to deal with. But many people have negative views about blacks. Because of this, blacks may find it difficult to find people who want to deal with them and as a result, they may have to accept inferior alternatives. Even if this is true, though, they have no right to violate the property rights of others. People's property rights aren't dependent on not putting others at a significant disadvantage.
But in fact, as Rothbard says, the profit motive is very strong, and most businessmen won't be willing to give up a deal because of their personal opinions about a group. We can see this in the history of the American South after the end of the War Between the States.
There is an excellent discussion of this vital fact in an article by Tom Mullen, written in a very Rothbardian spirit. Here is what Mullen says: "If you believe the approved narrative, the post-bellum South was a monolithic hive-mind of sheet-wearing racists who couldn't wait to codify their hatred into law. While this fiction validates statists of every stripe and allows northerners to feel morally superior, the truth is uncomfortable for both: large parts of the South were already desegregating on their own until the government stepped in to stop them.
"That's right. Before the Jim Crow laws of 1890-1910, tens of thousands of Southern businesses - black and white owned - served both races without a second thought. Streetcars in New Orleans, theaters in Charleston, barbershops in Richmond, saloons in Mobile, and first-class railroad cars from Virginia to Texas routinely mixed Black and White customers. In many cities the integrated establishments were not a courageous minority; they were the majority.
"The free market was producing exactly what free markets always produce: a spectrum of choices, some segregated by private choice, most not. And the non-segregated ones were winning.
This situation changed only when the state governments required segregation:"If you believe the approved narrative, the post-bellum South was a monolithic hive-mind of sheet-wearing racists who couldn't wait to codify their hatred into law. While this fiction validates statists of every stripe and allows northerners to feel morally superior, the truth is uncomfortable for both: large parts of the South were already desegregating on their own until the government stepped in to stop them.
"That's right. Before the Jim Crow laws of 1890-1910, tens of thousands of Southern businesses - black and white owned - served both races without a second thought. Streetcars in New Orleans, theaters in Charleston, barbershops in Richmond, saloons in Mobile, and first-class railroad cars from Virginia to Texas routinely mixed Black and White customers. In many cities the integrated establishments were not a courageous minority; they were the majority.
"The free market was producing exactly what free markets always produce: a spectrum of choices, some segregated by private choice, most not. And the non-segregated ones were winning."
This situation changed only after the state governments required segregation:"Every single segregation statute was a blatant violation of freedom of association and freedom of contract. The Louisiana Separate Car Act didn't politely 'ask' the railroad to add a colored car; it threatened prison for any conductor who let a Black passenger sit in the White section-or a White passenger sit in the Black section if he preferred the company. The Arkansas streetcar law of 1903 didn't appeal to conscience; it fined drivers $25 (over $800 today) every time they failed to enforce the color line.
"These weren't 'public safety' regulations. They were cartel enforcement mechanisms written by the losers in the marketplace who couldn't compete with entrepreneurs - Black or White - who treated customers as individuals instead of racial categories.
"White restaurant owners in Mobile didn't lobby for segregation because they woke up one day disliking black people any more than they previously did. They did it because John Callahan's café served Black longshoremen at the same counter for the same price and was stealing their lunch trade. White theater owners in Chattanooga didn't care about 'racial purity' until the Bijou started selling orchestra seats to Black patrons and cut their ticket revenue in half. White barbers in Little Rock passed a law banning barbers from cutting the hair of the opposite race because Black barbers had cornered the high-end White clientele.
"And don't think they only targeted Black competitors. White 'race traitors' got it worse. The Richmond streetcar monopoly didn't just want Black hack drivers gone; they wanted every White hack driver who still picked up Black passengers run out of business, too. Economic historian Jennifer Roback documented that Jim Crow laws systematically raised the cost of doing integrated business until only the state-protected cartel survived."
Let's do everything we can to defend genuine freedom of association and oppose all laws requiring either preferential treatment or "segregation." This is what our great teacher Murray Rothbard wanted us to do.