Hmmm. Lib, you and Lemur do make the libertarian case here quite well. However, I see things slightly differently, and do not see in intelligent non-discrimination laws the extreme of coercion that you both have suggested as morally equivalent in your pervious posts.
To start with, in one’s private doings one may choose to do whatsoever one wants, within the confines of the rather broad legal term of “peaceful enjoyment of one’s usufructs.”
When one starts dealing with the public at large, one is, under current law, obliged to conform to certain legal standards.
For example, you are correct that you may choose whom you will hire. But in making that choice, you must take into account that if you blatantly discriminate as regards the “protected classes” (legal fictions constituting groups of people historically discriminated against), you forfeit your right to contracts with agencies of the state and federal governments. Now, in Libertaria, neither the “protected classes” nor the government activities giving rise to those contracts ought to occur. But as a practical mattter, they do in real life.
Similarly, you are under no obligation to hold your second house up for rental to anyone whatsoever. And you are privileged to make a private transaction, e.g., if dear Aunt Matilda has had her family home sold out from under her by the vile Cousin Mortimer, who established title to it by some shady doings involving Great-grandfather’s will, and stands to make inordinately large sums by sale of it to the corporation attempting to build a shopping mall of which that parcel is a key component, then you are quite justified in renting your house to her for a pittance, and rejecting any other person who might inquire about it in favor of Aunt Matilda.
But if you hold that house open for rental to the general public, as by listing it with a realtor or in a newspaper ad, you are obliged to consider all applicants without reference to those categories into which they might fall which would constitute discrimination in the forum state. You have the right not to rent, to rent by private transaction, or to rent to a member of the public. Once you have opted to rent publicly, the rights of the individual members of the public, including those in “protected classes,” come into play, and you may not discriminate against them in manners prohibited by law.
Given this mutualism of rights, does this meet with, if not your ideal libertarian standards, your understanding of what are fair standards in the non-libertarian society which we inhabit?
Finally, to address one point made by Lemur, let me note that the right to collective bargaining is guaranteed by law, not because some theorist felt it ought to be, but because absent that legal protection, an employer could simply dismiss all employees who favored collective bargaining, there being an unequal playing field – he could run at a loss or close down for a period of time much more easily than his erstwhile employees could support themselves in the absence of his employment, particularly in “company towns” which were common in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Ideally, “peaceful honest people” (Lib’s phrase, which I believe valid in the ideal case) would require a minimum of government intervention. However, the world contains a rather substantial portion of people who are not peaceful or honest, at least as regards some particular aspect of their common life. So the Wagner Law and its sequelae protect the right to unionize. So the various housing laws protect the rights of blacks, mixed marriages, unmarried couples, gay people, and so on, from the discriminatory attitudes which might affect their ability to rent or buy safe and decent housing for themselves and their families.
I welcome reasoned refutation of my points, and humbly ask that you not hypothecate extremes but deal with “real life” situations as I attempted to. I grant that no one should force you at gunpoint to rent to them. And I allow that the unnecessary coercion of the law is morally equivalent. The question becomes, what constitutes ‘unnecessary’? Certainly, you would not object to a police officer employing coercion on someone in the process of robbing you, and probably not on someone embezzling your funds either. Where is the line to be drawn? I think reasonable people may honestly have a range of views as to the proper answer to this.