How exactly does being a Market Anarchist reconcile with the notion of forcing people who don’t want to deal with certain people to deal with them?
Man, you’re new here, aren’t you?
Nobody here (neither me, nor the folks I linked to on the Rand Paul/Rachel Maddow exchange) is proposing that people who want to run stupid racist lunch counters be forced to serve black people. What has been proposed is that if you open up a stupid racist lunch counter, black people (and white anti-racists) have a right to engage in nonviolent forms of grassroots social protest against your stupid racist policies.
If you don’t like how people peacefully react to your whites-only policy, then you have a few options: (1) you can bear the costs of the protest and wait it out; (2) you can bear the costs of changing your space so that protesters can’t get access to it while maintaining disciplined nonviolence (e.g., rather than putting it in the middle of an integrated department store, you could put it in a closed-in bar and hire a bouncer to turn away would-be customers who are black); (3) you can move somewhere where there aren’t any black people or anti-racist activists to protest; or (4) you can decide that the benefits (whatever they’re supposed to be) of your whites-only lunch counter aren’t enough to be worth the social costs of antagonizing a large segment of the community. My view is that (4) is the best option — because I don’t think there are any real benefits worth having in that kind of stupid racist shit. But whatever you may decide, the protesters aren’t forcing you to do jack — in the sense of treading on your individual rights. Rather, they are freely deciding not to support your stupid policies, or to make life socially easy for you when you promote policies they consider offensive. But you don’t have a right to make other people support your stupid policies, or to make life socially easy for you.
So, when you ask:
But in a market anarchist society, how do you justify forcing a community to admit people they would rather not associate with?
I surely don’t know, but I have yet to be shown where somebody is being forced. Of course I oppose government antidiscrimination laws, as do Sheldon and Brad. What we’re discussing is how nonviolent grassroots social activism might affect things without forcing integrationist policies on anybody.
HTH.
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