Freedom of Association Maxxing

I’m going to make the case for something I’m guessing most people disagree with. But by the end of this article, you may find the idea isn’t so bad.

People should be free to leave each other alone. In other words, they should have freedom of association. It’s a core enlightenment value.

Freedom of association ‘light’ means choosing your friends, your job, your wife, and so on. Those examples are uncontroversial. I’m guessing you agree you should be able to choose your friends, and that forced friendship wouldn’t be friendship at all.

But taken seriously, freedom of association has many controversial implications as well.

One of the more controversial implications is that businesses should be free to turn away customers for any reason or no reason at all. That includes racist reasons. For example, under true freedom of association, a hospital would be free to turn away minorities. To be sure, the people running that hospital would be fools to turn away minorities. Their reputation would take a hit and they’d lose business. But some action shouldn’t automatically be illegal just because it’s foolish.

I can think of two businesses that have turned me away for (in my opinion) foolish reasons. One time in Japan, my then-girlfriend and I were turned away from a bar. The bouncer told us, “No women and no foreigners.” We weren’t offended. In Austria, I tried going to a hospital when I had the flu. They turned me away because I didn’t have an appointment. I don’t know how an illness could possibly be scheduled but their policies are their policies. I had no claim to their services, so turning me away was their prerogative.

In the US, things are different. I’m no history expert but my understanding is that Jim Crow laws enforced racial discrimination. Then the Civil Rights Act forbade racial (and other) discrimination. Those are two sides of the same coin: one forbids certain types of association, the other enforces them. There’s a third way: for the government to stay out of it. Society organizes itself much more effectively when people are free to make their own separate choices. It’s not like you can outlaw racism anyway.

There’s a deeper argument for freedom of association along Popperian lines. What if I’m wrong to oppose racism? Don’t get me wrong, I’d be surprised. But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. If I am wrong, then the mistake is currently entrenched in American law. Getting rid of bad laws is possible but difficult. Under freedom of association, I could just vote with my wallet and go to a hospital whose policies I agree with. Much easier.

I’m guessing you agreed when I wrote that people should be free to choose their jobs. But the government prevents people from taking all kinds of jobs they’d otherwise happily take. Minimum-wage laws, for example, outlaw jobs. If you want to wait tables for $5 an hour, and a restaurant wants to hire you at $5 an hour, both of you benefit – otherwise neither of you would enter into the agreement. But if the minimum wage is set an $10 an hour, you don’t have that freedom of association. You and the restaurant are forced not to associate in this way. As a result, both of you are poorer than you otherwise would have been. If I recall correctly, Thomas Sowell called minimum-wage laws the number one cause keeping black teens on the streets. But the same legislators were presumably in favor of the Civil Rights Act. So you can see how contradictory things get once we abandon freedom of association. Under true freedom of association, there’d be no minimum-wage laws and no such contradictions.

Put more generally, unwanted protection is oppression. In the words of Milton Friedman:

Most consumer-protection legislation is not consumer-protection legislation. It’s the enacting into the laws of the prejudices of a small group of people who have organized themselves into an effective lobbying group. Is the consumer really being protected by having somebody else decide for him whether he may use saccharin or not? He’s not being protected, he’s being hurt. I think that the most effective protection the consumer can get is free competition.

If somebody else decides for you, whether you like it or not, that you don’t get to apply to a certain job, or that you must accept business from certain customers, or that you can’t eat certain foods, then you’re not being protected at all. You’re being oppressed. Somebody else is telling you how to live your life.

That includes having to pay for services you don’t want, even those (allegedly) essential for a functioning society like the police or the fire department. You shouldn’t have to pay for police if you don’t want their protection. If you’re a big guy with guns and you feel that you can protect yourself, that should be your prerogative. And if those services really are essential, meaning people can’t live without them, then they will happily pay for them anyway, and no law or force to that effect is needed.

I’m guessing you agreed when I wrote that people should be free to choose their friends. But what about kids? They’re forced to go to school and associate with other kids they might not associate with otherwise, including bullies. That’s horrible.

Public property is another offender. It forces people who otherwise wouldn’t associate into the same space. You’re not free to avoid drug addicts if they can roam the streets. If all property were private, people would be free to make their own rules around unacceptable behaviors. I see hardly a need for prisons without public property since there’d be no public streets to keep criminals off of. Instead, we need to abolish public property and give people the tools they need to protect their private property. Then there could be harmony among all men.

In short, if we had true of freedom of association, people would be richer and freer. There’d be greater diversity of jobs, products, and businesses. People commonly focus on finding the ‘right’ way to do things and then entrenching that way in law. I think that’s bad because it hinders error correction.