Sunday 4 July 2004

This week's cause celebre

The case of Thomas Forrest's refusal to let a double room to two gays continues to reverberate throughout the Scottish media.

Stuart Dickson commented on my previous item:

All services and products become "public" when they are offered for sale. As such they must comply with the many laws of the land. Those laws include the right to freedom from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
As a libertarian I don't agree that goods and services somehow become "public" when offered for sale. The function of the state should not extend beyond the prevention of the initiation of force or fraud. People should be free to offer services on whatever terms they like. Of course, we don't live in a libertarian society and one should comply with the present laws. It seems to be the case here that the sex discrimination laws apply to matters relating to employment but not to the provision of services and that's why Mr Forrest hasn't faced prosecution. In these circumstances it is disturbing that VisitScotland - a taxpayer-funded body - has in effect unilaterally decided that the law should be different. A private tourist body would be fully within its rights to make judgments of this sort but surely not one supposedly acting on behalf of us all.

In his new book Stanford University Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell writes:

Politics and the market are both ways of getting some people to respond to other people's desires. Consumers choosing which goods to spend their money on have often been analogized to voters deciding which candidates to elect to public office. However, the two processes are profoundly different. Not only do individuals invest very different amounts of time and thought in making economic versus political decisions, those decisions are inherently different in themselves. Voters decide whether to vote for one candidate or another but they decide how much of what kinds of food, clothing, shelter, etc., to purchase. In short, political decisions tend to be categorical, while economic decisions tend to be incremental.

Incremental decisions can be more fine-tuned than deciding which candidate's whole package of principles and practices comes closest to meeting your own desires.

I agree. When the state makes the provision of goods and service "public" then it's usually a case of either/or - a "categorical" rule, to use Sowell's terminology. No doubt the law will now be changed to force Mr Forrest to accept gays in his guesthouse, just as a few decades ago allowing gays to share a double room would probably have been illegal. If we leave these decisions to the market we get an "incremental" outcome. Some guesthouses would bar gays, some would be solely for gays and the vast majority would probably not make any rule whatsoever. Incidentally, the same principles happily resolve the so-called problem of smoking in so-called "public" places.

3 comments:

David Farrer said...

Comments made on previous template:

Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
I just did a Google search on this story. It kicked up a story on the BNP's website which applauds Mr Forrest, recommends his services, and even provides a link to his website! 
 
Well done Mr Forrest. Look at all the lovely people who will be crossing your threshold in the near future. Thats just what Kinlochewe needs: an influx of pseudo-fascist bovver-boys. You shall reap the hatred that you have sown.

17 July 2004, 22:28:04 GMT+01:00
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Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
Squander Two 
 
You say that no-one is trying to defend the actions of Mr Forrest. I fear that you are wrong. 
 
6 weeks after this strand came to its gentle conclusion it appears that cro-magnon man finally mastered the internet, and sent me the following email, privately. They did not have the guts to post their prejudice on "Freedom & Whisky" publicly. Please note the hilarious use of capital letters throughout - sure sign of an inarticulate knuckle dragger: 
 
"TOM FORREST GUEST HOUSE" 
 
"GOOD FOR YOU MR FORREST. 
I AM NOT CONSIDERED TO BE CONTROVERSIAL IN MY VIEWS. 
I AM CONVENTIONALLY MARRIED AND HAVE TWO LOVELY DAUGHTERS. 
THE WORLD CREATED MEN AND WOMEN WITH ONLY ONE AIM IN LIFE, TO LIVE TOGETHER NORMALLY AND PERPETUATE THEIR FAMILY BY HAVING CHILDREN. 
ANY OTHER KIND OF RELATIONSHIP IS NOT NORMAL, WETHER (sic) YOU ARE RELIGIOUS OR NOT. 
I BELEIVE (sic) THRE (sic) ARE MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING FED UP WITH BELEIVING (sic) THAT GAYS,LESBIANS ETC IS NORMAL 
WE EVEN ALLOW GAYS OPEN ACCESS TO T.V AND DIRECT CONTACT TO NORMAL FAMILIES THROUGH T.V PROGRAMMES. 
CALL ME OLD FASHIONED BUT LETS STAND UP FOR REAL VALUES IN OUR WORLD. 
GOOD LUCK TO MR FORREST FOR STANDING HIS GROUND. 
I WILL BE BOOKING AT HIS GUEST HOUSE KNOWING THAT HE HAS REAL VALUES AND PRINCIPALS." 
 
From: Kelvin Baines 
kelvin.baines@btinternet.com 
17th July, 2004 
 
I will be informing the administrator of BT Internet that Mr Baines is using their service to post homophobic material.

17 July 2004, 21:07:25 GMT+01:00
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Squander Two (193.116.123.29)
Ivan Massow. Yup, that was him. Thanks, Gawain.

6 July 2004, 17:57:01 GMT+01:00
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Roland Watson (194.217.109.13)
Stuart, 
 
I think you have identified a market niche - evangelical B&Bs. 
 
The free market always finds a way to satisfy all needs and opinions ...

6 July 2004, 16:32:20 GMT+01:00
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Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
Roland 
Upon re-reading the "Scotsman" article I would like to revise my unilateral sentence. 
 
Mr Forrest is an unusually obnoxious individual determined to profit from his ill-gotten notoriety. 
 
Twelve months is way too lenient. And no parole. And a fifty thousand pound fine. And he must wear a miniskirt and lipstick in jail. 
 
Ah well, I'm sure he will get his comeuppance one way or the other. Perhaps God will reward him with record bookings from born again evangelical Republicans, and readers of the Daily Telegraph. Now that truly would be an unpleasant fate.

6 July 2004, 13:53:08 GMT+01:00
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David Farrer said...

Roland Watson (194.217.109.13)
Stuart: 
 
If you are saying that merely expressing disapproval of homosexuality merits state sanctions then you are quite wrong. 
 
If the disapproval leads to acts of violence then yes. But we already have laws in place for acts of violence and neither should there be aggravated sentencing because of so-called discrimination. Punching someone because you do not like their preference of gender or politics or football team should not matter either way.

6 July 2004, 12:07:32 GMT+01:00
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Gawain (83.134.34.31)
I think that the insurence chap you talked about is Ivan Massow - or at least it was in the same business that he made his mint. And an intereting chap he is too.

6 July 2004, 11:50:27 GMT+01:00
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David Farrer (62.49.21.253)
I use Blogger's own server. It too sometimes gets overloaded for a while - I think that they have over a million users. It'll probably sort itself out later in the day. I notice that not all of my photographs are loading at the moment.

6 July 2004, 09:52:29 GMT+01:00
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Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
Yes. It was yesterday evening that Haloscan took a wee fit. 
 
But your site is still not loading properly. I keep having to go in to the ASI website and using their link. Even that only works intermittently.

6 July 2004, 09:49:53 GMT+01:00
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David Farrer (62.49.21.253)
"By the way David Farrar: HaloScan is playing up and lost one of my contributions. And your website is only loading about once in every four attempts. Do you have a problem with your server?" 
 
Haloscan is sometimes a bit temperamental. I was blogging a short while ago - that may explain the problem. Is it OK now and are all of your comments now to be seen? I haven't deleted any!

6 July 2004, 09:43:53 GMT+01:00
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Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
Roland 
 
The persecuted often become the persecutors. Witness the Holocaust and now the behaviour of modern Israel. Or the fact that abused children sometimes become child-abusers. 
 
Oscar Wildes' only crime was to succumb to love. Tom Forrest's was to succumb to hatred. Society discourages other forms of hatred, abuse and nastiness with custodial sentences. Why not homophobia?

6 July 2004, 08:44:25 GMT+01:00
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David Farrer said...




Stuart Dickson (217.211.160.56)
Squander Two 
 
Yes, apologies. I should have said "right-wing Conservatives", which is what acolytes of the Adam Smith Institute are. 
 
I fully acknowledge that that is not the same thing as "far-right" which would be deep into numpty statist territory. I see almost no differentiation between far-right, far-left, communist or fascist: it all works out as much the same thing: total misery and mass murder. (Tories only cause a little bit of misery, and back-up only the occasional unjustified war.) 
 
The reason I made the error in terminology is that my partner was showing worrying signs of absconding to the local without me, and I didn't want to be dragged away from the keyboard by the lug before hitting "OK". 
 
(By the way David Farrar: HaloScan is playing up and lost one of my contributions. And your website is only loading about once in every four attempts. Do you have a problem with your server?) 
 
Negative Externalities: 
As I say my university economics is a bit rusty. But I do seem to remember that even neo-classical theory does allow for novel forms of taxation to discourage damaging behaviour (eg pollution, nicotine consumption, ... or homophobia). Taxation IS market-oriented. It seeks to distort the market, but not to abolish it.

6 July 2004, 08:37:17 GMT+01:00
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Roland Watson (194.217.109.13)
Jail sentences for homophobes? 
 
How the persecuted have become the perscutors!

6 July 2004, 08:34:25 GMT+01:00
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Squander Two (81.178.233.117)
Oh, and, by the way, the Far Right are a bunch of statists. It's not really the right term to use about libertarians. But you knew that, right? 
 
YAAT

5 July 2004, 22:17:26 GMT+01:00
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Squander Two (81.178.233.117)
Stuart,  
 
Firstly, I think you have an unrealistic picture of Scots. Not remember the Clause 28 fiasco? Defending the actions of homophobes wins the whole-hearted approval of very many Scots indeed, as we plainly saw a few years ago. 
 
But that's beside the point, because no-one's defending Forrest's actions here. There is a huge difference between saying that something is wrong and saying that it should therefore be illegal. What Forrest did was wrong. Whether a taxpayer-funded tourist board has any right to decide what opinions one of their taxpaying members should be allowed to hold is a separate issue. 
 
You ask for a market-oriented solution to this problem. (And then you suggest a tax increase, which is the opposite of market-oriented, but hey.) Have you ever heard of this company? http://www.pinkinsurance.co.uk/ 
During the 80s, as the AIDS scare took off, insurance companies started to push up the price of insurance for gay men, on the premise that they had an inherently dangerous lifestyle. A handful of politicians had started to make vague rumblings about maybe doing something about it one day, but it wasn't about to take off politically. And what could they have done? Forced companies to offer the same premiums for gay and straight men? That would have just led to higher premiums for everyone. But one gay man (whose name I forget; sorry) working for an insurance company at the time spotted that this was a huge gap in the market, went and started his own insurance firm, and became a millionaire by offering lower premiums for gay men. Quicker and more effective and cheaper than any government solution, and it created new jobs and wealth, and it didn't cause any resentment because it didn't inconvenience any heterosexual people in order to make life easier for gay men.  
 
All Mr Forrest has done is to establish a gap in his local market. Keep the state out of it and someone will exploit that gap.

5 July 2004, 22:15:41 GMT+01:00