ALAN writes:
Recently I spoke with a woman who grew up in St. Louis in the 1950s, as did I. She was educated in Catholic schools, as was I, but in neighborhoods far apart.
She told me she had two aunts who enjoyed shopping downtown. They did not drive, so they depended on the streetcars or buses to take them downtown and back. Occasionally they took a taxi.
One day, she told me, they called a taxi company and said, “White driver, please.”
Can’t you hear the “Liberals” howling “Evil and indefensible!”?
It did not seem that way to my acquaintance when she was a girl in the 1950s. But it seems that way to her now. She professes to be shocked by what her aunts said. She seems to think it was a BAD THING to say and to do. That, of course, is the standard “Liberal” dogma that has been pounded into Americans for the last 70 years. Apparently my acquaintance absorbed that dogma and now believes her aunts were guilty of WRONG-THINK and WRONG-SPEAK. Apparently she sees nothing wrong when government busybodies forbid Americans today to make and act upon the kinds of choices her aunts and other Americans made routinely in the 1950s.
Excuse me, but I see everything wrong with it. I contend not only that there is nothing wrong with “White driver, please”, but that her aunts had an inalienable right to say it and stand by it. It is an exercise in freedom of choice. It does not prevent anyone else from choosing any taxi driver he desires.
To believe otherwise is, in effect, to annul common sense, the principle of individual rights, freedom of choice and freedom of association in an open marketplace, and the principle of limited government. And for what? For the limitless expansion of government power on the pretext of “hurt feelings” claimed by people who want something for nothing.
If you think you do not “discriminate”, think again. If you are alive and want to remain that way, then you must discriminate endlessly. (more…)