The market against race and sex discrimination
Libertarians with conservative backgrounds might grumble at : Responding to reports that diversity at big law firms is on the decline, a group of big corporations such as American Airlines, DuPont, and General Mills has just agreed to spend $30 million to hire minority- and women-owned law firms as outside counsel.
At first glance, this might seem like out-of-control political correctness or unseemly race consciousness. Why shouldn鈥檛 they just hire the best counsel, without regard to race or sex?
But as this National Law Journal points out (free registration required), businesses aren鈥檛 doing this out of altruism or even just for the PR value. They鈥檙e doing it because the smaller minority- and female-run firms can do the work more efficiently, for less money than big white-male-dominated firms, which matters a lot in a tough economy.
This is exactly what free-market economists would predict. If minorities and women are insufficiently valued by some employers, they鈥檒l go compete with those employers and win.
And if that holds true in the legal field, where personal characteristics and relationships matter far more than usual, that should make us all the more confident that it works most everywhere else, too 鈥� and that anti-discrimination laws aren鈥檛 as necessary as we鈥檝e been led to believe.
Incidentally, Jeffrey Tucker has nicely summarized some of the problems caused by employment-discrimination laws in of Richard Epstein鈥檚 important book on the subject, Forbidden Grounds.
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