Responding to msg by Doug Cutrell: "Blanc seems to be concerned principally with the soundness and health of the business entity." Well, if you mean that I was defending the prerogative of a corporate entity against an angry mob of voters descending upon it to coerce services from it, health (& safety!) is the concern. But actually I was taking your argument of equal fairness and noting that voters who responded that way to a denial of service would be expecting automatic beneficence, without considering the means to the end: if there is no existing service, there is no one to coerce into providing it. The voting public which bands together to use coercion takes services & benefits for granted, without any respect for the source. " I am not sure whether Blanc would hold that businesses should be free to engage in racist hiring policies if that is their decision...." Since I wouldn't claim to own either the corporations or the society within which they operate, I wouldn't presume to direct their hiring policies either. "The argument seems to be that in a free society, natural cooperative processes will provide a form of "autoregulation" to discourage the widespread development of oppression of specific classes of individuals." Societies, I hear tell, develop with the intent of deriving positive benefits from an association with people who want to interact with each other. In a "free" society, oppressed classes of individuals would be at liberty to leave to form their own, repressive arrangements and establish their own discriminative hiring policies. "....... imagine the development of a multitude of secret "crypto-posse" organizations. .......Organizations such as the KKK could accrue the financial support of large numbers of members to create strong social and economic pressures to oppress segments of the population. . . . . . " One thing I can say about this, is that there already exist a large number of this type of organization, and they are not very secret about it. In Bosnia, in Iran, in South America, in South Africa, et al. They suppress & decimate whole populations in full view. Perhaps if there were a larger number of secret organizations, they would target each other and kill each other off. The world could become one big, happy family of paranoids instead of just a horde of " nattering nabobs of negativism" ( is that an endangered species?). Blanc