I'm gonna go out on a limb here and take what may be an unpopular position: If you're a financial services firm, you should be forbidden from refusing services to anyone who is not committing an illegal act. Services like PayPal are starting to sound like insurance companies prior to the ACA. If it's not illegal you should not be allowed to turn customers away.
Doesn't this open up the door to using legality as a proxy for morality? Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?
It's strange that you would make a slippery slope argument in this context, because a slippery slope is the situation we're already in. If there are going to be circumstances in which a company refuses service, I'd rather they be a) decided on democratically and b) visible to everyone in the RSA, rather than behind an opaque corporate structure. The current situation is much worse.
morality is relevant, rarely people that is doing something that we think immoral see their acts as immoral too.
"Shouldn't a company, regardless of the service they provide, be free to establish their own conditions under which they will act or not act?"
like a restaurant in south refusing to serve blacks?
with restaurant you have at least some options, but with businesses with monopoly finding an alternative is very hard or expensive.
What about religion? Religion is, strictly speaking, mutable. But, for me at least, saying "no Muslims" or "no Sikhs" is the same level of badness as saying "no blacks".
Religion is a tricky one.... It is mutable, but most people (a) don't change their religion in their lifetime and (b) use religion as a proxy signal for social identity, including many things that aren't mutable.
In practice: I'd take the bet that a white person of Muslim faith could get around a "no Muslims" rule most of the time. "No Muslims", then, can be a proxy for "no middle-Eastern looking folks".
To my (admittedly weak) understanding, those laws affect employment, government agencies, and the ability to get any sort of government funding/aid. Are there laws that actually require organizations to allow membership in or provide services for all people? That doesn't seem workable.
Not only is this workable, but there was a whole movement around these issues in the 1960s called the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the results of that movement, and this law makes it illegal for a store to refuse service on the basis of race, for example. This is why you don't see signs saying "No Coloreds" in stores any more.
Other laws, like the ADA and FHA, have expanded on this, and individual states have broader protections. Look at the case of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Oregon, which was fined for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.
For emergency care, look up the EMTLA. There are many other regulations centered on discrimination and health care, that's just one of them.
Which gets really complicated really quickly. There are plenty of cases of benign exclusivity, and plenty of cases of less than benign exclusivity, even in those areas you specifically pointed out.
The horse has LONG left that barn since the "public accommodation" doctrine of the Civil Rights Act. Should Christian bakers be able to refuse catering a gay wedding?
At which point you have the government making the decision what to mandate.
If the service is important enough that it has to be mandated in some cases then why shouldn't it be mandated in all cases? If it isn't that important, why should it be mandated in any case?
I'm a big fan of "allow everything with no judgement" to be honest. The principles and morals of some will always offend the sensibilities of others. What gives us the right to codify into law which reasons are just and which are not?
That's not how the US presently works -- see things like the ADA or discrimination laws, which regulate how a business may deny service and what accommodations for customers they must provide.
It's not absurd that an essential civil service -- payment processing -- should be regulated to uphold our collective standards of freedom, and not use their privileged position to impose their private moral standards on society.
Yeah, it's almost like there's a market for an all-digital decentralized monetary system that does not suffer from flawed and ever-changing human morality judgments, and is only so happy to work in the place of human-driven entities.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
Banks: Whatever legal business you turn away, you basically give away to crypto; and once it's there, it will never come back. Decide carefully.
One of my faves, it's applied time and again to things. It's why Apple made the right move in removing DRM from their music and simply providing a better service- they knew they were up against a darknet that did not care about these rules (but also did not care about service quality/consistency). And he said this in 1993 (!) How prescient was THAT?
People need to realize that risk is itself a market. If everyone avoids risk (such as banks avoiding doing business with any remotely-risky business, such as legal marijuana sales), the first person (or entity) who doesn't shy away from risk stands to gain a lot more than if people were generally less fearful of risk. So cryptocurrencies, being completely fearless, will always fill the financial spaces that have been left vacant by more fearful living entities. ;)
Perhaps there is even an entity that has realized this and is working to instill fear in the hearts of everyone in order to reap greater rewards from their own risk-taking. But I'm off into tinfoil-hat territory, there.
This is really tough. There are all kinds of reasons why a financial services firm wants to deny services. They could range from trivial (this customer keeps trolling our customer service reps) to more serious (this customer serves an industry with a high fraud rate and we don't have the system or processes in place to handle this) to legally ambiguous situations (marijuana being legal in some states but not others, or arbitrary measure of what constitutes illegal porn).
To make matters worse, Paypal has extreme platform lock-in. For example, you can't move your users billing to another platform; you have to get the user to sign up all over again. On top of that, you have to hope they have another form of compatible payment (i.e. mobile payments, credit card direct, etc).
Paypal holds all the data and when they ban you for whatever reason, they keep it, so even if there is another option, once you commit to Paypal, you are committed.
Personally, I think on that (on balance) it's preferable to have freedom of association. However, I can respect and understand the opposite view as long as it's consistent. A lot of people I know who were of the opinion that bakeries should be legally obligated to bake wedding cakes are now the same people defending cloudflare et al. for refusing access to critical infrastructure (not just cake!) for political reasons.
This inconsistency completely rubs me the wrong way. There's nothing that pisses me off more than hearing people rail against a business's right to refuse service instantly double back when the company did something they like. These are not muddy waters where it's hard to tell you're contradicting yourself; people are outright encouraging things they'd otherwise argue against just because it's going their way.
Since I'm one of those people, let me defend this position.
Cloudflare didn't kick Daily Stormer off until DS started publicly claiming that the reason CF was continuing to serve them was that CF secretly agreed with DS's politics [0]. That was a lie and might even be cause for a libel suit.
The analogy would be if the gay couple secured the agreement of the baker to bake them a wedding cake, then started announcing publicly that the reason the baker was doing that was because the baker was secretly gay. I don't think anyone would have a problem, at that point, with the baker telling them to take their business elsewhere.
Being a member of an unpopular group doesn't give you carte blanche to abuse the goodwill of the private businesses that would otherwise be required to serve you.
The actions of GoDaddy and Google in this case are less defensible, and indeed, I don't defend them. (If I understand correctly, GoDaddy kicked DS off their DNS service, so they went to Google, who not only refused to serve their domain but put it on hold, so they can't even use it elsewhere. I'm not aware that DS provoked either company they way they did Cloudflare.)
No business is legally required to serve customers who defame and disrupt their business. The law only requires that the same standard be applied to customers who happen to be members of protected classes as is applied to everyone else.
Ask your friends, but I'm assuming that the cake baking cases that they argued about referred to sexual preference being a protected class. Political mindset is not a protected class.
Assuming someone will ask, "Why do we talk about what is (law) rather than what could be (ideals)", you're perfectly fine to hold the ideal that political beliefs should not be discriminated against. But you probably aren't happy with just believing in an ideal, and so you want to know why political belief is not a legally protected class like age, religion, sex, race, etc. This means we have to include real world considerations, including legal history/precedent and the realistic implementation of law, when arguing whether political beliefs should get legal protections.
To make a quick initial argument, I think political belief is hard to protect because it is nearly indistinguishable from any kind of belief. At that point, how sensical is a legal system after it becomes impossible to discriminate on any kind of assertive opinion?
The line is already difficult and blurred with religion (which is protected because of centuries of prior belief and political situations), as we see in the case of a religious baker refusing to bake for gay customers. I'm not saying there's an easy or happy answer to this and similar disputes, just that protection of political beliefs would make things even worse without much benefit.
The other thing to consider is that as someone who has political beliefs and wants to assert them, you have the entire U.S. political system to participate and effect the change you want. But being political is not necessary when following a religion, and in some religions, it's outright antithetical. These folks would have little recourse to petition politicians and lawmakers.
Yes, your comment is correct but also tautological. A protected class is essentially defined as those categories by which businesses are not allowed to choose customers. It would be just as reasonable to include political beliefs as well as e.g. religious beliefs.
It's not tautological. The legislative process in which certain classes were deemed protected was not a simple declaration. I'm not going to try to look up the history and issues that led to religion being explicitly protected in the Forst Amendment, but the American Disabilities Act was passed relatively recently enough to find contemporary accounts of the debate and controversy that preceded its passage:
The outlawing of discrimination against disabilities is, IMO, very humane, and it's hard to imagine something like it being sponsored by a very liberal Senator and signed by a Republican president. That said, the law has required significant costs from society. California, which I believe has stronger disability laws, still faces big debate about the cost to businesses:
As accepted as ADA is by the status quo, that doesn't mean that the definition of disabled, or of the costs needed to fulfill the law, are easily understood. But I do think its issues and conflicts are relatively simple compared to a law that outlawed discrimination against political beliefs.
How would that even work without getting quickly entangled with the First Amendment? Or even in implemented in everyday life. Business owners have no right whatsoever to fire someone for expressing beliefs that run profoundly counter to the business? Or to kick out a trolling customer?
Financial services firms benefit from the regulatory framework provided by the State therefore it's not unreasonable that the State should make some stipulations of its own.
If you steal from PayPal we don't say "they're a private company, they knew the risks" do we?
Why shouldn't a company like PayPal be able to pick and choose who they work with? It's not like they have anything close to a monopoly. If you're selling something controversial and PayPal doesn't want it, shop around until you find somebody who does. If every single financial services company rejects you, there's still bitcoin and cash.
I feel like that's a reasonable position given the realities of the near monopolies these kinds of companies have. It would probably be better if there was real freedom of association in these kinds of cases, but you'd actually have to have other options for that to work right.
I think that any financial institution that has FDIC insurance should not be allowed to turn away business unless it would force them to commit an illegal act.
