Summarize the content below in your own words while using a portion of the quote

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Summarize the content below in your own words while using a portion of the quoted material. (Please provide an answer that is NO LESS THAN 300 words in content):

Capitalism has been accompanied throughout history by lessening economic discrimination towards minority groups. This was so for serfs and Jews through the Middle ages, Puritans and Quakers in America, and so on. When southern states imposed legal restrictions on Negroes after the Civil War they never denied them the right to personal property, reflecting a belief in private property "so strong that it overrode the desire to discriminate against Negroes." Capitalism and private property have created much opportunity for Negroes to make great progress.

Paradoxically, minorities have been the most vocally resistant to fundamentals of capitalism. "They have tended to attribute to capitalism the residual restrictions they experience rather than to recognize that the free market has been the major factor enabling these restrictions to be as small as they are." Capitalism provides incentives for dealing with the most economically efficient individuals of any group.

Discrimination is hard to define. We discriminate on the basis of taste against one singer for another but consider it different when paying more for the service of a person of one color over another. The difference is only that in "one case we share the taste, and in the other we do not. Is there any difference in principle …?"

While the principle is the same, tastes are not equal. Friedman himself does not discriminate based on skin color or religion and deplores those who do. But in a free society, the recourse, he says, is changing the minds of racists through free speech and discussion, not state coercion.

Fair employment laws inhibit the freedom of individuals to voluntarily enter contracts. Say an unprejudiced man is made to hire a Negro though his customers are racist. He may lose money or his business though he was only giving customers what they wanted. The customers, whose behavior the law sought to change, are not punished, though the proprietor is.

Proponents of these laws argue it's justified because denying the Negro employment hurts others–all in the Negro community. They are confused. There is positive harm– direct physical force or legal coercion, or that of third-party effects of pollution; and negative harm–when two individuals cannot agree on a contract, making one worse off. If a community prefers blues singers to opera singers, the opera singer is harmed in not finding work. The government has no right to ameliorate this latter harm, which is the case of the Negro seeking employment.

Friedman charges the American Civil Liberties Union with hypocrisy. "The ACLU will fight to the death to protect the right of a racist to preach on a street corner the doctrine of racial segregation. But it will favor putting him in jail if he acts on his principles by refusing to hire a Negro for a particular job." One must pursue the racist of his err, not use state coercion.

Right-to-work laws make it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment, and are identical to Fair Employment laws. "Both interfere with the freedom of the employment contract." But most who favor the one are opposed to the other. "As a liberal, I am opposed to both," writes Friedman.

Given competition among employers and employees, employers should be able to offer any terms of employment they want.

Segregation in school is a unique problem because the government administers schools and must choose segregation or integration across the board. Forced to choose, Friedman finds it "impossible not to choose integration." But better still, is to free schools from government, and permit parents to choose where their kids attend while encouraging through free speech the normalizing of integration.

"It is desirable to let men follow the bent of their own interests because there is no way of predicting where they will come out," Friedman says of the relation between intentions and results.

Explanation / Answer

Capitalism is considered by minorities as a weapon to discriminate against them but historical evidences often contradict the fact- be it the fact of elevation of Serfs and Jews through the middle ages or the Puritans and Quakers in America. Even when the southern state imposed restriction on Negros, the underlining intention was not bar the progress of Negros, which can be understood from the rule to give them every right to private property. They emphasized more on the small restrictions and blamed capitalism for its discriminatory nature- rather than realizing the opportunities capitalism provides to economically efficient individual.

“Discrimination”-the term is often misjudged and in order to provide right to one, discriminate against the other. People are often confused between taste/preference and discrimination-in some instances, they try to justify it in terms personal taste and preference while on the other mark it as Discrimination. When the Fair employment laws harms the individual choice by not allowing one to hire somebody of his/her choice-isn’t that discrimination? But these laws often hypocritically argue in favor of minorities stating these restrictions are required to provide justice. They should understand, as law cannot do discrimination against the minorities, it should not be discriminatory to the employer too. For betterment, a competitive environment should exist between the employer and its employees- Employer should keep whatever term it chooses to do business, on the other hand employee should have all the right to decide at what terms he/she want to work-a situation will work when these two reaches an agreement.

Segregation in school, though, is a unique problem and a school should always be integrated in nature. This integration should not be forceful but ideally be voluntary, and for that these institutions should be deregulated. It should be left to parents to decide in which school their kids will attend while encouraging through free speech to normalize integration.

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