I fully agree with Andy on this. A business should be able to discriminate however it wants.
Before anybody says anything, I do know something what it feels like to be a second class citizen. There was a time in my life when I wished I had the rights of a black man in the 50s. Let me explain. In the early 90s the Soviet economy was in a terrible condition. At the same time many American businesses came in to pursue an opportunity. They hired locals and expats. Locals were getting paid about one tenth to do the same job. I worked for one of those businesses. Owning the passport of the wrong color I found myself on the wrong side of the compensation fence. One time I overheard a conversation that I could never forget. An American business student was interviewing for a job in Moscow. The interviewer was trying to talk him out of applying. He said he did not care that the pay was too low. He said he would even work for free just to get the experience. Finally the interviewer had to break it to him: "This job is for a Russian". At that point, as far as I was concerned, the American anti-discrimination ideology had revealed to me its true colors. I realized that the movement had some kind of an agenda behind it but it was not justice as I knew it. Perhaps an appearance of justice for the loudest complaining group of US voters, but definitely not "liberty and justice for all". In the absence of any form of government or ACLU help my answer to the discrimination was to do what I could to make anybody who tried to discriminate against me look like an idiot. I spent hours and hours learning English. Passable and understood was not good enough - it had to be flawless and eloquent. I read American magazines and listed to American radio trying to understand what values the American culture had that mine did not that created a 10-fold difference in the compensation. I found a friend with a computer and used it to learn C thinking every time that the more fluent I was with the semi-colon separated statements inside the curly braces the more fit I would be for a high paying job. And let me tell you, it worked. The artificially created injustice eventually self-corrected in spite of the diligent efforts of the US government to maintain it by consistently treating non-US citizens as second class and being extremely reluctant to give "the tired and poor huddled masses yearning to be free" a chance to contribute to the welfare of our country. Personal prejudice and inept government policies like a puny hand can try to stop the powerfully gushing stream of a free market, but they can go only that far. If we are concerned about discrimination, instead of trying to legislatively shallow out the waters of the free market we should let them flow freely and focus instead on teaching people how to swim. -- Sasha Pachev AskSasha Linux Consulting http://asksasha.com Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
