Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, passed during the first Bush administration, is intended to eliminate, or at least minimize, discrimination against the disabled. Trumpeted as equal rights for the disabled, it gives people the right to sue if they can show that someone has discriminated against them because of their disability, in the areas of employment and in access to facilities.

Supporters of the ADA claim that it is a violation of a person’s civil rights to be discriminated against. I disagree. My view is that discrimination is a violation of civil rights only when government is doing the discriminating. However, an individual or a business has the right to discriminate, because freedom of association is a basic human right, whereas freedom from discrimination is not.

I concede that discrimination against the disabled can be senseless and bigoted. But a government social engineering program based on coercion is not the answer. Not only does it expand government authority in a dangerous way, but it is actually making the situation worse. For example, the ADA has hurt employment of the disabled by increasing litigation risk associated with hiring the disabled.

The proper way to reduce discrimination against the disabled is through education, persuasion, and social pressure. We will always have some discrimination, which is quite appropriate; after all, blind people can’t be airline pilots. The real question is – who should decide when discrimination is or is not appropriate? Should it be a free people, or should it be the government?

Government must grant equal rights to all, but special privilege to none. When ADA is used to give the disabled access to government services, it is defending their right to equal protection under the law. However, when ADA is directed against the private sector, it being used to grant special privilege.

Child Labor Laws

No doubt you learned from your government school text book that unions pushed to pass labor laws in the early twentieth century to stop the exploitation of children by greedy industrialists, who paid children low wages to work long hours in unsafe sweatshops. These laws made it illegal to employ pre-teens and young teens is factories.

Now think for a minute. Surely you suspected something wrong with the story you were being told. If conditions were so harsh, why couldn’t these young people just quit their jobs. Who was forcing those poor hapless children to slave in these sweat shops? Was it their parents? If so, then are we to believe that union leaders care more about children than parents do? And how can you help young workers by taking away their jobs?

See what I mean? Something is wrong with this government school text book story.

The real story is quite different. Children originally left the farms to work in harsh factory conditions because it was a matter of survival for them and their families. Since child labor competes with unionized labor, unions have long sought to use the power of the state to deprive younger workers of the right to work. Union workers wanted those factory jobs for themselves.

As a side note, union-backed legislation prohibiting child labor came after the decline in child labor had already begun in America. The reason for the decline was that capital investment and subsequent productivity improvements meant that more people were lifted from poverty and could afford to keep their children at home and in school.

In the Third World today, where poverty is still the norm, the alternative to "child labor" is all too often begging, prostitution, crime, or starvation. Today’s Unions absurdly proclaim to be taking the moral high road by advocating protectionist policies that inevitably lead to these consequences.

It often happens that social legislation inadvertently harms the very people it claims to help. In the case of child labor laws, the harm was (and is) intentional.

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Portions taken from related article “Markets, Not Unions, Gave us Leisure” By Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 8/24/04, at http://www.mises.org/