Comments Elsewhere

Ed:

Now, being the defender of the free market that I am, I can’t conceive of any reason why Ford shouldn’t be able to make its own decisions on where it is best to advertise their products.

This seems to me to be special pleading.

The AFA is not claiming, as far as I can tell, that Ford should be legally prohibited from advertising in gay publications. What they are saying is that they intend to reinstate a consumer boycott of Ford by fundamentalist creeps if Ford doesn’t stop advertising in gay publications. You might think that’s a foolish thing to do (I certainly do), but the reasons that it is foolish don’t have anything to do with a debate over “the free market”, or with Ford “making its own decisions on where it is best to advertise their products” in any sense that matters from the perspective of free market principles.

Fundamentalist creeps have every right to try to get the results they want on the free market by refusing, or threatening to refuse, to buy from Ford as long as Ford advertises in magazines they find objectionable. Just as I have every right to refuse, or threaten to refuse, to buy from Ford if they kowtow to such idiotic demands, or if (say) they decided to start running ads in publications that really are morally repugnant, e.g., paedophile or white-power magazines. The fact that big corporations have to account for their business decisions to would-be consumers is not hampering the market; it’s part of the free market at work.

There are more than enough reasons to call the AFA’s demands foolish. Making specious appeals to free market principles, though, just reinforces the confusion — which all too many people, both libertarian and non-libertarian, already have — between “the free market” and “blind deference to big business.”