In response to this, which is a partial quote from Sieben:
"So, you’d have to believe that business owners like Walmart would intentionally piss off half of their consumer base, creating a huge profit opportunity for Target/K-Mart/Anyone to think that there was mass voluntary boycott of blacks.
The mainstream left needs to get their mythology straight. Either capitalists are racist, in which case they DON’T put profits first. Or capitalists are a bunch of greedy profit maximizing extortionists, who put monetary gain first, and therefore are color blind. Can’t have it both ways.”
Someone on HuffPo said this:
“So, Major League Baseball’s “Gentlemen’s Agreement” didn’t happen?”
I’ve never heard of this agreement before. Did I shoot myself in the foot somehow?
I don’t think you shot yourself in the foot. You might ask that poster which politician we should all lionize for putting an end to this Gentlemen’s Agreement.
In the end, it became too costly to the greedy capitalists to keep out talented ball players in order to indulge their personal preferences, and they followed Walter O’Malley’s courageous (and lucrative) example. When he signed Jackie Robinson, it wasn’t because a liberal judge ruled in favor of Negro players attempting to get their fair chance at stardom. Rather, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers decided to take a very unpopular chance, perhaps driven purely by greed, perhaps by a personal conviction that racism is ugly. Frankly his reasoning is irrelevant. The point is that in the end the market sorted it out. Major League Baseball, to the extent that it was actually a representation of a private business and not the strange statist hybrid it is today, would have been free to continue maintaining its ahem lack of diversity, but other leagues - like the Negro Leagues, for example - would have continued to rise in stature with their superior “colored” talent (Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Roberto Clemente, Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr, Ichiro Suzuki, thousands of others).
In short, I don’t quite know what the HuffPo poster’s point is. If MLB broke down its color barrier as a result of some new law or judicial hearing, perhaps there would reason to bring it up in regard to the WalMart case. As it was though, it seems that if anybody would be eager to bring it up, it would be somebody in favor of the free market and its ability to sort this sort of thing out and to punish anti-social behavior. As you said, if WalMart is really a sexist company, a more ethical company will be more than happy to make it pay by advertising that fact and hiring off its underpaid workforce. In the same way, the fact that MLB was in the past an openly racist organization proves nothing except that people, including the legislators who made it legal, were racist. However, the force that drives the racism/sexism/ageism/religionism out of a business is its drive to make the most money, in this case by improving its product by bringing in non-white talent.
No, I could give two craps less about racism if it does not involve the Initiation of Force, though I do not condone racism by any means. Violent action is all I am concerned with, personally.
The commenter must not have been able to keep their thoughts straight then. Nobody is saying institutionalized racism can’t happen on a market, the only point is that it will become costly to do so as society evolves to a more tolerant society. Something like slavery could be maintained on a free market if it has enough ideological support. But it could also be maintained through a State. What is common in society is dictated by social mores and not by the government or market forces per se. Government policy and business practices are only going to be reflections of prevailing opinion at a given moment.