Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Visa and Mastercard won’t service conservative businesses. They are intentionally discriminating on the basis of political viewpoint.
It’s completely legal, of course, under freedom of association. It’s the same reason I don’t shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods, the America-hating social justice suck-ups who won’t sell Black Rifles, and the reason I won’t spend money in any store that bans guns on the premises to provide a sanctuary for criminals. I disagree with their political viewpoint so I won’t support it.
Customers have a right to discriminate against merchants based on their political viewpoint. Should merchants have a right to discriminate against customers based on their political viewpoint? Tough question.
I’m on the side of the wedding cake decorator who doesn’t want do gay cakes. I’m against Visa who doesn’t want to facilitate gun sales. I could use some help from SITD readers. How do we balance the rights?
Joe Doakes
I’ll throw this out to my audience, who are inevitably much smarter than I am.
My two cents: it takes two to balance. The other side wants nothing to do with “balance”. I think we are inevitably sliding into two different economies (at best) or complete dissolution as a nation ,one way or the other.
Thoughts?
Ace addressed this a couple years ago. It’s an interesting question which brings up others.
As evidenced by the anger with which Ace reacts to the anger of Bill Quick’s original response, this is actually a fault line between Boomers and Gen-Xers. Ace’s argument goes like an explosive shell right at the cornerstone of the edifice started in the 50s and completed in the 60s such that civil rights is not just the equal treatment of all by the State, but a State imposed equal treatment of everyone by all institutions, public and private. While perhaps laudable, this definition has actually become a moniker for policies that attempt to crush differences of opinion and so, to slowly and surely dissolve freedom of association.
Hit send button too quickly.
If I interpret Ace correctly, it seems like the CC companies have suddenly changed the rules which was not part of the original agreement before the SJW dept in each bank got power. That seems to be something for which they could be sued.
Moreover, and not addressed by Ace, is how to deal with banks who act in unison; that is, they *all* discriminate against conservatives. And why not? People in the banking community all know each other and SJWs are quite OCD about ensuring total conformance to their directives (really kinda exposes the all-electronic banking wet dreams of Euro countries to a nasty dark side). If that prevents conservatives from being able to do business, buy food, pay bills… then I think banks must be treated like a public entity and required to serve all.
There is no “free marketplace” of CC processors. It is an oligopoly. In any event, you have likely noticed that in most cases these corporations cave when they get pushback from customers and consumers. I suspect that the actual decision to deny service is made by an SJW who has embedded him or herself into a position of advising on these things. The CEO (or whoever) is told that the group being discriminated against has been labeled as a white supremacist group by the SLPC & the CEO signs off on it, not realizing that the group being discriminated against is actually quite mainstream with tens of millions of defenders (like the FRC).
Name and shame. Expose the SJW’s as unsympathetic hard-core Lefties. The way you get to name & shame is by demanding a transparent process. Lift the rug & watch the cockroaches scatter.
This is the single biggest use case against transitioning to a cashless society. Once the middlemen, CC processors (Visa, MC, Amex,etc), establish that they can control who you purchase from, the next step is to arbitrate what you can purchase. Let that notion sink in for a moment, there are lots of ramifications. Its just a short hop to linking your potential purchase to your Social Credit Score as established by your social media presence and your medical history (in just the last couple months it was reported that FB was negotiating for access to their user’s medical records).
you would think that if a constitutional right to privacy allows you to kill a baby it should allow you to monitor, track, review, and prohibit outright this sort of thing:
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/2018/08/30/google-and-mastercard-cut-a-secret-ad-deal-to-track-retail-sales#gs.ebgJc0Y
In related news, Levi Strauss & Co. has come out in favor of “common sense gun control”, apparently ignoring the fact that places that have already enacted such are war zones.