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This is a bad example because discriminating against people with purple hair is absurd on its face, and doesn't lead people to question why that should be allowed.

Here are some better examples:

1. A big and tall clothing store that discriminates against smaller customers.

2. A cafe that discriminates against people who are assholes (to the staff).

3. A retailer that does lots of business on the weekends that discriminates against hiring people who can't work weekends for non-religious reasons (e.g. because they have a sports league they do on Sundays).

4. A restaurant that discriminates against people with vegan/carnivore/keto/raw food/etc. diets by not having acceptable meals they can eat.

5. An airline that discriminates against obese people by making them pay for as many seats as they are actually using.

A lot of "discrimination" is reasonable. Anti-purple-hair prejudice is not.

None of these are discrimination in the narrower sense that it's usually understood as.

1 and 4 don't actually ban those people, they simply don't provide any services that those groups of people would want. 3 is choosing not to hire people who don't actually fit the requirements of the job. 5 is paying for usage - obviously a reasonable concept, though specific policies may turn into discrimination. 2 is a reactive policy to something you have complete control over: your own behaviour. They don't care about any characteristic of you, except that you follow the rule of being polite to their staff. If the rule to follow becomes discriminatory then you'd have an argument - but that's not the example you brought up.

Yes, these are all arguments you might be able to use to varying degrees of success to defend yourself against a discrimination lawsuit, but that's a lot more hassle to deal with than if said lawsuits are already just invalid on their face because discrimination is legal generally except for a few specific kinds.

Also I'm not as optimistic as you are that some of these defenses would work.

Because you live in a society that mostly functions because people mostly don't discriminate against each other, and the conditions which result in you being able to open a fruit stand for personal profit would be basically impossible without that.

Luckily, this is mostly the case today, and for the cases where it's not eventually a law gets passed, so there's theoretically no reason for a broader law assuming that we don't... assuming that the goal is eventual consistency, so to speak.

Some people would rather argue from their hypothetical spherical fruit stand in a vacuum than to argue from reality at hand.

You're absolutely allowed to discriminate based on hair color because it's not a protected class.

As a society we have decided that discriminating on some things is abhorrent (race, et al), and other things is not (hair and eye color).

I don't think you're saying anything different than the comment you're replying to. They are themselves replying to the question "well, why not just forbid discrimination on anything except the ability to perform the job", and their answer is the same as your second paragraph.

> "You're absolutely allowed to discriminate based on hair color because it's not a protected class."

The "not a protected class" counterargument is self-defeating because it suggests that discrimination was A-OK before that protected class was created by law. If illegality does not imply immorality, as is often said on HN, then conversely legality does not imply morality.

That's the inverse, not the converse, and if we're talking about propositional logic it is not implied by the original statement.

>Why should the government be able to legally control what I choose to do with my property and my goods. ... So why should the government force me to sell them to people I do not want to?

Because your property and your ability to sell goods is directly supported by the people you discriminate against.

How do people, customers and employees alike, get to your property? Roads? Helicopter overseen by the FAA? How do packages get delivered over the roads, semi, USPS, UPS/fedex. Who pays to protect your building from crime and fire, who pays for the energy infrastructure, who pays for the teachers teaching your workforce?

Your store isnt an isolated self sufficient entity, its part of a web of interconnected forces mutually benefiting each other. There is a social contract, that if you want to profit off the infrastructure of the United States, you wont discriminate.

The entire premise of government is that you give up some of your personal freedoms in return for rules in a society. What you're saying makes sense in an anarchist regime, but that's not what we have today.

Also, your right to private property is, itself, protected by the government. Without that protection, I could steal from your fruit stand with impunity (as long as I have the bigger gun).

LOL!

Absolutely Ayn Randian stream of thought.

Could you may be think about how you were able to do the said fruit stand business in peace, take a currency as a payment and not worry about bartering, not worry about your business being stolen outright my guy with biggest muscles or how people are able to come to your fruit stand in the first place etc? Unless you are thinking of your business in a vacuum, then go ahead and fantasize.

Game theory, in specific a coordination problem:

If every business in town discriminates against purple-haired people, for example, the owners of the one business to break ranks leave themselves open to harassment up to and including being murdered. Even if no business wants to discriminate, being the first to make the move sets you apart, and open to retaliation from the consumer base. The government mandating hair-color-equality dissolves the problem very neatly.

I guess this perspective makes too much sense for the people who want to continue discrimination.

> Why should the government be able to legally control what I choose to do with my property and my goods...

When you run a store on your private property, you are inviting the general public onto your private property and it ceases to be as private as it was.

You can be indignant as you wish, make all the arguments that you wish, but this is how it has been for hundreds of years.

That is not true. It remains private property, even though some public regulations apply.

If opening a store to the public made it not private property, then well meaning rules like “no shirt, no shoes, no service” would have to be handled by local ordinance, which would be overly cumbersome.

I specified that it ceases to be as private as it once was, not that it was no longer private.