WHEN GAY NON-DISCRIMINATION LAWS are subject to a popular vote, gays generally lose. When gay non-discrimination laws, and, even more, gay marriage laws are put to a vote in a legislature, gays generally lose.
At the same time, several major business firms have recently made outreach to gays and lesbians, advertising to them and fashioning products and services for them. Large numbers of major corporations have adopted gay non-discrimination rules and some are providing health insurance for domestic partners.
The marked contrast between the political and the business realms suggests that the economic marketplace is friendlier to gays and lesbians than the political marketplace.
Put another way, actors in the economic marketplace, subject to profit and loss, have an incentive to be friendly to gays because their goal is to retain skilled employees and to lure dollars from every possible consumer. By contrast, actors in the political marketplace have a disincentive to be friendly to gays because they need to lure votes from all citizens; that is, they are subject to democracy or majority rule.
As author Grant Lukenbill remarked recently, "Gay employees of Apple Computer in Texas have more rights at work than they do in their own home."
Bluntly, the free market is better for gays than democracy.
It is worth looking more closely at some of the ways in which the economic market provides better protection for individuality and individual choice than the political market.
Votes that really register
In the economic marketplace, when you cast your "dollar vote" for the product you want, you get the product you want. That is, you win no matter what other people do with their dollar votes, and your approval registers economically with the firm whose product you bought.
In the political marketplace, you get what you want only if half of all the other voters already agree with you. If you voted for a losing side, you get nothing. And your candidate gets no reward for making outreach to you. In fact, he may be being penalized.
In short, the economic marketplace fosters a pluralism of values and a plurality of results�i.e., a variety of ways of living. In the political marketplace, the winner's values are imposed on the losers.
For the political marketplace to achieve the value pluralism of the economic marketplace, you would have to imagine a country (state, city) in which you could choose which politicians made the laws for you, and everyone else could do the same.
A second advantage of the economic marketplace is that you can use your dollar votes for the things you want most, and forgo (if necessary) the things you want less. In other words, priorities count. For people with limited incomes, this is a particularly important feature of the marketplace.
In the political marketplace, by contrast, you get to case only one ballot vote for each office, even if on particular race is very more important to you and some others are not important at all.
Say a gay candidate were running. If the political marketplace had the same respect for individual preferences that the economic marketplace does, you could abstain from voting in races you did not care about and then use all those votes in the race you felt strongly about.
Package deals
A third advantage of the economic marketplace: In the political marketplace each candidate has an "issues package," a set of positions on different issues, some of which you will agree with and some of which most likely you will not. But you are stuck with the package and if you vote for the candidate you get the positions you dislike just as much as the ones you like.
In the economic marketplace, by contrast, you can use your dollar votes for a wide variety of disparate items, buying the products, styles, and brands of each that you want, putting together a personal "products package" that is different from everyone else's. There are no package deals where you have to buy, say, Guess jeans, Arrow shirts, Adidas tennis shoes, and Pepsodent toothpaste in order to get any one of them.
A fourth advantage of the economic marketplace is that it encourages rational consideration in advance of acting.
Before you buy a major purchase, you tend to read up on the subject, ask friends, comparison shop, and so forth. You have a definite incentive to do this because the more time you invest in making a prudent "dollar vote" choice, the more you benefit directly by having and using a good product.
In the political marketplace, by contrast, there is little benefit to spending your time investigating the candidates' voting records, analyzing the issues, and so forth. An informed vote has no more influence on the outcome than an uninformed one, and practically no influence in any case, so there is no incentive to be an informed voter, no "payoff." Your vote can still be canceled out by someone who does not know or care about the issues and votes on whim.
Recourse for Defective Merchandise
A fifth advantage of the economic "dollar vote" is that if the product you bought turns out to be defective or fails to live up to your expectations, you can cut your losses immediately. You can throw the product away, return it to the store, get it repaired, sometimes even get your dollar votes back.
No so with the political marketplace. No politician ever came with a guarantee of "Full refund if not completely satisfied." One you have "bought" him (or her) with your vote, you are stuck with him no matter if he changes his positions, compromises his principles, or turns out to be totally ineffective in advancing the ideas that led you to vote for him. Perhaps a few names come to mind.
The political marketplace is open only once every two, or four, or sometimes only once every six years. In the economic marketplace, people are voting every day.
Pluralism: The Genuine Article
Perhaps the root difference between the economic marketplace and the political marketplace is that the economic marketplace is voluntary. It respects people's individual choices in what they buy or sell, including the choice not to participate, because it cannot do otherwise. It embodies as well as fosters values pluralism.
The political marketplace, by contrast, is coercive. It allows a majority to make one rule for all, usually to the advantage of the majority, and requires all who dissent to obey. It gives short or no shrift to differing desires, needs, or conditions. Which of these better benefits minorities like gays seems clear.