Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination (NYT): “Hiring for looks is old news in some industries, as cocktail waitresses, strippers and previous generations of flight attendants know all too well. But many companies have taken that approach to sophisticated new heights in recent years, hiring workers to project an image. In doing so, some of those companies have been skirting the edges of antidiscrimination laws and provoking a wave of private and government lawsuits. Hiring attractive people is not necessarily illegal, but discriminating on the basis of age, sex or ethnicity is. That is where things can get confusing and contentious.”
Thus do we have a clear example of what anti-discrimination law comes down to: denying the freedom of association based on what government says is the motivation (that is, a psychological state of mind) of the employer. Because bureaucrats cannot ultimately do this, much less prove it, they are unleashed to target any employer based on arbitrary political whim. See Lew Rockwell’s “The Economics of Discrimination.”
