Last Updated on August 5, 2020
Libertarian Party presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen has hailed a company for firing an employee who posted the slogan ‘All Lives Matter’ on their private Facebook page as a demonstration of how the free market can drive the cause of social justice, according to a Ron Paul Institute report.
Jorgensen condemned what she believed to be systemic racism in the United States in an interview with C-SPAN.
“I’d like to mention one thing that a lot of people don’t realize, and this will give you an example of just how deep the problem is,” Jorgensen said. “We’ve all heard the story of Rosa Parks, about she was the heroic black woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that that was a government-owned, government-run bus, and the only way that racism was able to go on for so long was the government was putting it into place. And you look, 60 percent of the bus ridership back then was black.”
She further elaborated on how she believes the free market is more effect at stopping discrimination than the federal government.
“Let’s say Uber discriminated against 60 percent of their customers — the best 60 percent of the customers they had,” Jorgensen added. “They would go out of business, as well they should. However, the government doesn’t go out of business. They can discriminate all they want, and they just keep raising taxes. So, first of all, private companies cannot discriminate as easily and get off as scot-free as the federal government.”
Jorgensen then supportively cited a recent incident of a woman fired for saying the simple, inclusive phrase ‘All Lives Matter’ on her private Facebook profile.
“There was a woman who on her private Facebook — this was highly publicized — her private Facebook put ‘All Lives Matter,’ and the company fired her,” Jorgensen noted.
“And what I’d like to make note of she wasn’t talking to or wasn’t tweeting a coworker, an employee, a customer, a client, anybody like that, and this was her private Facebook, not the company Facebook, and yet the company said ‘OK, we don’t tolerate that.'”
Libertarian doctrines dictate that the people should always serve the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market, rather than taking government action to protect important principles such as freedom of speech. Leading conservatives, such as President Trump and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), have led the charge to defend their voters’ free speech on socially liberal big tech platforms that have often been eager to censor opposing opinions.
