The Curious Case of dermdoc

So I came across this news report, which, by itself, isn't particularly newsworthy. Basically, a guy on a message board claimed to be laying off someone because he (the employee) was an Obama supporter, and Obamacare was going to cost the medical business a lot of money, and people need to understand that [political] actions have consequences. There was also some general semi-founded ranting about Obamacare, and not much else to the story... but it got me thinking.

I've ranted before about the problem, especially in a representative democracy, of people being unable to correlate the consequences of their political actions to real-world changes. In a high-level sense, this might be an area where employers could really make a positive contribution to enforcing the correlation directly: by laying off people who indirectly created the business need to lay off people (eg: by voting for socialists), a business owner would be aptly rewarding people for their political actions. After all, if you have two equally-qualified people vying for one position because another position was eliminated due to the actions of one of the potential employees, it seems only fair to let that employee go, both to that employee and the system as a whole.

On the other hand, though, it brings up the interesting and potentially precipitous concept of discrimination based on political views. Now, political views are not a protected class, so there's no direct legal issue; indeed, employers are doing more extensive personal background checks on employees now, and disqualifying people for a variety of non job-related personal things. The counter-argument to the [legal] discrimination would be that an employee can keep his/her political views private if they don't want them to bias employment applications. However, this begs for a much higher level of anonymity than is currently the norm, especially in the age of social networking and information aggregation, and much more discretion in inter-personal discussions, which is also not preferable.

Furthermore, there's an inherent danger of abuse based purely on ideological differences. While it might be noble and beneficial to have an employer bias employment decisions against people actively working to the detriment of his/her business, it might be hard to make the distinction between that case and an employer just biasing on the basis of ideology, without respect to the effect on the business. Moreover, there are some specific legal protections for supporting some ideologies and organizations which are explicitly working against the best economic interests of the businesses (eg: unions), and you could argue that those protections have legitimate justification in our society. Clearly, then, there would be advocates on both sides of the debate.

The question, then, remains: should an employer bias employment decisions against those supporting anti-business laws and/or political candidates? I don't know which side I would support. The best answer, in my mind, is more education and better correlation; it's unlikely that employees would support policies/candidates which caused their jobs to cease to exist, and it would be better for the country if people were better able to vote in a way which was actually beneficial for them. In discriminating against anti-business supporters, though, you would also run the risk of creating a large enough section of the voting populace to overwhelm the free-market supporters entirely, and bring the whole system crashing down in a government-largess, Atlas shrugging style event. Clearly if the direction was to allow alienation of those people who could not grasp correlation, for whatever reason, there must be a mechanism to protect the rest of the social organism from their continued cancerous influence, and without such a mechanism it might be better for the organism as a whole to maintain whatever unsustainable balance exists for as long as possible (sort of like prolonging the life of a terminally-ill cancer patient, and making them as comfortable as possible). In that case, if the patient is already too far along to be saved, it doesn't make a lot of sense to start cutting out bad cells and causing trauma, which argues for not exploiting or emphasizing the correlation.

As I said, I don't know what the right answer is, which is why I found the case curious. Let me know what you all think.