Why are there laws against age discrimination?
For example, if I want to fill my company with pretty young women, competent or otherwise, why should the law prohibit me from doing so?
I do think there's an alternate-history scenario where nondiscrimination laws might not have been passed in the US, if discrimination were mostly random and idiosyncratic. But when a huge portion of companies uniformly discriminated in the same way and ended up creating what amounted to a permanent underclass, it became a fairly unsustainable situation, and was eventually overturned. And it's fairly hard to go back now, because race relations haven't reached a point of sufficient trust: a lot of African-Americans believe that if the Civil Rights Act were overturned, companies would go back to not hiring them due to racism (at the very least, many would interpret overturning the Civil Rights Act as an action with unfriendly intent).
As a strictly positive rather than a normative statement: because "old" people vote, and "old" people see value in not getting thrown out of their jobs in favor of cheaper young people, and instruct their elected representatives as to their preferences in that regard.
In a parallel universe where young people voted and old people did not, one could imagine a law which made it illegal to pay 20 year olds and 40 year olds different amounts of money for the same job. Hah hah hah, hah hah hah, hahahaha. What a quirky universe that would be.
That parallel universe might also have very interesting discussions about, e.g., health care financing.
I rush to note that I am not necessarily in favor of the status quo policies of either our world or the parallel universe.
Let me ask a possibly unpopular question because
the answer is not immediately obvious to me:
Here's an explanation I've heard: Yes, it's your business, your property, and in most things you're free to do as you like with it. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can have a business and a good life because you live in a particular society, so you have some obligations back to that society. That can take the form of, well, taxes (for example), but also as special protections for select groups of people.
Let look at this way. Each law we made will have potential side-effects, which is most likely to be negative. Thus, the law of unintended consequence.
For example, a business deciding who to hire might decide on only the merit/performances of employees. However, this end up with lot of white people, because white people are disproportional represented in the tech industry. Any minority in the tech industry have to swim against lot of talented white people. So what we end up with is a firm with mostly white people.
However, discrimination against race is prohibited in our law and it looks like the firm is engaged in favoring white people over other type of colors. So people either sue the firm for racial discrimination, or the firm decided a quota of people from each race to hire.
Thus, we end up with the strange situation of a color-blind company being sued for discrimination that it never engaged in, or forced to take a racist route to avoid lawsuits.
So we better be careful of how we make our laws. A law with good intentions and made with great moral conviction may end up doing the opposite.
"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings." -- 1654 R. Whitlock Observations on Manners of English 203
I absolutely agree, and offered the explanation as one I've often heard, but it isn't one I can get my heart into. But even if it's true in general principal, the idea of trying to do good by roundabout methods is indeed tricky, and if you cannot accurately measure the results you're doing witchcraft not statecraft.
Why would fire a good employee for something as stupid as sex or age?
Yes, there are people who would do that, but if they're that brainless I don't think their business is going to be long-lived.