In the Early 20th Century By Paul Varnell First published in the Windy City Times . Governments tend to impose majority opinion, while markets are the great solvent of prejudice. This should not be surprising.
Governments tend to impose the opinions and prejudices of the majority.
By contrast, the free market is where people have an incentive to suspend their prejudices and simply try to make money from every available source. Thus free markets are the great solvent of prejudice. And while government necessarily makes one law for everyone, the market is always open to a variety of minority tastes that can find themselves served as a niche market. Chauncey s book offers several examples of entrepreneurs ignoring pubic prejudice or evading the law in order to make money by catering to gays even when it was risky to do so. Early in this century some heterosexual Turkish bathhouses began quietly tolerating gay men.