When I was young, my family lived in America, and we frequently went to Florida to visit my uncles. I still remember how shocked I was whenever I boarded a bus in Florida. Towards the rear of each bus there was a yellow line drawn on the floor, and all the black people in the bus were required to stand behind that line.

The public discrimination that existed in the American South has now disappeared, but America has now gone to the opposite extreme and is trying to prohibit private discrimination. This would necessarily destroy all individual freedom, because private discrimination is what life is all about. When one chooses a school, when one chooses a job, when one chooses a house, when one chooses one's friends and when one chooses a wife or husband, one is obviously discriminating. (A girl who has six suitors and chooses to marry only one, is obviously discriminating against the others.Yet they have no right of complaint.) Indeed,it is the word "discriminating" that has always had a good connotation, while it is the word "indiscriminate" which has always had a pejorative one.

It is difficult to see by what right any government can interfere with personal choice - indeed just as no government should ever allow public discrimination, so no government should try to interfere with private choice. Yet this distinction does not seem to have yet permeated the American consciousness. Even worse, it has slowly been seeping into Europe, where it is now causing similar confusion.