THE CITY
people standing aside being agnostic to what’s going on. No aggregate harm to the economy. We’re going to hire the same number of people. It’s going to be different people, and in fact, if you put these restrictions on us we may go out of business and the rest of the world will be worse off. It’s much harder to do that in a world that does not respect autonomy as a primary value. And it’s not only with respect to religion—it’s with the Boy Scouts. It’s with any organization that wants to have a point of view and to have all members share in that point of view. They will always be subject to an onslaught from an anti-discrimination law. The hard question that we have to face in all of these questions is why it is that we want to bring this regulatory apparatus to bear on, in effect, all of these religious institutions. And to me it has always been a sucker’s game. You can’t win from playing it, and you really ought not to try. One final question: what advice do you have for current students who are studying today that they’ve gained through your own wealth of experience? The single most important thing to do when you are young is to learn as much as you can about as many different things as you possibly can. Don’t have a very narrow definition of what is relevant to the things that you want to do, because if you exclude things, you’ll never be able to figure out how different fields get put together. The advantage of the success often goes to those people who have the largest set of tools in their tool kit, people who are comfortable with quantitative issues, moral issues, economic issues, religious issues, and so forth—so don’t close too many doors too soon in your life.
Richard Epstein is Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fe llow at the Hoover Institution, the Laurence A. Tisch Pr ofessor of Law at New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His most r ecent book is Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administr ation, and the Rule of Law (Harvard University Press, 2011). Benjamin Domenech is Editor in Chief of T HE C IT Y . 44