Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Full and edited versions of our podcasts are available on our website at

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Today's podcast will examine the lawsuit brought against Craigslist by the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under law.

Craigslist stands accused of facilitating illegal housing ads that discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, and marital status.

We'll go to Cato policy analyst and Daddy Government whiz Radley Balko for some answers.

Radley, is there any logic to this case at all?

No, I don't think so.

I think this case raises a number of questions.

First of all, just from a logistical standpoint,

Craigslist has millions of ads that go up every day and these

ads are put up by users.

It's generally a user-run site.

In fact, for a long time, Craig Craigslist was didn't make any money and only recently

started bringing in some ad revenue.

So if this suit were to go forward and be successful, Craigslist would have to start hiring

people to monitor these millions of ads every day

and effectively probably put the company under.

And it would also inconvenience a lot of people in that it would make it virtually impossible for any type of similar online

classified system to come up. To apply anti-discrimination laws in this way is

pretty ridiculous. It inconveniences everyone involved. If you, let's say you're a, you know, a little

old lady who has a room to rent to someone, say that she can't winnow her pool of applicants down to someone she might actually rent to which

...