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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - September 28, 2010

Equality -- or Freedom?
by: Pat Buchanan

If you would understand why America has lost the dynamism
she had in the 1950s and 1960s, consider the new Paycheck
Fairness Act passed by the House 256 to 162.

The need for such a law, writes Valerie Jarrett, the rank-
ing woman in Barack Obama's White House, is that "working
women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned
by a man."

But why is that a concern of the U.S. government, and where
is the empirical evidence that an inequality of pay between
the sexes is proof of sexist hostility to women?

On average, Asians earn more than Hispanics; blacks less
than whites. Mormons earn more than Muslims; Jews more
than Jehovah's Witnesses. And Polish Americans earn more
than Puerto Ricans.

Does that prove America is a racist and religiously bigoted
country?

The assumption of the Jarrett-backed law is that the sexes
are equal in capacity, aptitude, drive and interest, and
if there is a disparity in pay, only bigotry can explain
it.

But are there not other, simpler answers for why women earn
less?

Perhaps half of American women leave the job market during
their lives, sometimes for decades, to raise children,
which puts them behind men who never leave the workforce.
Women gravitate to teaching, nursing, secretarial and
service work, which pay less than jobs where men
predominate: mining, manufacturing, construction and the
military.

Over 95 percent of our 40,000 dead and wounded from
Afghanistan and Iraq were men. Men in prison outnumber
women 10 to one. Is that the result of sex discrimination?

Sports have become a national obsession, and among the most
rewarded professions in fame and fortune. And TV viewers
prefer to watch male athletes compete in baseball,
basketball, football, hockey, golf, tennis and boxing.

Is unequal pay for men and women professional athletes a
matter for the government?

Larry Summers lost his job as president of Harvard for
suggesting that women have less aptitude for higher math
and that may explain why they are underrepresented on Ivy
League faculties in the sciences, economics and math. Would
not that male aptitude help explain why men are dominant
in investment banking and corporate finance, where salaries
are among the highest?

Jarrett wants to empower the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission to more closely monitor all businesses until
women reach pay parity.

But if inequality of pay is a result of human nature and
a free society, a greater equality of rewards can only be
achieved through coercion, a government declaring its
value, economic parity, to be supreme, and imposing its
value and its preferred pay structure upon employers.

If this is where America is headed, why not go all the way
and dictate that Asians and Hispanics, Muslims and Jews,
women and men, blacks and whites, gay and straight must
all be paid the exact same for the same work -- and let
the EEOC hire 100,000 more bureaucrats to see that it
happens?

Would that be a great country or a socialist hell?

And before we empower the EEOC to monitor every business
for sexism and racism, perhaps the commissioners will
explain why African-Americans are 40 percent of all EEOC
employees, while only 10 percent of the civilian labor
force. Not a single white male sits on the commission.

Whence comes this egalitarian fanaticism?

Not from our Declaration of Independence, which spoke of
all men being equal in their Creator-endowed rights to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nor from the
America Revolution, which was about liberty not equality,
not this alien ideology of egalitarianism.

Equality is not even mentioned in the Constitution or the
Bill of Rights, and the 14th Amendment's "equal protection"
clause did not even make an appearance until after the
Civil War. And that was about equal justice under law,
not the socioeconomic equality of all Americans.

No, this egalitarian ideology is traceable to the French
Revolution, where the royalty and aristocracy went to the
guillotine in the name of "egalite."

Under the Paycheck Fairness Act, writes Jarrett, "employers
will be required to prove in court that any wage differ-
ences were based on factors other than sex -- such as
education, training or experience -- and were consistent
with business necessity."

In short, women alleging sexist practices by their bosses
do not have to prove their guilt. The boss must prove his
innocence. This is another way of saying businessman are
to be presumed guilty when charged.

If that is not un-American, it surely once was.

Should this bill become law, the effects are predictable:
more forms to be filled out by businesses, more bureaucrats
for the EEOC, more charges of sex discrimination, more
class-action suits, more fines, more lawyers getting rich
via the litigious looting of the private sector.

America's decline is directly related to the growth in
government power and the concomitant loss of freedom.

Except in God-given and constitutional rights, we are not
equal. We are all unequal. The utopian promise of equality
is but the banner of every power-hungry politician in
modern history. And the rise of the egalitarian society
means the death of the free society.

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