To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 18:10:17 -0500
Subject: [WSFA] Re: equal pay
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Tue, 02 Apr 2002 17:19:08 -0500 Candy Madigan
<candymadigan at mindspring.com> writes:

> At 09:24 AM 04/02/2002 -0500, you wrote:
I submit that until it is unconstitutional for
> >employers to pay women less than men for working at exactly the
> same
> >jobs, this country will not have equal rights for all.
> >
> >Kit
>
> I want to substitute 'anyone' for women and 'anyone else' or 'men'.
>
> Candy

As a libertarian, I have to jump in here.  Workers who do the same job
are not necessarily equally productive.  That's one reason why
salespersons are often paid on commission.  Most jobs are not well suited
to being put on a commission or piecework basis, even though such is
probably the fairest way to pay workers, in theory.  Given the reality
that it is not always practical to tie pay directly to productivity,
employers should be free to reward their more productive workers with
higher pay, according to their own judgement.  That is, in my view,
consistent with justice, fairness, and economic efficiency.  A free
market tends to produce winning results for society as a whole, and
attempts to impose laws to equalize pay are based on a mistaken notion of
justice, the idea that justice demands equality of outcomes.

It costs something like twice as much (or more) to live in New York City
as it does to live in Mississippi.  It does not make sense to demand that
a cashier at a McDonalds restaurant in NYC be paid precisely the same
wage as one doing that job in Mississippi, and indeed the market works to
balance those differences.  McDonalds' workers in high cost/high wage
locations are paid more.

It would, I think, make better sense to advocate that men and women be
paid equally after accounting for productivity and local market
conditions, with gender making no difference.  That is, to advocate equal
pay for equal work in the same market, rather equal pay for the same job
description.  But the devil is in the details.  Trying to administer such
a law would necessarily put the government in the business of deciding
how much people should paid for their work.  Take, for example, the case
of an employer who has just one employee, an employee who happens to be a
woman.  How could we necessarily know how much that employer might offer
to pay a man for the same work?

Ron Kean

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