Quote :

"is it a defensible position to wholeheartedly be against the practice and maintain that the government shouldn't do anything about it? "

YES

What the govt or any law cannot accurately gauge is ability or productivity. So simply saying that everyone should be paid the same is just a pipedream. If you sell 10 cars a month and another employee, a woman this time, sells 1, should you be paid the same? You have the SAME JOB? You guys honestly think you can pass a law to make things "fair"? Now if the roles were reversed and the woman was selling 10 cars and being paid less than the guy who sells 1, then I can see her being pissed and looking for a new job...but that shit only happens on paper bc ANY business owner wants to keep their most productive and reward them.

But today there seems to be a big push for the govt to make all OUTCOMES equal. If so, then the govt can only dish out discrimination. Then the race to the bottom begins.

Im going to humor your opinion that you can force "equal pay" "fairness" or whatever makes you feel good. Explain to me how exactly that would work? Just pay everyone the same? Set a max to how much more you can pay your best employee vs worst? Doesnt this all seem terribly divisive and intrusive? Just let me know how that will work in the real world please.

[Edited on June 7, 2012 at 10:53 AM. Reason : .]

6/7/2012 10:43:20 AM

Quote :

"Yep I said that. What we can do is take off our Ayn Rand blinders and address bias instead of pretending it doesn't exist or doesn't matter."

mrfrog already said it best. Honest to God gender discrimination is the hardest thing to deal with. The government cannot make people stop being biased. You cannot make people stop being biased. Holding guns to peoples' heads (although your preferred solution) isn't going to do shit to solve the problem. Attitudes of bias are a symptom of other cultural problems that need to be addressed; many of these cultural problems are actually the direct result of government policies, and if you ignore that, you do so at your own peril.

Quote :

"Do people have a right to fairness? That's a valid question, and most people would answer "no". However, it's interesting to consider a world unfair to women, agreement on the fact, and inaction by the government. If you've identified clear inequality, then is it a defensible position to wholeheartedly be against the practice and maintain that the government shouldn't do anything about it? Ethics itself should dictate that an action exists. Even if it's other people making these unequal and immoral decisions, there should be something that you, as someone who recognizes the inequality, does about it. The inherent human condition demands it. Our founders made similar statements about rights - that they are self-obvious and not granted by any government. That's consistent with the belief of an absolute and objective moral framework we should aspire to, and I think that all the ideals of the civil rights movement should be included in this framework. The issue is that some people believe the government shouldn't take action on this. So we then accept an absolute moral framework, and within that framework find actionable and in-actionable items for the government. Is human trafficking the business of government? I would venture a guess that the libertarians among us would agree with me in answering "yes". If the line doesn't reach to equal opportunity and economic fairness to all, how do we draw the line between what is government's business and what isn't?"

So, we identify some problem. Gender inequality. AIDS. Murder. Theft. These things are terrible, and "we" just have to do something about it.

Well, greats news! We have the government. It's this fabulous group of wise, altruistic individuals that truly represents the will of the people. Governments have a long, proven track record of generally doing what's best for the population at large and not becoming corrupted and not doing more harm than good. History is just bursting with examples of awesome, effective government.

In reality, the government is just people - people with power. Power is about as addictive as cocaine. When people get a taste of power, they want more. The values and ideals they held as normal, powerless people are superseded by the desire to get just a little more.

Me, and you, and a lot of people agree on what the problems are. We think stealing is wrong. We think the initiation of force is wrong. We think racism and sexism is wrong. We think fraud is wrong. We (I hope) live our lives in a way that is congruent with these moral principles. If it was just you, me, and people like us, no force would be necessary. We could peacefully agree on what was right/wrong and live our lives.

But all of those bad people and bad things! Us (the good people) need to form a government to force those bad people and bad things to stop being bad. We'll stop them from doing bad things by putting them in jail, killing them, and stealing from them. If someone needs help, we'll steal from someone else (rather than just helping them ourselves), because that's what good people do. And, somehow, in all of this confusion where "we" (the good people) are doing bad things to keep bad people from doing bad things, we will also keep the truly bad people from taking power.

Really and truly, having a government is a losing proposition. Having and supporting a government is not consistent with any decent moral system. I mean, the U.S. was created with the intent of being the smallest government ever, and it has turned into what it is today. Highest incarceration rate, broken economy, military empire, only two nukes used in the history of man on civilian populations, the list goes on.

6/7/2012 11:07:47 AM

Quote :

"So, we identify some problem. Gender inequality. AIDS. Murder. Theft. These things are terrible, and "we" just have to do something about it. Well, greats news! We have the government. It's this fabulous group of wise, altruistic individuals that truly represents the will of the people. Governments have a long, proven track record of generally doing what's best for the population at large and not becoming corrupted and not doing more harm than good. History is just bursting with examples of awesome, effective government."

Most people see a role for government in combating murder. Even the most libertarian of the libertarians believe that. The most EXTREME libertarians who literally advocate for private organization of government agree for this function of government - just that you get to chose which "government" or "rights enforcement agency" you want to use.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o

Anything beyond that view (articulated in that video well) diverges from libertarianism to anarchism. The two are, indeed, completely different.

Quote :

"Im going to humor your opinion that you can force "equal pay" "fairness" or whatever makes you feel good. Explain to me how exactly that would work? Just pay everyone the same? Set a max to how much more you can pay your best employee vs worst? Doesnt this all seem terribly divisive and intrusive? Just let me know how that will work in the real world please. "

Researchers often do a particular type of blind experiment:

Make up a resume. Identify 500 employers to send it to. Let a computer randomly pick 250 of them and sent out the resume to those with a white male name on it. Then send the other 250 employers the same resume with a female name or a black name on it.

Researchers have done this exact nature of experiment, testing for black names and female names. They do find a difference. This exemplifies equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. Now, an uber-progressive position would be that you could mandate the IRS to redistribute wealth to the groups that have less opportunity based on empirical predictions of the pay difference due to the results of those experiments. No progressive argues this. This would be too progressive for the progressives.

What we actually do is use successively more and more aggressive labor laws. I don't know this is the right answer, and I think that regardless of one's location on the political spectrum, I think it's likely just plain inefficient in terms of the mechanics of enforcement. There is something distinct, however, that we do address. We (as in our democracy) look to our government to address friction points between groups. This is why we have hate crime laws. This is also affirmative action.

Even if you compensated women for the empirically measured pay difference due to discrimination, some women would still get more boned (that was probably bad word choice, but oh well) than other women because they happen to pick a more sexist company. But if the unfairness if random we don't have a problem with it. Our nation is all about random unfairness. The entire proposition of the stock market wouldn't work otherwise.

Honestly, I think there is a problem with group friction in society that we need government to address. Look at the Middle East. Government failures are largely a reflection of the tensions between the Kurds and the Sunis and the Shiites and the Jews and so on and so fourth. Ultimately the tyrannical governments worked because they just boned them all. Group identity is sufficiently strong that they'll sacrifice national success for marginal gains for their own group. Again, a very cursory look at Iraq easily bears out these dynamics. The most important role of government is to keep us from killing each other. Thankfully, I find that mostly unlikely in the case of male-female interactions... mostly. Economic integration is also the #1 way to keep two groups from killing each other, so in that sense I agree with the motivation for busing kids from low-income neighborhoods to high-income neighborhoods.

6/7/2012 12:28:30 PM

Quote :

"Most people see a role for government in combating murder. Even the most libertarian of the libertarians believe that. The most EXTREME libertarians who literally advocate for private organization of government agree for this function of government - just that you get to chose which "government" or "rights enforcement agency" you want to use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o Anything beyond that view (articulated in that video well) diverges from libertarianism to anarchism. The two are, indeed, completely different."

Anarchism is a logical extension of libertarianism. I don't advocate having no laws, I advocate having no rulers.

Government is a monopoly on force. That is what I want to eliminate. No person or group of people can be trusted with absolute power.

6/7/2012 12:34:19 PM

Quote :

"The question is: Should employers be able to discriminate pay wages and benefits solely on the basis of gender? Clearly the answer is no."

People lie. It doesn't matter why the employer wants to pay her or him less than someone else, be it racism/sexism/dedication/blackmail, they do. Making it illegal to do so doesn't fix the problem of the employer viewing the other as more valuable, all it does is ban the appearance. The workers being discriminated against clearly want the jobs at the offered wages. Saying this is illegal does not put them in the jobs at "fair" wages, it just puts many of them out on the street at "zero" wages.

It is a fundamental human right to choose who you associate with and on what terms. To deprive any workers of what opportunities they have just so you can feel better about the statistics is morally reprehensible.

6/7/2012 12:47:08 PM

We already don't allow it. If discrimination is written in a company's policies, they will get pwnd. The only discrimination the law currently allows is discrimination that can't be proven.

6/7/2012 12:56:39 PM

^ It is actually much better than that. The employers in question don't actually believe they are being discriminatory. How the hell do you ban behavior when neither party believes the behavior is taking place?

6/7/2012 1:13:44 PM

Quote :

"Government is a monopoly on force. That is what I want to eliminate. No person or group of people can be trusted with absolute power."

I'd rather a democratic monopoly on force than a non-democratic oligopoly.

Quote :

"Making it illegal to do so doesn't fix the problem of the employer viewing the other as more valuable, all it does is ban the appearance."

Uh not really. When an employer consistently pays, say, black people less money than whites, with no verifiable proof of differing performance (Which is increasingly likely to be fraudulent, the more employees under them fall into gap).

Quote :

"The workers being discriminated against clearly want the jobs at the offered wages."

No, they want jobs, and will take wages. When you're discriminated against in at least half of the resumes you submit, then once hired you get discriminated in wages at most companies, you'll take what you can get.

Quote :

"It is a fundamental human right to choose who you associate with and on what terms."

This is completely meaningless when private discrimination and bigotry actively restrict your choices in association. Choice is pointless without options.

Quote :

" To deprive any workers of what opportunities they have just so you can feel better about the statistics is morally reprehensible."

Seriously guys, if we ban slavery, where will the slaves work?

[Edited on June 7, 2012 at 1:53 PM. Reason : .]

6/7/2012 1:49:19 PM

Just think of all the people you're negatively impacting by not associating with right now.

Shame shame.

6/7/2012 4:57:27 PM

Quote :

"This is completely meaningless when private discrimination and bigotry actively restrict your choices in association. Choice is pointless without options."

So therefore the government should make some of their options illegal?

Quote :

"I'd rather a democratic monopoly on force than a non-democratic oligopoly."

Democratic monopolies on force have on occasion stopped being democratic.

I don't know anyone defending a non-democratic oligopoly on force. But a system of monopolistic competition on force (guns are readily available but unevenly distributed) tends to be democratic and always tolerable.

6/10/2012 6:54:37 PM