Many of the economic realities written about in this article can’t be comprehended until they are stuck under the magnification of a small business microscope. Embracing an economic truth or economic lie in a small business is the difference between surviving, or not. Just ask my dad who has been and is a small business owner. That’s why mammoth corporations and big government bureaucracies cannot grasp intelligible concepts like:
- The job is not the property of the employee, it is the property of the employer. If an employee worked for a single individual and that individual died, would that employee still be entitled to remuneration and his job? Of course not.
- Laws against discriminatory pay are an infringement on private contracts between two individuals. The employer is employing that particular individual for his ability to carry out that job. Impersonal, overarching laws made by some bureaucratic dictator in a land far, far away from the real world cannot possibly comprehend the millions upon millions of individual decisions that are daily made for the better in businesses. An owner of a grocery store, for instance, might choose a 5′9″ girl to stock the shelves of his store over a 5′2″ girl who couldn’t reach as high. Sounds discriminatory to me. I guess that law against discriminatory pay wasn’t discriminating enough.
- Our economy would fall apart within a month if the government really made an impersonal decision in every single job. A free market economy is elastic and fluid and reshapes itself to the needs of the consumer — emphasis on needs. What a consumer pays for and needs in one month/year/decade and what the producer produces to meet his demands will be radically different needs in the next month/year/decade — a free market economy realizes and reshapes itself to that.
- The employer is buying the employee’s ability to work. Therefore, an employer is far more likely to hire a man who has the capacity for working long hours on a demanding job than a mother of five young children who cannot devote as much time or productivity to the job because of her children. We may sympathize with that mother who needs the job to feed her children, but it’s not the duty of the employer to provide her with a job that would create a deficit in his capital and resources by hiring an unproductive employee. Rather, it’s the duty of families and churches to see that the mother is provided for.
Besides, if a woman’s labor was really worth as much as a man’s in any given job, then why do we have to mandate laws about equal pay for equal work? In reality, if a woman’s work was equal to (or better than) a man’s in every field of expertise, there would be no stopping employers from hiring women employees. But the truth is, men and women were created by a loving Designer with different talents, abilities, and affinities for people and things, that influence how they work. Men offer better productive abilities in many areas of the work force than women do because God created them with the different capacities for carrying out unique roles in the work force and at home. This is not to undermine or devalue women’s intelligence or ability to comprehend the knowledge necessary for certain jobs (though, one wonders why there aren’t as many female programmers or mathematicians), but when the rubber meets the road, it’s often the woman who is incapable of carrying out that job to its full extent because she has a unique role at home. Either she has to coldly abandon that role or not perform as well at her job.
The unintended consequence of the laws prohibiting discriminatory pay is that they, like minimum-wage laws, will harm the people that they are intended to help. In a free society, individuals enter into contracts of their own accord with the assumption that the contract will benefit them. Government interference in private contracts prevents this process from taking place, hindering the individual’s ability to improve his standard of living and usurping control over his life.
By mandating equal pay, the government erases the competitive advantage of those people who are willing to take less pay. In addition, employers are less willing to hire employees who they believe could subject them to increased liability. Thus, instead of equalizing pay between men and women, the Ledbetter Act will lead to higher unemployment rates among women.
The Ledbetter Act is aimed at equality. But individuals are not equal. We all have different talents, resources, interests, abilities, educations, and backgrounds. In a free market, individual persons can find the niche in which they can exploit their talents to mold their lives in the way that they wish. Far from encouraging discrimination, the free market leads to social harmony as people view each other not as members of disparate groups with hostile intentions, but instead as individuals providing products and services that improve one another’s lives.
Coram Deo!