“Rand Paul’s Twisted Mind”: Protecting Individual Rights Is Not Stalinist
This week Republicans in the Senate once again blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would take further steps to guarantee access to the legal system for women who charge they’ve been paid less than men for doing the same job. (That’s illegal, in case anyone was thinking of trying it.) Justifying his vote against the act, Rand Paul compared it to Soviet communism. This is sort of a dog bites man story; on a given day, Rand Paul probably compares several dozen things to Soviet communism. But here, for what it’s worth, is why he thinks legislation to make it easier for women to sue when they’ve been paid less than men for doing the same job is just like Soviet communism:
“Three hundred million people get to vote everyday on what you should be paid or what the price of goods are,” Paul told reporters on Capitol Hill. “In the Soviet Union, the Politburo decided the price of bread, and they either had no bread or too much bread. So setting prices or wages by the government is always a bad idea.”
Mr. Paul does not appear to understand either the law which he has just voted against, or the class of economic transaction about which he is speaking. If a woman sues because she has been paid less than a man for doing the same work, and a judge rules in her favour, that is not an instance of “setting prices or wages by the government”. The wage in question was set by the employer. What the judge has ruled is that the employer cannot offer different wages to different employees based on their sex. Why might such a hypothetical judge make such a ruling? Because, as noted above, offering different wages to different employees based on their sex is against the law, and has been so since 1963.
I. What Are the Federal Laws Prohibiting Job Discrimination?
1. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
2. the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), which protects men and women who perform substantially equal work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination;
But should it be illegal to offer different pay for the same work based on an employee’s sex? Maybe not. Mr Paul’s argument here implies he thinks it should be okay. So, let’s try a thought experiment. How would you react to seeing a job advertisement that read: “Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years’ experience required, salary $100k for man, $77k for woman”? Is that okay? If not, why not? How about this: “Associate lawyer in patent firm, 3 years’ experience required, salary $100k for Christian, $70k for Jew”? How about “Salary $100k for white, $65k for negro”?
The Paycheck Fairness Act, like the Lily Ledbetter Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, is not an instance of government price setting. It is an instance of government prohibition of certain forms of exploitative price discrimination. It is illegal for an employer to pay a woman less than a man for the same work just as it is illegal for a shop owner to charge a Jew more than a Christian for the same loaf of bread. There have been places in the world where at various times shop owners were allowed to charge Jews more based on their religion, to pay untouchables less based on their caste, and so forth.
Those places were not freer than America. Indeed, one place where employers were free to discriminate against women and Jews, and did so avidly, was the Soviet Union. One of the key differences between the Soviet Union and America is that in America, we have an independent judiciary to which individuals can turn for enforcement of their legal rights when someone is screwing them over because they are of the wrong race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.
In America, you have rights, and what makes those rights non-meaningless is that you can use the legal system to defend them. Mr Paul’s ideological system has performed the ingenious trick of twisting his head around 180 degrees, such that he views the fact that Americans have legally enforceable rights not to be discriminated against as a form of communism.
By: M. S., The Economist, June 6, 2012
Religion, Patriotism And Freedom: Ayn Rand Vs. America
Ayn Rand has a large and growing influence on American politics. Speaking at an event in her honor, Congressman Paul Ryan said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
A few weeks ago, Maureen Fiedler, the producer of the weekly radio show, Interfaith Voices, asked me to participate in a debate with Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. I eagerly accepted. I wanted to hear how a follower of Rand would defend proposals to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps while exempting the wealthy from paying their fair share.
In one sense there was agreement. Maureen, a Sister of Loretto, argued that Republican budget proposals turned their back on Christ’s admonition to care for “the least among us,” the hungry, the sick, the homeless. Ghate did not dispute that. Rand, he said, was an atheist who did not believe in government efforts to help those in need.
Ghate countered Sister Maureen’s religious position with a moral argument. He maintained that redistribution of wealth was unfair to the rich and weakened the ambition of the rest. I wasn’t surprised by this position, since I’d heard it repeatedly during the fight on welfare reform.
What I did find startling was Ghate’s insistence that just as there should be a separation of church and state, so there should be a separation of economics and state. That notion really got me thinking.
I’ve always understood that one’s loyalty to God should take precedence over one’s patriotic duty. Churches are exempt from taxation, and conscientious objectors aren’t required to serve in war. Our high regard for the First Amendment shows the preeminence of faith in the American consciousness.
But to place economics on the same level as religious freedom seemed to me almost blasphemous. Are we really to believe that the freedom to make money should stand on the same level of religious liberty? Are the words of Milton Friedman equal to the Sermon on the Mount? I don’t think so. But maybe in the eyes of Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan, they are.
Ayn Rand’s biography goes a long way toward explaining her animus to government. Her first-hand experience of communism showed her how the state can crush people, kill dissent, and exile lovers of freedom to the gulag. Horrified by what government power could do, she was determined to shrink it to the point of impotence.
America was the perfect place for Rand’s single-minded celebration of the individual. After all, this was the nation that inspired intrepid emigrants to leave behind country, family, and friends with little more than the shirt on their back to make a new life. Here they wouldn’t be judged by what they were before or who their parents were but by what they could made of themselves.
America was a beacon of freedom from its earliest days. But the freedom to earn one’s living is not the same as the freedom to emasculate government. It’s a mistake to enshrine individual liberty without acknowledging the role that a good government plays in preserving and promoting it. Look at places like Haiti, Somalia, and the Congo to see what happens when governments aren’t around much.
When government is marginalized, it’s not just individual freedom that suffers; the economy suffers too. A vibrant capitalism requires a legal system: contracts must be honored, fraud punished. Markets have to work, and for that we need a strong infrastructure of roads, rail, energy, and water and sewage systems.
Good government sets us free to spend our days in fruitful endeavors, not evasive action motivated by fear and distrust. Government regulations reassure us that speeding drivers will be arrested, that the financial products we buy won’t cheat us, and that it will be safer to put our money in banks than under our pillows. If we can’t trust our food to be healthy, our drugs to be safe, or our planes to fly without crashing, we’ll waste a lot of productive time.
During the debate, I also raised the point that the separation of economics and state implies that businesses and the people who run them are under no obligation to be patriotic.
In the 19th century, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Fricks, and J.P. Morgans wanted America to do well because their own fortunes were tied to American prosperity. They made America a great economic power by creating jobs and technological advances right here at home. They knew that their own fortunes were bound up with the well-being of their fellow Americans.
In Ayn Rand’s America, the first obligation of CEOs is to their shareholders, not to citizens. Their business is global, not local. Why should they care if they send jobs overseas? Why should they be concerned if American kids can’t do math or write a sentence? They’ll just outsource the work. Why should they worry that the next generation of Americans is going to have a tough time? Their own kids will do just fine. And in the meantime, they’re doing just fine themselves.
Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, sees a problem with this view. He writes, “You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work–and much of the profits–remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work–and masses of unemployed?”
Don Peck makes a similar point in his new book, Pinched, and in an Atlantic cover story. “Arguably,” he writes, “the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class.”
Besides this economic problem, I also see a moral issue with Ayn Rand’s insistence that all of us, CEOs included, should be totally free of the ties that bind. I especially disagree when it comes to CEOs. As I wrote here a few months ago, the wealthy have a special responsibility. Much will be asked of those to whom much has been given. Participating in government and civic life, serving in war, helping the less fortunate, and–yes–paying a fair share of taxes are inescapable responsibilities for all Americans, especially for those who have realized the American dream that inspires us all.
I doubt there was anything I could have said in the debate that would have induced Onkar Ghate to view the meaning of freedom in a different light. I suppose he might say the same of me. Still, I can’t see how one can be free in a vacuum. Freedom takes work, by each of us, and by our government, to create the place where each of us can prosper. The freedom to sleep under a bridge is no freedom at all. We can only be free when we work together for the well-being of all Americans–including the least among us.
By: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, The Atlantic, August 23, 2011
The Limits Of Free-Market Capitalism
Until a few years ago, my spiritual devotions were limited to the free market and the music of Patsy Cline. I’m sorry to say it’s just me and Patsy now.
Karl Marx may have been wrong where it really mattered—communism, to paraphrase Churchill, is government “of the duds, by the duds, and for the duds”—but he was spot on about the pitfalls of capitalism, particularly when it came to the entrenchment of social classes, the fetish of consumption, the frequency of recession, and the concentration of industry. Yet, like trained seals, we continue to leap through the flaming rings of a system that is contemptuous of the public good while rewarding those who feed off “free” markets and the politicians who rig them. Nearly three years after the global economy almost collapsed under the weight of a corrupt and inbred financial order, Washington is still mired between the false choice of the state or private enterprise as the proper steward of the general welfare.
It should be clear to anyone who has lost a cell phone signal in our nation’s capital or been denied health coverage because of a pre-existing ailment that capitalism’s endgame is not freedom of choice and efficiency, but oligarchy. Many of America’s top industries—agriculture, airlines, media, medical care, banking, defense, auto production, telecommunications—are controlled by a handful of corporations who fix prices like cartels. As Marx predicted, the natural inclination of players in a market-driven economy is not to compete but to collude.
Reporting in Asia and the Middle East for many years, I prayed to the same kitchen gods of untrammeled commerce that now bewitch the Republican Party faithful and the neoliberals who inhabit the Obama White House. In Asia more than a decade ago, I covered the liquidation of state assets as prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, perhaps the largest-ever transfer of wealth from public to private hands, as if it were a new religion that would transform economies from the Korean peninsula to the Indian subcontinent. Laissez-faireism, I wrote, would liberate consumers and domesticate once overweening state-owned enterprises.
In fact, privatization merely shifted economic control from corrupt apparatchiks to their allies in business, a transaction lubricated with kick-backs and sweetheart deals. That’s what happened in the Middle East, and it became the spore that engendered the Arab uprising.
The corruption of capitalism in America is all the more appalling for its legality. With the economy still struggling to recover from a housing crisis fomented largely by Wall Street’s craving for mortgage-backed securities, prosecution of those responsible has been confined to a single lawsuit filed by the Securities Exchange Commission against a lone financier. The system is still lousy with loopholes, and the Republican Party, which demographically as well as ideologically is becoming a gated community for white, southern males, is calling for more deregulation, not less.
Which brings us to the central failure of American capitalism: the excoriation of the state.
So deep is the mythology of the free market that we ignore the consequences of starving our schools, libraries, public media, and roads and railways. We expect our teachers to assume the burdens of parenthood and then blame them for failing education. We lament our dependence on foreign oil and the aviation cartels, but we refuse to underwrite a passenger-rail equivalent of the interstate highway system. We disparage the coarse reductionism of corporate-owned news outlets while neglecting public broadcasting, an isolated archipelago of smart, responsible journalism.
Our hostility to the public sector—fountainhead of the Hoover Dam, Mount Rushmore, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Los Angeles Coliseum, our national parks, and countless other public utilities and services in addition to the federal highway system—is inversely proportional to our reverence for private consumption. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his 1958 book The Affluent Society, “Vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses are praiseworthy and essential in our standard of living. Street cleaners to ensure clean streets are an unfortunate expense. Partly as a result, our houses are generally clean and our streets are generally filthy.” Galbraith also noted the uniquely American conceit of sanctioning debt when households and private investors hold it but condemning it when governments do.
Should the feds nationalize banks and appropriate soy fields? Certainly not. At its essence, there is probably no more efficient way of establishing the price of a particular good or service than market economics. Not all transactions are so simple, however, and there are some services—healthcare, for example, or transportation—that often fare better more as public goods than as private commodities. In order to save American capitalism, we must appreciate its limits even as we struggle to harness its power.
By: Stephen Glain, U. S. News and World Report, June 2, 2011
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