I disagree with this claim in John Tamny’s most recent post at RealClearMarkets on the gender pay gap:
In the real world, no truly talented person would seek coerced higher pay; instead, the skilled would reveal in the marketplace just why their pay isn’t high enough through performance proving just that. In short, if women really feel they’re underpaid relative to their male peers, they should express this truth in the free market.
Barring some deployment of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, that’s simply and demonstrably untrue. Here’s one of tens of thousands of examples. Is Bill Gates “truly talented”? I think that most people would say so. And yet he has repeatedly resorted to the courts and to the legislature, two of the arms of the coercive state, to secure more revenue for Microsoft. Most large businesses do the same. Small businesses don’t but only because they don’t have the leverage.
It’s called “rent-seeking” and I would argue that the drive to leverage social or political systems to obtain more than you could get on the basis of your own unaided efforts is one of the most powerful ones in the world. Probably right after survival and reproduction.
I don’t blame activists for promoting exaggerations, myths, or flat-out lies to get the government on their side. I blame politicians for knuckling under and people who know better for not opposing them.
I recall when I entered the American work force, back in the middle 1960s, a manager might have three employees of roughly equal skill and productivity, and pay them rather differently. Beginning programmers, let’s say, Susan would be paid about 3000 dollars per year, because that’s what women were paid back then. Johnnie, as an unmarried man, might pull down about 5000 dollars. Harold, with a wife and kid at home, would be paid 6000, because he had a family to support.
This was the fair and natural order, virtually as ordained by God, and only very strange people — Old Maids, chiefly — considered any other scheme for compensation. There weren’t companies with different notions for paying programmers. There weren’t companies that spontaneously decided employees doing the same sort of work with the same sort of skill should receive the same sort of pay. That wouldn’t have been moral! This was how the free market system worked, was supposed to work — capitalism in its best and finest form. It took lawsuits, lots of noisy demonstrations, federal equal rights legislation, and some judges to change things, not a one of which Libertarians approved of.
If John Tamny is unwilling to address that history, he’s either very stupid or a deliberate liar.