Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Misleading Metric

pay gap, gender, legislation, justice, fairness, hypocrisy, Sen. Susan Lee

Yesterday’s Washington Post clarified how the “gender pay gap” is calculated:

This metric does not take into account the different types of jobs, varying levels of experience and education, or women who lose seniority and promotion opportunities when they leave the workforce temporarily to care for children, which they do in larger numbers than men. Still, it is widely used as a measuring stick.

The Post informed readers that the gap isn’t what it appears, that it doesn’t actually measure discrimination against women. Nonetheless, the paper justifies promoting this misleading statistic with the claim that it is “widely used.”

Sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Post’s story was sparked by legislation in Maryland to purportedly mandate “equal-pay” between men and women. Yet, the bill specifically authorizes unequal pay for any “bona fide factor other than sex or gender identity.”

It’s already against the law for employers to pay women less for the same job or to deny equal opportunity for advancement. This legislation, on the other hand, seems designed to create full-employment for lawyers. If passed, employees could sue their employer for “assigning work less likely to lead to promotion or future opportunities.”

Sen. Susan Lee, the bill’s sponsor, proclaims that, “Any gap is unequal and unacceptable.”

What about the gender pay gap in the Maryland Legislature? Using the same misleading metric, female legislative employees make less than what males make.

Unacceptable!

So, why don’t legislators fix their own pay discrepancy before they dictate to everyone else?

Or better yet, they could simply stop peddling a divisive non-solution for this dishonestly hyped “problem.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags feminism, gender pay gap, Sen. Susan Lee, sex equality, wage legislation, wages

Today

Hyphen War

On March 29, 1990, the Czechoslovak parliament proved unable to reach an agreement on what to call the country after the “Velvet Revolution” — in which the Communist Party was booted from sole power. This sparked the “Hyphen War,” a tongue-in-cheek moniker for the dispute between Czechs and Slovaks about official recognition of the two nations’ equal status. (The Slovak representatives wanted to insert a hyphen into the name, to make the Slovak part stand out.) Eventually, the dispute was resolved with the “Velvet Divorce,” in which the two countries split up, on New Year’s Day, 1993.

Common Sense

Václav Havel

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

Václav Havel, Letter to the downthrown Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubček (August 1969), as translated in Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 5: The Politics of Hope, p. 115.

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

Mr. Most Merciless

Obama, clemency, pardon, mercy, crime, Common Sense, illustration

Usually, when contemplating the Office of the President of the United States, our cause for complaint is excess of power. Our country was founded on opposition to such centralized power — initially directed against King George III — and the Constitution written, in part, to allow a strong federal government without feeding the beast of Tyranny.

Yet, today, I’m not bemoaning unchecked presidential power. Instead, the opposite: an important presidential power that Mr. Obama lets lie unused.

What is that power?

The executive’s power to pardon, defined in Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Yesterday, George Lardner Jr., a scholar with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and Political Science Professor P. S. Ruckman Jr., the editor of the Pardon Power Blog, reported in an op-ed for The Washington Post, that “Obama has a clemency record comparable to the least merciful presidents in history. He has granted just 70 pardons, the lowest mark for any full-term president since John Adams, and 187 commutations of sentence.”

“Obama’s record is all the more deplorable because of assurances that he has made,” argue Lardner and Ruckman, noting that the Department of Justice’s Clemency Project 2014 — designed to provide relief to non-violent drug offenders and announced “to great fanfare” — has “become a bureaucratic disaster.”

With all the injustice found even in the best justice systems, I cannot understand how a compassionate person could ignore this power. Or use it, as President Bill Clinton did, to provide last-minute pardons for cronies and high-rolling campaign contributors.

Have mercy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags capital punishment, clemency, crime, Obama, President Barack Obama, presidential pardon, prisons

Thought

Coretta Scott King

I believe that freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience.

Common Sense

Vargas and Vaughn

On March 28, 1936, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was born. This recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature ran, in 1990, for the presidency of Peru, but lost to Alberto Fujimori. His novels include La casa verde (The Green House), La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of the World), La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was filmed as Tune in Tomorrow.

On the same date in 1970, Vince Vaughn, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, was born. Vaughn is one of a small minority of non-left-leaning Hollywood stars; his ideas on politics and economic policy were greatly influenced by Ron Paul.

links

Townhall: The Next Emperor

Trump and America, the plot thickens! Click on over to Townhall. Then come back here for more clues.

Washington Post: Trump questions need for NATO, outlines noninterventionist foreign policy
Washington Post: A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board
Washington Post: The U.S. is bound by treaties to defend a quarter of humanity
Cato: Subsidizing our NATO Allies: Your Tax Dollars at Work
CBO: Budget Projections for 2016
Forbes: You Think The Deficit Is Bad? Federal Unfunded Liabilities Exceed $127 Trillion
Cato: No Libertarian Case for Empire

Today

Typhoid Mary

On March 27, 1915, Mary Mallon, popularly and scandalously known as “Typhoid Mary,” was put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life, over 23 years incarcerated.

Ms. Mallon was the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States. As an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, she was a puzzle to science, and, once discovered, an apparent threat to those around her, with at least three deaths attributable to her presence. She did not co-operate with officials, and preferred to work as a cook, which paid higher wages than less dangerous-to-the-public occupations. She had been quarantined once before her final permanent quarantine in a hospital.

The civil liberties aspect to her incarceration loom large, and it is obvious that health officials of her time were not exactly any more co-operative regarding her rights as she was with those of her clients and neighbors. The case was an obvious turning point in American legal practice, and can be categorized along with eugenics and “social hygiene” — along with prohibition regarding alcohol and recreational drugs — in the increasing illiberality of legal practice in America in the early part of the 20th century.

Thought

Auberon Herbert

Men quickly learn to look upon what is done for them by the state as a right and grumble that what is given is not given in fuller measure. It is a common cry: “We do not want charity, but state employment.” State employment is charity, only with all the healing grace left out of it.

Auberon Herbert, as reprinted in the first edition of The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, 1885.

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