It's March 20th, colloquially known as 4:20 and everyone knows what is celebrated today. Yes, it is Equal Pay Day, the day where we reflect on how women supposedly make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Why, what did you think this post was going to be about?
According to a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation, "One year out of college, women working full-time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn."
The data seems to imply either a lack of opportunity for women or outright discrimination. However, the data for college enrollments show that 57% of college undergraduates are women and that number is climbing. Certainly then, it is not a lack of opportunities that women face. Given that a college education should supposedly raise one's earning potential, is this even more damning evidence that discrimination is keeping the ladies down? Not when you look more closely at the data.
The study notes some difference in male/female employment which explain much of the gap. First off, men and women are not compared with careers held constant, it is an overall number of all men and all women. The report admits that women seek employment statistically slanted towards education, psychology, the humanities, nonprofit groups and local governments which typically pay less than the sectors preferred by men, such as engineering, math, and business.
The one year out of college pay difference of 20% also makes more sense in light of the average hours worked. The report admits that a year out of college, notes AAUW, women in full-time jobs work an average of 42 hours a week, compared to 45 for men. Men are also far more likely to work more than 50 hours a week.
A decade after graduation, women make fully 31 percent less than men but this too is explained in the fine print of the report. A decade after graduation, only 3% of men have left the workforce or are working part time as compared to a whopping 39% of women. Those women who return to the workforce after being gone for so long, typically due to child-rearing, understandably make less than the men who never left.
Although the headline of the report trumpets discrimination at the hands of men, the text admits that "After accounting for all factors known to affect wages, about one-quarter of the gap remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination." So by the feminists own reasoning, the 23 cent gap is only less than a 6 cent gap and even that only may be discrimination. June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has done more independent research on the subject and comes to a fairly unsurprising conclusion, "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap."
For years feminists have tried to act as though there are no inherent differences between men and women, possibly excepting that men are evil. False facts are constructed to distort the overall picture. A 2007 study reported that 51% of women were now choosing to live without a spouse. A New York Times correction noted: "A front-page article and chart on Jan. 16 about the rising number of women in the United States living without spouses referred imprecisely to ages of the women included in the Census Bureau survey that was the basis of the finding. The women were 15 and older." Imagine that, when girls as young as 15 are included, most women are unmarried.
I'm not a feminist, I'm a libertarian. I support everyone's right to choose their own path by their individual decisions and not because of outside influence. Feminists, on the other hand, seem much more interested in generating false data to support their own conclusions about trends they would prefer to see in society. Unbiased studies show again and again that women choose to make different lifestyle choices than men, that may change with time or it may not. Regardless, as long as women are free to choose their education level, careers, and life decisions without undue interference or artificial barriers they have true equality of opportunity. Equalizing outcomes is a fool's errand and could only succeed by seeking to take away the freedom of choice that early feminists justly fought for.
A NOTE TO MY READERS: Between 2007 and 2010, Equal Pay Day was observed on March 20. In 2011, the date was moved to March 12. I became aware of this after Equal Pay Day had passed by reading this article which was not used as a reference within this column but is an excellent companion piece. It seems that, just like with anti-war protests, it is only cool for to hold rallies for the supposedly disenfranchised when the President is a Republican. If I missed it even though I was expecting it, I can't imagine too many other people even knew it existed. Although I used feminists' own statistics to debunk their bogus findings, the Wall Street Journal uses Department of Labor statistics to suggest women actually make 8% more than men in the cohort of 22-30 year old urban childless workers. They also found the unemployment rate to be 1% higher among men because of the different fields dominated by either sex, a fact I can't help notice men don't seem to be marching in the street about. Happy Equal Pay Day, sort of.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Obama's War
According to the United States Constitution, troops can only be deployed when Congress formally declares war. The last time this was done was at the start of World War II. This might come as a surprise to anyone who remembers the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan or Iraq. There were also no formal declarations when troops were used for "humanitarian purposes" in Bosnia, Kosovo or Somalia.
As stated in previous columns, Congress dislikes having all that authority that the Constitution delegated to it so it has gradually meted it out to other branches. In 1973 after being burned for their support for the Vietnam War (though it was not even then done constitutionally), Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon's veto. Essentially abdicating its war making powers to a President who didn't want them, the War Powers Resolution enables the President to send troops into war for 60 days without Congressional approval when national security is threatened. Over the years, even these standards have been relaxed so that national security does not have to be threatened and the 60 day limit is waived.
For longer wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress has passed authorizations of force. These give the President the final say so as to whether or not we go to war for an extended period of time. The authorizations of force are meant to give legitimacy to a war if undertaken but as we saw with Iraq, Congress loves to act tough only to abandon wars if they become unpopular. Maybe if they had to formally declare war, they would tend to take their war making power a little more seriously.
All of this brings us to Libya where Obama has used the War Powers Resolution to deploy the military. This seems contradictory to his belief in an interview to The Boston Globe in 2007 when he stated, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." No one has asked how Libya endangers national security because it is pretty obvious that it doesn't.
Although reasonable people can disagree about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Afghanistan absolutely fell under the War Powers Resolution when its government endorsed an attack on American soil and at least a case was made for Iraq at the time with corroboration of many foreign intelligence agencies. As for the sixty day limit, don't expect Obama to be handicapped by a time frame when he didn't let himself be tied down by the national security requirement.
Obama has set an even more interesting precedent by saying that we are not involved in a war with Libya. In 1984, George Orwell predicted a new lexicon would emerge from overarching government. Newspeak, as it was called, turned truth upon its head and acted to obscure what government was actually. Obama has said we are not involved in a war but a Kinetic Military Action. Last year he announced that the Global War On Terror would now be the Overseas Contingency Operation and acts of terror would be called Man Caused Disasters.
Obama's justification for his more genteel term is that we will not have "boots on the ground" but he has actually sent 2200 marines into Libya. Obama has said that he is reluctant to send troops but cannot stand by while a bloodbath ensues. However, America has stood by while Darfur is drowning in blood. In the Middle East alone, cases could be made on similar grounds for intervention in Tunisia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan. Saddam killed more than ten times as many of his own people than Qaddafi and even used chemical weapons on the Kurds, are liberals also prepared to embrace that war retroactively?
Even worse, Obama's reason for entering and benchmark for leaving keep changing. Originally, we were there because Qaddafi must go. Then after speaking with his allies, Obama clarified that the UN mandate only went so far as stopping the slaughter of the rebels. Obama then declared victory but has not withdrawn his forces. Likely because the rebels would be slaughtered if we pulled out. If that doesn't quite sound like victory, that's because it is not.
The real reason Obama has gone into Libya was because the French and British were already going to go in. International consensus, through the UN if possible, justifies any war to the liberal mind. If the peace movement largely dissolved when Obama was elected, it has now been co-opted to support a war in a foreign land where no vital US interest exists and there is no clear mission and no clear exit strategy. Sound familiar?
A NOTE TO MY READERS:
Due to other responsibilities including co-hosting Captain Blue Hen's podcast, From the Booth, The Libertarin is putting out columns on a tri-weekly basis. To get information about libertarian politics in between posts, check out The Libertarin's Facebook page. I've been posting interesting links, videos, and excerpts from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (I'm trying to read all of Part 1 before the movie comes out on April 15). Please "like" the Facebook page and tell your friends so I can get more fans.
As stated in previous columns, Congress dislikes having all that authority that the Constitution delegated to it so it has gradually meted it out to other branches. In 1973 after being burned for their support for the Vietnam War (though it was not even then done constitutionally), Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon's veto. Essentially abdicating its war making powers to a President who didn't want them, the War Powers Resolution enables the President to send troops into war for 60 days without Congressional approval when national security is threatened. Over the years, even these standards have been relaxed so that national security does not have to be threatened and the 60 day limit is waived.
For longer wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress has passed authorizations of force. These give the President the final say so as to whether or not we go to war for an extended period of time. The authorizations of force are meant to give legitimacy to a war if undertaken but as we saw with Iraq, Congress loves to act tough only to abandon wars if they become unpopular. Maybe if they had to formally declare war, they would tend to take their war making power a little more seriously.
All of this brings us to Libya where Obama has used the War Powers Resolution to deploy the military. This seems contradictory to his belief in an interview to The Boston Globe in 2007 when he stated, "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." No one has asked how Libya endangers national security because it is pretty obvious that it doesn't.
Although reasonable people can disagree about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Afghanistan absolutely fell under the War Powers Resolution when its government endorsed an attack on American soil and at least a case was made for Iraq at the time with corroboration of many foreign intelligence agencies. As for the sixty day limit, don't expect Obama to be handicapped by a time frame when he didn't let himself be tied down by the national security requirement.
Obama has set an even more interesting precedent by saying that we are not involved in a war with Libya. In 1984, George Orwell predicted a new lexicon would emerge from overarching government. Newspeak, as it was called, turned truth upon its head and acted to obscure what government was actually. Obama has said we are not involved in a war but a Kinetic Military Action. Last year he announced that the Global War On Terror would now be the Overseas Contingency Operation and acts of terror would be called Man Caused Disasters.
Obama's justification for his more genteel term is that we will not have "boots on the ground" but he has actually sent 2200 marines into Libya. Obama has said that he is reluctant to send troops but cannot stand by while a bloodbath ensues. However, America has stood by while Darfur is drowning in blood. In the Middle East alone, cases could be made on similar grounds for intervention in Tunisia, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, and Sudan. Saddam killed more than ten times as many of his own people than Qaddafi and even used chemical weapons on the Kurds, are liberals also prepared to embrace that war retroactively?
Even worse, Obama's reason for entering and benchmark for leaving keep changing. Originally, we were there because Qaddafi must go. Then after speaking with his allies, Obama clarified that the UN mandate only went so far as stopping the slaughter of the rebels. Obama then declared victory but has not withdrawn his forces. Likely because the rebels would be slaughtered if we pulled out. If that doesn't quite sound like victory, that's because it is not.
The real reason Obama has gone into Libya was because the French and British were already going to go in. International consensus, through the UN if possible, justifies any war to the liberal mind. If the peace movement largely dissolved when Obama was elected, it has now been co-opted to support a war in a foreign land where no vital US interest exists and there is no clear mission and no clear exit strategy. Sound familiar?
A NOTE TO MY READERS:
Due to other responsibilities including co-hosting Captain Blue Hen's podcast, From the Booth, The Libertarin is putting out columns on a tri-weekly basis. To get information about libertarian politics in between posts, check out The Libertarin's Facebook page. I've been posting interesting links, videos, and excerpts from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (I'm trying to read all of Part 1 before the movie comes out on April 15). Please "like" the Facebook page and tell your friends so I can get more fans.
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