NITA LOWEY THINKS THE FREE MARKET IS SEXIST

Voted YES for Stronger enforcement against gender-based pay discrimination in the Paycheck Fairness Act
(Jan 2009)

Females earn roughly 30% less then males earn in the work place.

When Nita Lowey looks at this general statistic she wrongfully assumes that the free market has failed and that this wage gap is due to sexism in the work place and that male employers have some kind of natural animosity towards women. This, of course, is completely untrue. Although I do not deny that there is sexism, the free market is actually a deterrent of it and creates more equality in the work place...not less.

Profit, above all else, is what drives entrance into the free market. If there is no profit to be made there is little motivation to start your own business. Why then would an employer knowingly hire a male employee, when he knows that if he hired an equally capable female, he could pay her 30% less, keep the difference, and increase his profits? The answer is...he wouldn't. The female would certainly be hired. But let's say the employer was sexist and foolish and didn't hire the female. In a free market with open competition, there is always market forces grinding away at its competitors that hire higher priced workers when they could have hired lower priced workers. These sexist employers would either be weeded out of the market by losing business to cheaper competition or forced to adopted non-sexist policies.

The argument that the market is inherently sexist doesn't make much sense. But nevertheless, the fact remains that females earn roughly 30% less then males. So why is this?

This actually can be explained by the:

Marital Asymmetry Hypothesis:
This says that marriage/relationships have asymmetrical effects on male and female incomes and is the leading cause for men to earn more than women.

If we compare the pay between women that have never been married and never have had children to a man's salary it has a difference of 1%. But once a woman has married or has had children, the gap becomes enormous. If there was actually sexism in the free market the large gap in income would always be there.

So now we have to ask: Why does this huge gap appear when a woman is married and/or has children?

This is because there is an unequal sharing of chores and child raising in the household, which happens to predominantly fall on the woman's shoulders. In a society, where two groups are more or less equal, and you give a burden to one of the groups, something has to suffer. This is called opportunity costs...whenever you do one thing it always comes at the cost of something else. For example, Michael Phelps would not be a world class swimmer if he had to sacrifice his time in the pool for any number of different things. Such is the case with women's salaries. By taking more time away from their profession then their spouse they are in turn causing their skilll level to atrophy thus stagnating their salary. This holds true for men that stay at home or for single parents who can not afford to work late and put in extra hours or take classes to help them advance in their field.

But what Nita should ask herself is: Why do women predominantly choose to take on the responsibilities of household chores and child care?

Students of socio-biology say that this is human nature and that we are somehow hardwired this way because of what it took millions of years ago to survive. Like all living beings our main purpose is to procreate to ensure our society's longevity. Beings that do not live by this code eventually become extinct. We have evolved into a patriarchal society because we have descended from civilizations where the men were more expendable to the society and as a result would risk their lives to hunt and protect the village. Women, on the other hand, stayed in the village and took care of the children because they were a precious commodity. For the same reason, farmers only need to keep one bull on the farm to procreate with fifty cows to have a healthy number of livestock, men would risk their lives knowing that it would take fewer men to populate the society then women. Women are nature's insurance policy.

For more sociobiological information I suggest listening to Walter Block's lecture:


The pay gap is not due to sexism in the free market but because of the individual's choice on how to balance the responsibilities of a relationship, a family and a career. And unless Nita wants to do something as ridiculous as begin to attack a family's right to choose how to most effectively provide for themselves, she will not be able to lower the pay gap without destroying the economy. This bill may seem as if it promotes equality in the work place but what it actually does is open businesses up to frivolous lawsuits and a lot of extra expenses that will either result in a loss of jobs or the destruction of the business.

IT'S TIME FOR NITA TO LEAVE THE FREE MARKET ALONE!

NITA LOWEY DESTROYS JOBS

Voted YES on increasing minimum wage to $7.25.
(Jan 2007)

Although this may appear to be an economically sound vote in support of the low-skilled worker, it in fact, destroys jobs, eliminates opportunities to learn new skills and wastes resources. With an estimated 300,000 jobs destroyed by this wage increase and unemployment now hovering at 10%, it is time to vote Nita Lowey out of office and look to someone that will eliminate the minimum wage law.

Things Nita Lowey doesn't understand about minimum wage laws:

1. Reduces Future Earnings Unskilled workers use low paying jobs as a training ground to learn the skills they need to advance and increase their future earnings. Since having a job is one of the most important ways to acquire valuable skills, today's minimum wage-induced unemployment translates into tomorrow's reduced earnings.

2. Creates Underemployment Not only does it create unemployment, it also creates underemployment. Even if a higher minimum wage doesn’t manifest itself into lost jobs, it will lead to fewer hours, reduced benefits or both. Some workers who would have received paid training won’t. Employee discounts and other perks might fall.

3. Increases Prices A reduced amount of labor leads to increased prices. Because prices are determined by supply and demand, if less of a product is produced, it will become more scarce resulting in higher prices. If wages were allowed to fall to market level, there would be more jobs, output would be increased making the product less scarce, in turn, lowering the price and increasing everybody's real wage.

(A person's real wage is determined by the strength of the purchasing power of their dollar. For instance, even though you may not have received a raise this year, if prices fall, you're real wage actually went up because you can buy more than you did before. But when prices rise at a higher percentage than your wage does, your real wage actually goes down because your dollar can not buy as much.)

4. Discrimination Over the years, steady hikes in the minimum wage have priced out of the market the most vulnerable workers, including minorities, teenagers, and women with limited skills. The bias of minimum wage laws against disadvantaged minorities has been conspicuous ever since 1956, when the minimum wage shot up from 75 cents to $1.00 an hour. During the next two years, nonwhite teenage unemployment spiraled from 14 to 24 percent.

We must ask ourselves, if minimum wage laws are so bad, why would Nita vote for them?

I'm sure Nita can answer this question herself. You see, Rep. Lowey not only supports minimum wage laws but she is also a big supporter of labor unions.

Labor unions play a critical role in the minimum wage laws. Unions spend millions of dollars a year (a huge waste of valuable capital) lobbying congress to increase the minimum wage in the name of the "greater good."

But by increasing the minimum wage, unions are in fact, pricing unskilled workers out of the market. Where you might have once been able to hire 5 unskilled workers to do one job, it is now cheaper to hire one skilled union worker instead. An obvious example of this is an increase in the amount of self checkout areas in supermarkets. Once there might have been 5 cashiers ringing up customers, but now there is only the cost of one union worker to service the new machines. Sadly the cashier is going the way of the elevator operators and ushers of the 1950s.

No matter how Nita may word it: Unions, laws, and regulations do not increase the standard of living of the ordinary people. The real thing that protects the worker is the existence of alternative employers competing against one another for new workers. People do not look to stay at a minimum wage job. They use them to acquire the skills needed to obtain better jobs elsewhere. If Nita really cared about the workers she would do away with the minimum wage and support the creation of new jobs, by cutting taxes and getting rid of regulations that interfere with the creation of new businesses.

If wage increases were truly the only thing necessary for improved living, than why not push for $100/hr minimum wage?