by Mike Gray

But if inequality of pay is a result of human nature and a free society, a greater equality of rewards can only be achieved through coercion, a government declaring its value, economic parity, to be supreme, and imposing its value and its preferred pay structure upon employers.

If this is where America is headed, why not go all the way and dictate that Asians and Hispanics, Muslims and Jews, women and men, blacks and whites, gay and straight must all be paid the exact same for the same work—and let the EEOC hire 100,000 more bureaucrats to see that it happens? Would that be a great country or a socialist hell? — Patrick Buchanan

According to paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan on CNS News, the federal government—but more particularly close Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett—thinks there is an endemic sexism operating in the business world that prevents pay parity for women:

If you would understand why America has lost the dynamism she had in the 1950s and 1960s, consider the new Paycheck Fairness Act passed by the House 256 to 162.

The need for such a law, writes Valerie Jarrett, the ranking woman in Barack Obama’s White House, is that “working women are still paid only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man.”

But why is that a concern of the U.S. government, and where is the empirical evidence that an inequality of pay between the sexes is proof of sexist hostility to women?

In the Never-Never Land of the Entitlement Culture, Pat, “empirical evidence” is only a weapon of last resort:

The assumption of the Jarrett-backed law is that the sexes are equal in capacity, aptitude, drive and interest, and if there is a disparity in pay, only bigotry can explain it. But are there not other, simpler answers for why women earn less?

Indeed, there are.