Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Monday, April 20, 2015

Gender Pay Gap [Questions Thereto] | Mansplaining Rodney Hide’s Herald Piece on Paul Henry.



By dint of being a classical liberal, hence an individualist, I am a feminist, married to a very individualistic classical liberal, career feminist. I advocate for the individualist ethic of classical liberalism because only in that will the free (and prosperous) society be founded. The enemy of that freedom is the unbounded statism that has overthrown the West, ironically via the emoting booth, funded by the tax surveillance state. One of the bastions of statism has become identity politick feminism, also called Marxist feminism, and thus my regular - reflecting now regular MSM reportage -  attacks against that tyrannical liturgy foundered too often on falsehoods. On the current course we are not many years from state enforced public (certainly) and private sector gender work place quotas. The following Twitter feed is but one example of how you must always dig deeper into assumptions and statistics.

Note I don’t cite the below Twitter timeline to ‘get at’ respondent Marianne. She’s great, albeit unfollowing me on this. [I will defend my principles until proven wrong by reality; unlike Progressives, sadly – and this is part of the problem – who too soon disengage when their mantras are questioned, either leaving the fray, as Marianne did, or much worse, goose-stepping off to advocate the ban and the boycott, or trotting out that offensive word which overuse has rendered useless; misogynist.] I post the following only because it explicates the theme of this post, being what I think is the massaged wonk behind the statistics being used in the current gender pay gap debate, and, as with the climate change debate, the wholesale unthinking, uncritical buy-in to the agenda of the identity politick by those who are intelligent enough to know better. This post is also, as will become plain, a request for anecdotal information please.

This is the first part of the timeline:












Before moving on that link is important, although there is now a better source here. Senior Fellow in Political Economy and editor at large of The Independent Review, Robert Higgs’s piece is worth quoting directly, my highlighting:


The quality of economic journalism in the United States is terrible. Day after day, journalists write about the causes and consequences of economic conditions and events without understanding the underlying economics of the situation, and their articles are, as a rule, simply bunk. Here is an example.

I have not examined the actual report whose findings are described in the article, but I am familiar with many studies of the same question that economists have conducted over the years. Moreover, I myself have made many applied econometric studies in a variety of areas, and I know how delicate the findings of such studies are to a variety of details—sample period, sample size, sampling method, data collection details, model specification, estimation methods, and so forth. I know, too, that the best studies—those with the best data, most sensible model specification, and most exhaustive set of controls—have found virtually no difference in the amounts that men and women are paid for doing the same work. The key is “doing the same work,” which is another way of saying “providing equally valuable services to the employer” in the sense of adding equally to the employer’s net income.

[Snip.]

In sum, the so-called gender gap is almost certainly a myth, a persistent misapprehension kept alive by leftists—feminist ideologues and politicians posturing as special friends of women—who wish to use the power of government to benefit members of their political constituency. If employers truly discriminate between equally value-productive male and female employees, however, they do so only in cases that are few and transitory, because the systematic, persistent conduct of such discrimination is inconsistent with everything we know about how people make decisions in labor markets and about what we presume business owners in general are trying to do, namely, make profits.


It’s worth reading the whole piece, but I bet that goes against the perceived reality most readers will have on the gender pay gap. Noting I view Higgs as authoritative. From this, to the second part of the Twitter timeline, and my request for anecdotal information please:













Marianne never did confirm she knew of a single case of a female employee receiving less in the same job, same employer. Nor did David Farrar. I repeat I know of no case. And more than that, I professionally have a lot of farming clients; especially when a young farming couple are starting out, off-farm wages are often required. In every case I can think of it’s the female spouse who does the off-farm work, not for any type of sexist reason, but because the female is indubitably better qualified, and can command a higher wage off-farm than the male spouse could.

So, comments are open, I don’t moderate or edit in any way, a respect you won’t see on many statist blogs. Can anyone cite actual New Zealand examples of what would be a true gender pay gap, please: male/female in same job, same employer, paid unequally.

***

While on this topic, Rodney Hide’s Herald piece from this weekend weighing into (New Zealand's) Equal Employment Opportunities Dr Jackie Blue’s decision to publicly scold breakfast TV broadcaster Paul Henry on his Hilliary Clinton comments was spot on. Dr Blue is a tax payer funded identity politick agent shoved down the necks of those of us who know better and are forced to pay for her commissariat. Henry’s remarks were not sexism – judge for yourself:


Henry had said in regard to Hillary Clinton's run for the White House: "Why, if feminism has come so far, does she feel the need to highlight the fact that she's a woman?

"Shouldn't she be selling herself on the fact that she's the best person, the right person, for the job, no matter what her sex?"

Henry also noted other high-profile females had "fallen into the same trap", including Helen Clark in her bid to become Secretary-General of the United Nations.


I’ve written what I think of this tactic so shamelessly being used by Clinton here: let’s not mistake criticism with persecution. Hide makes an exemplary point (my inserted comment in orange):


Henry has a good point. The feminist complaint was "jobs for the boys". The argument was women shouldn't be excluded because they're women. But the argument has become that women must be selected because they are women. [Unless, it’s worthy of note, those women are Margaret Thatcher or Sarah Palin, apparently - and that because this is a Progressive agenda, there being the rub.] Clinton and Clark have replaced sexism with reverse sexism.

Blue declared Henry wrong. "Feminism hasn't come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark, feminism will only ever go as far as they and other women go."

I have wrapped my head in a wet towel, meditated for two days, and still don't know what she is saying.


Of course Hide was castigated on Twitter for mansplaining, but as I’ve always found, those who toss that term around so liberally do so because they don’t have the wherewithal to debate content (after they've normally dropped context). Retorting with ‘mansplaining’ is that Progressive tactic of soft censorship they try on first, able to rely on null-think from the neophytes, before they then go to the full ban and boycott approach and the fist of government, that is, mandatory quotas. Pfui!

I have no clue what Blue is on about in that ‘feminism hasn’t come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark’ sentence either, given Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand for nine years; perhaps a radfem could inane-splain it to me, but as for my tax money being used so Nanny Blue can monitor breakfast television for thought crimes, bugger off with that, I'll take a refund please.

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 21, 2015 at 10:39 AM

    Hi Mark,

    I just came across this: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=hire_women

    Cheers
    Paul

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mark HubbardApril 21, 2015 at 10:44 AM

      Interesting link. Cheers.

      And still waiting for a single anecdotal example. My mind is starting to firmly move to the position of agenderised distorted stats on this one (also).

      Delete

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