| | I don't understand the obsession with employment discrimination. If a man and a woman apply for a job or promotion, someone will be accepted and someone, rejected. The person who is rejected is an individual, not a gender. The same is true for the person who is accepted. In such a case, it is individuals who gain and lose, not genders or collectives. So why is it somehow better if the individual who is rejected is a man instead of a woman? Someone must be accepted and someone rejected. If the man is rejected, he loses in a manner no different than the woman would if she were rejected. The fact that one happens to be a man and the other a woman is irrelevant.
Think of it this way. Suppose that two women are being considered for a job. If one of them is rejected, she will lose to the other woman in the same way that she would if the other applicant had been a man. Does it matter to her that the person hired instead of her is another woman rather than a man? No. She is in the same position either way. She didn't get the job. If her rejection is morally just in competition with another woman, why does it become morally unjust in competition with a man. And if it would not have been unjust simply because her competitor was a man rather than a woman, then why is it unjust if a majority of other women are rejected in favor of male applicants?
In order to make the case for employment discrimination, one has to show that the better qualified person was rejected and the less qualified person hired, a criterion that is independent of gender or ethnicity, since it can occur even between two women, if the less qualified one is hired in preference to the better qualified. But who should determine the employee's "qualifications" -- the EEOC or the employer? Clearly, it is the employer who should determine them, since he or she is the one who is paying the employee's salary and must bear the consequences of an employee's bad performance if the person doesn't work out. The government has no business dictating whom an employer can hire, if it is the employer rather than the government who must bear the cost of that decision. Anti-discrimination laws are a clear violation of the employer's right to manage his own business.
Besides, employers have a clear incentive to hire the most competent employees, since their bottom line depends on the success of that decision. In a free market, the better qualified people tend to get hired anyway. Employers who make bad employment decisions will be less competitive and will tend to lose business to employers who make better decisions. If, however, the government has the authority to dictate an employer's hiring policies, as it does now, courtesy of employment discrimination law, it will tend to make decisions that result in the less competent employees being hired, because it does not have the same knowledge or incentives that the employer has, in which case, it is the government rather than private employers who are more likely to practice employment discrimination. Far from preventing or reducing employment discrimination, anti-discrimination laws can be expected to make it worse and thereby to reduce overall productivity in the economy -- lowering everyone's standard of living in the process.
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