The Fair Pay Act (or Alternatively, Obama’s Folly)

I have friends that support Obama, and when I tell them them the details of the Fair Pay Act, which Obama supports and regularly touts, they simply deny my explanation of the bill and tell me I must be mistaken.  They say this because, when I describe the Fair Pay Act, it sounds like something radical and ridiculous, and they think Obama is a smart and rational man that would never support something so radical and ridiculous.  They are wrong.

This (from Fortune, a year ago) is what the Fair Pay Act does:

Under its provisions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) would create criteria determining whether a given job is dominated by one sex; employers would have to send the EEOC every year a listing of each job classification, the race and sex of those holding such jobs; how much they are paid; and how such pay was determined. The goal of all this is to ensure that people in “equivalent” jobs are paid similar wages. “The term, ‘equivalent jobs’, according to the legislation, “means jobs that may be dissimilar, but whose requirements are equivalent, when viewed as a composite of skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions.” And who would decide what is equivalent? The federal government, of course. Forget the price signal: Congress is on the job!

The Fair Pay Act used to be called “Comparable Worth.”  Now, Obama likes to argue that he’s the candidate with new ideas, but Comparable Worth, like most of his ideas, is an old one.  (A very old one.)  But with the fall of communism and the general acceptance of free market economics, Comparable Worth seemed to be dead.  Almost, anyway.  As Greg Mankiw wrote last year:

In the first edition of my favorite economics textbook, there was a section on “comparable worth.” Eventually, my editor suggested I take it out, on the grounds that economic logic had finally killed off this bad idea. But like Lord Voldemort in the first Harrry Potter book, the idea was weakened, but not dead.

There are lots of things about Obama that are really, really good.  And then there are some things, like this, which terrify me.

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