I understand and agree with the libertarian notion of freedom of association, especially in regards to private property. But at the same time, how can one ignore that massive government intervention engendered a great majority of the progress in equality, first with slavery, then with Civil Rights, and most recently with Title IX gender equality.
Along the same vein, watching the DNC (just a little, I can barely stand it!) and the most rousing speech has been from Lilly Ledbetter praising Obama’s Lilly Ledbetter Act promising equal pay for equal work. What’s wrong with that? The statistic that shows that women only earn .77c for every dollar a man makes is misconstrued because this is taken as an aggregate, which includes women who drop out of the labor force or deliberately slow their careers due to motherhood or other reasons and thus it stands to reason that women would make less than men over a lifetime. I’m not advocating to equalize pay in general comparison to a man’s, but if a man and a woman do the same work, shouldn’t they get paid the same thing?
So in regards to matters of equality, what should the government’s role be and how would you rate it historically?
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