The Bureaucrats Attack

Never underestimate the antipathy liberals have toward capitalism and businesses. The American economy has proven unable to shed the shackles placed on it by the Obama administration regulators.
 
The latest affront comes from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The title of the agency alone screams “command economy” and is another good reason to choose Presidents wisely. If Josef Stalin had lacked the equivalent of an EEOC for his economy, he would have gone down in history as a laissez faire wimp.
 
The EEOC is now proposing to require all employers with 100 or more employees to document what they pay each employee based on ethnicity, gender, and race. Apparently, the federal government has the right to collect such information based on Article 5150 of the Constitution, which is the same place where one can find the “separation of church and state,” the article that gives the feds the right to establish fuel mileage standards for cars, and which gives the feds the right to mandate the amount of toilet water that can go to the sewer with each flush.
 
Ah, but it’s much worse than a little record keeping. In larger companies, that’s a lot of record keeping. Additionally, people get raises, necessitating constant updating. Most important, such information is not- and has never been- the government’s business.
 
The Obama administration, which we already know underpays women in the White House, wants to prove that women are underpaid. That is a case that already has been debunked for women who don’t work inside the White House.  Women of child-bearing age take off more time from work; generally speaking, men are more ambitious than women (i.e., more willing to work additional hours, more driven to promote to higher positions); and women hold an overwhelming majority of clerical jobs, which are lower paying jobs. Data has been ushered out, vetted, distributed, and trumpeted, but don’t bother to tell liberals and neo-Marxists:  they don’t want to hear it.
 
But wait. We have reassurances from the EEOC that this will only cost $400 per employee. Four hundred dollars? What’s four Benjamins?
 
So you’re an employer of 110 people. You had a good year last year and you decide you want to give nice raises. Nope. You’ll be giving part of that profit to the new person you hire to track pay for Uncle “Forced Outcomes” Sam.
 
Once the federal government has the information, they will be able to build cases against businesses without the need to bother with plaintiffs- wronged human beings. In other words, no one in your 110-person-strong workforce needs to feel discriminated against- mere numbers would demonstrate that someone is being cheated, even if they aren’t. Real harm need not be encountered- just the appearance of harm will suffice for the swarm of government lawyers to have cause to swoop down and ruin your company... and add your employees to the ranks of the 4.9% of the unemployed who have yet to give up looking for jobs.
 
There is an old Bureaucrat proverb which states, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; take away his fishing pole and he’ll be a dependent voter for life.” That is similar to the thought process behind the federal government’s push to make people need the government- even when Stupid Voter doesn’t even realize that he needs the government.
 
The more regulations we have, the more government does; the more government does, the more people expect it to do; the more people expect the government to do, the more taxes that need to be collected; the more taxes that are collected, the more bureaucrats they hire; the more bureaucrats they hire, the more these people need something to do, so they make up regulations. Dizzy yet? If so, you too might be qualified to be a Washington bureaucrat.
 
Overbearing Washington, D.C., regulations damage the economy by slowing economic growth and taking away economic freedom from employers and employees alike. Money that goes to the government grows government, not private businesses. Public employees do indeed contribute to the economy, but to put it simply, the impact of public employee spending is lessened because some of the taxes paid by the public employee goes to pay his own salary.
 
To honor George Washington, we should change the name of the city to Marx, District of Bureaucracy- anything-  just take George Washington’s name off the city, please.
 
(Important note for liberal readers who are currently hyperventilating and on the verge of dialing 911:  some regulations are good. I understand that. Get a bag; breathe faster.)
 
Big government begets big government. It’s kind of like when you were in high school and the athletes hung out with the athletes, the geeks hung out with the geeks, etc. Big government politicians and bureaucrats need voters willing to sustain them, so they pursue people with common beliefs to work for them, and they also seek to create more voters to be like them. What better way to get voters to sustain them than by creating dependent voters? This paragraph sums up modern liberal government. Lesson over. Thank you.
 
The fact that government officials are so bold that they’re willing to propose any regulation they choose just goes to show... that you haven’t been paying attention. They’ve been doing the same thing for years through an agency known as the OFCCP (no relation to the CCCP; well, sorta). The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs has been running a similar racket for decades against private companies that do business with the federal government.
 
Never underestimate the antipathy liberals have toward capitalism and businesses. The latest unconstitutional attack on private enterprise is just another day at the office for bureaucrats looking to justify their existence and to turn people into dependents so that they will vote to feed the Big Government monster more of your money. Uncle Joe would be proud.

Sources:

EEOC Announces Proposed Addition of Pay Data to Annual EEO-1 Reports
 

Questions and Answers
Notice of Proposed Changes to the EEO-1 to Collect Pay Data from Certain Employers