Legislators turn to the Detroit automakers and demand that the cars they produce get an additional five or 10 miles per gallon, without any understanding of the engineering or costs involved. If the mandate causes the price of each vehicle to go up by $1,200, so be it.

Legislators propose that businesses which have 50 or more employees follow certain burdensome and expensive new regulations, not stopping to think that owners of businesses with 48 or 49 employees are going to be darn reluctant to hire the final employee that brings them to the magic number of 50.

This is not to argue that hard-working people don’t deserve an occasional raise (provided they do something to earn it), or that cars should not be as clean and efficient as can reasonably be accomplished (with cost-effective technology), or that some workplace regulations serve a legitimate purpose (un-insulated “live” electric wires should not be lying on factory floors). But liberals have the mistaken notion that they can somehow “re-shape human nature,” and that if only the “right people” were in charge making the right rules, all the world would be happy and content, war would cease to exist, and one-year olds would not bump into furniture while learning to walk.

Not only do liberals frequently fail to consider the long-term consequences of their proposals, they often fail to even see the faulty logic of their own pronouncements. Bill Clinton, for example, may have been the first to proclaim that “abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.” But that phrase has now been repeated thousands of times by millions of people, and virtually all of them fail to recognize the contradiction contained within the statement. If abortions should be legal, that implies there is nothing improper or immoral about the activity. If that is the case, then why must abortions be rare? And if there is something immoral or wrong with abortions that suggests they should be rare, then why must they also be legal?

Actions have consequences, whether liberals like it or not. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or gender. In theory, that doesn’t sound unreasonable. But, of course, the law led to quotas. Had quotas been specifically been mentioned in the Act, it would never have passed. Senator (later Vice-President) Hubert Humphrey, a champion of civil rights, argued in 1964 that the bill contained no requirement for quotas and that he would not support it if it did. Humphrey lived long enough to see how eager the bureaucrats, the courts, and the ACLU were to distort the language of the law.

Civil rights laws may have tried to eliminate discrimination by legislative fiat, but in practice they may have harmed more people than they have helped. An example will make the case. (It will be explained in simple terms, in order to make the argument clear to any liberal who has not already stopped reading by this point.)

Sam owns a small business. His accountant is retiring in a few weeks and a replacement is needed. Sam places an ad in the newspaper and receives a substantial number of resumes in the mail. He discards the letters of those who are obviously not qualified – suggested by such things as coffee stains on the documents, letters signed in crayon, poor grammar, poor spelling, questions about vacations and benefits in the very first paragraph, and improperly used apostrophe’s (sic).

Sam whittles down the list of potential new accountants to two applicants, and schedules interviews. Both applicants interview well. Both seem intelligent and articulate. Both have adequate accounting experience. Both would be comfortable with the salary Sam is offering. Pleasing Sam even more, neither chewed gum during the interview and neither peppered their conversation with repeated uses of the words “you know,” “I swear to God,” or “actually.”

Sam is encouraged. Now all he has to do is choose between the two applicants.

One job applicant is a young white male. The other is an older, overweight black woman. Sam believes the young man would make a good accountant for his firm. Sam also believes the older woman would make a good accountant. He likes both of them.

After a day or two of thought, Sam decides to hire the young man. Sam, by the way, is a white man in his fifties.

“Of course Sam hired the white man. He’s a racist and a sexist!”

Racism and sexism… that’s what the liberal sees in Sam’s actions. But before being judgmental, one should stop to consider what might not be so obvious. What else is at play in the situation? What other factors might have influenced Sam’s decision?

To the owner of a business, the cost of hiring someone includes more than the salary and benefits paid the new employee. It also includes the potential cost of firing that employee. There is no guarantee that the newly-hired employee will be a good employee, regardless of how impressive he or she may have been during the employment interview. If the new employee does not work out – for whatever reason – the owner of the business will want to cut his losses, terminate the employee, and look for a replacement. That is inescapable.

The liberal, of course, cannot imagine that an employee can ever be at fault, because all problems with employees (or even with the capitalist system in general) are the fault of the evil business owner. The employer must have done an inadequate job of training the new employee, or he expected too much of the employee, or the desk and chair given the employee were not ergonomically correct, or it’s unreasonable to have expected the employee not to call in sick on opening day of the baseball season or the day after the Super Bowl. But the employee is almost never at fault, according to the liberal, and should never be fired – at least not without 15 years of written warnings, reworded performance appraisals, career counseling sessions, union grievance meetings, and 26 weeks of family leave.

In the real world, of course, some employees don’t work out. Some simply chose the wrong line of work and would be better suited in a different career. Some are, regrettably, lazy or incompetent or simply lacking in the intelligence required by the job. That is a fact of life, which legislation cannot overcome.

Sam, in considering who to hire, has to factor into his decision the cost of firing that new employee. That is what prompted Sam to hire the young white male. Sam recognizes that if he has to terminate the young man, he will never see him again, but if he fires the older black woman, the possibility exists that he will see her in court – armed with a lawyer who has dollar signs for eyeballs and a briefcase full of precedents about firing discrimination on account of race, gender, age, and weight.

Sam has no way of knowing whether this particular woman would sue him if he ended up needing to fire her. In fact, she impressed him as someone who likely would not. But Sam has neither the time nor the money to hire a lawyer and sit in court battling the ACLU. Sam has a business to run, and he cannot afford to use it as full collateral for a bet.

There is no way to know how many people are hired or not hired on the basis of situations like Sam’s. But they most certainly exist. And it is definitely the case that if Sam did not have to worry about getting sued if he someday needed to fire the older black female job applicant he might very well have hired her.

In fact, Sam was leaning toward hiring her all along. It’s a shame liberal short-sightedness cost her the chance to prove herself.

Don Fredrick

February 20, 2009

Copyright 2009 Don Fredrick