Did you know?…. hidden in the text of that abomination of Liberty we have come to know as the “14th amendment,” is this little nugget of tyranny:

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

What most people can’t see, don’t see, or seem to gloss over is what it is actually saying.

Section 4. Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.

You see, the 14th Amendment was adopted three years after Lincoln’s genocidal conquest of the Southern Confederates. The republicans had been comfortably ensconced for eight years by then, and had grown adept at “waving the bloody shirt,” inflaming the hoi polloi to vote with their emotions. They [the republicans] were (and are) big-government down to their very DNA.

And while, to be sure, they hated, and wanted to destroy the disenfranchised former Confederates… They had far bigger plans. Plans that involved debt, and a bunch of it. For as Lincoln said in 1832 “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . the internal improvements system, and a high protective tariff.” (the internal improvement’s system is what we call “corporate welfare”).

Without wondering too far off track, it’s instructive to note that the republicans were the ideological heirs of the American whig party (think Henry Clay and his corrupt “American System”). The American whig party was, itself, the reincarnation of the Federalist party (think Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, John Adams, et al) The big-central-government liberals of the day. Remember, the “federalist papers” were nothing more than a sales brochure presented as editorials in big New York City papers. For those that doubt me, read Alexander Hamilton’s “report on manufactures” to see his economic ideals.

Appomattox led us to where we are, we are reaping the whirlwind of the republicans murderous deceit. Obama, though not to my liking, didn’t “take us down the road to socialism.” We’ve been on THAT road for 150 years. He is merely presiding over the death rattle of the free market.

*just couldn’t resist the LOTR reference.

What this sort of legislation does is makes it less costly for an employer to act in a sexist way. If you must pay a woman and a man the same amount, a sexist man would choose the man every time. If equal pay weren’t mandated, the employer would incur a significant cost (i.e. have to pay a higher salary) to hire the man over the woman.

The progressive argument also, not surprisingly, doesn’t take performance into account. Having been a manager at a major (120,000+ employees in the US alone) corporation, I can tell you that we go to great lengths WITHOUT legislation to ensure that women of similar performance and tenure as their male counterparts receive the same pay – the key phrase being “of similar performance and tenure.” A woman new to the job is not going to be paid like a 10 veteran (male or female). A lower performing employee is going to get a smaller bonus and lower, if any, pay raise than a higher performing counterpart (male or female). This concept is foreign to progressives, though, as all employees are created equal…some just more equal than others.