On A Gender Bender

And the latest Winger outrage is the Financial Regulation legislation, specifically Section 342.  Diana Furtchgott-Roth wades into this latest example of Ofascism, but only ends up stuck in her own mucky arguments.

In addition to this bill's well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau...all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency's workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.

Now, the federal government required by law to be an equal opportunity employer, this kind of enforcement and oversight arm makes sense.  Because it does, she goes and borrows one straw man too many.

This latest attempt by Congress to dictate what "fair" employment means is likely to encourage administrators and managers, in government and in the private sector, to hire women and minorities for the sake of appearances, even if some new hires are less qualified than other applicants. The result is likely to be redundant hiring and a wasteful expansion of payroll overhead.

If the director decides that a contractor has not made a good-faith effort to include women and minorities in its workforce, he is required to contact the agency administrator and recommend that the contractor be terminated.

Section 342's provisions are broad and vague, and are certain to increase inefficiency in federal agencies. To comply, federal agencies are likely to find it easier to employ and contract with less-qualified women and minorities, merely in order to avoid regulatory trouble. This would in turn decrease the agencies' efficiency, productivity and output, while increasing their costs.

Setting up these Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion is a troubling indictment of current law. Women and minorities have an ample range of legal avenues already to ensure that businesses engage in nondiscriminatory practices. By creating these new offices, Congress does not believe that existing law is sufficient.

Now, here's where she runs into her own buzzsaw.  She assumes that hiring will, because of this new office, be of women and minorities who must be less qualified, otherwise they would be already hired...meaning that there's no existing discrimination in the current hiring practices that this office would be needed to monitor.  Besides her insulting assumption that more women and minorities would lower the quality of work, she's also assuming that there's no discrimination now, and that this office would instead create reverse discrimination against "more qualified" hires.

At the same time, she assumes that the office is unneeded because there are already other agencies that investigate discrimination in the workplace...so they should enforce their discrimination policies to handle the discrimination that she just got done assuming there was absolutely none of.

But no, the worst part apparently is extending these rules to the contractors and sub-contractors that do business with these financial regulatory agencies.  How dare the government try to make private sector businesses taking taxpayer dollars to be contractors and sub-contractors have to follow government rules!

Which of course is exactly what Wingers want to do to prevent insurance companies involved in state insurance exchanges to have to follow regulations on abortion.  That's fine.  Applying those rules to prevent legal abortions, a moral imperative.  Applying those rules to private sector companies to prevent illegal discrimination?  Fascism.

You'd think Wall Street supporters could afford better logic.