an AA proposal
Topics: AA
16 Dec 1990
From: ervan
I dislike any law that buries the real cost of the action being
done because it prevents us from realizing how expensive certain things
are to do and it usually burdens the wrong person. Kef suggested
this kind of thing when she said we needed AA to lower the crime rate
> [if AA or welfare is cheaper than police for avoiding crime, why
> wouldn't you choose that?]
Current proposals regarding medical insurance are another example
of this. The government is screaming because it can't pay people's
medical bills any longer so it is going to force companies to buy
medical insurance for their employees. This is a terrible idea for
many reasons, but the one that is important here is that it forces us
all to pay for medical care via higher consumer prices, so we don't really know
what it is costing and we have no control over how much of it we are going
to pay for (for other people).
In this vein, AA is a method of burying the cost of achieving
a social goal (or an economic goal as Chau-Wen believes). Instead of
forcing employers to do what they don't want to and burdening them
with paperwork and lawsuits, let's get rid of all of the AA laws and
instead have the government pay employers some fixed percentage additional
wage for any black employee. E.g., if I hire a black person for $40K/
year to program the government would pay me (directly, not via some crazy
tax deduction), an extra 10%, $4K/year. The percent could then be
manipulated to achieve the desirable social/economic goals. We would then
have a direct measure of how expensive AA is. That could then be compared
against whatever benefits it produced. This would also have the advantage
of avoiding the token unproductive employee because the government bonus
would not be large enough to tolerate a gold brick that couldn't be fired
because he was filling the quota. It would in general give everyone the
right incentive to do the right thing.
I, of course, think such a plan would be a bad one, but not as
bad as AA itself. What do our resident liberals think of this plan
instead?
----Ervan
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