The ‘gender pay gap’ is a myth which has been spread for years. I have been reading about this ‘fake cause’ since I can remember. In 1984 Thomas Sowell covered this topic in chapter 5 of his book “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality”.
Here is a Prager University video by Christina Hoff Sommers explaining the statistical fudging that takes place when the gender pay cause becomes bigger than the truth.
In this article titled: Equal Pay Day Is An Annual Event That Spreads Statistical Misinformation About The Gender Pay Gap, by Mark J. Perry, at carpediemblog, Mark J. Perry says choices made about hours worked, type of work, and marriage and motherhood are three of the deciding factors on how much a person is paid. Women and men make different choices in these three areas. When you compare men and women who make the same decisions the wage gap is negligible.
“The Sons Of Alinsky” Getting Paid $3:00 An Hour To Protest Low Pay, at economicpolicyjournal.com. The fact that they are paying for a rent a mob for political dirty tricks is one thing. Paying them $3 an hour while trying to mandate a $15 minimum wage on the rest of us is something else. Do as I say not as I do.
Leaked Audio: Clinton Says Supreme Court Is ‘Wrong’ On Second Amendment, at freebeacon.com. Some of my Democrat friends tell me that they don’t want to take guns away. I tell them that’s great, but you are not the leaders of your party. I believe them. But Hillary? That’s a different story. If she gets elected, the left will be ready to act when she appoints a Supreme Court Justice. They will bring a gun rights case to a friendly district court which will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. The court will overturn the Heller case in a 5-4 decision, and the second amendment will be meaningless words on paper. Mark my words.
ECONOMIC STUFF
Why The Hell Is Socialism Gaining So Much Popularity? at economicpolicyjournal.com. Many people think socialism is the government helping people in need (aka a safety net). This is not socialism. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. There is a difference between a free market economy hampered by government, and the government owning the means of production. Look at Venezuela if you want to see the results of Socialism.
Harassing Uber, at economicpolicyjournal.com. The status quo taxi cartel is trying to get the government to use its monopoly power to protect the cartel’s monopoly position that was originally created by government.
How Regulation Protects Established Firms, by Peter G. Klein, at mises.org. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein admits that, “…burdensome regulation acts as a moat around our business.” Government props up the status quo making it tougher for new competitors to enter the market.
We Can Build Our Way Out Of The Housing Crisis, by Steven Greenhut, at reason.com. The reason prices for homes in California are so high is because Government restrictions and regulations constrain the supply of housing. Low supply and high demand means higher prices. The high prices ration the short supply.
I have read Thomas Sowell’s analysis concerning this topic since I stumbled upon his writings in 1995. I thought he had driven as stake through the heart of “the gender pay gap” myth. I wasn’t going to post anything about this topic, but reading and listening to the news this week has changed my mind. Since I couldn’t possibly cover this topic as authoritatively or as eloquently as Thomas Sowell, I’m not even going to try. I’m going to let him do it in his own words.
QUOTE FROM THOMAS SOWELL’S ‘KNOWLEDGE AND DECISIONS’
Here is an excerpt from my favorite book, Knowledge and Decision, which Dr. Sowell wrote in 1980:
“With women the key variable is marriage. Even before “affirmative action” quotas, women in their thirties who worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men in their thirties who worked continuously since high school. In the academic world, where many discrimination charges have been filed under affirmative action, female academics earned slightly more than male academics when neither were married – again even before “affirmative action” – and unmarried female Ph.D.’s who received their degrees in the 1930’s and 1940’s became full professors in the 1950’s to a slightly greater extent than did unmarried male Ph.D’s of the same vintage. In short, the male-female differences in incomes and occupations are largely differences between married women and all other persons….the clear-cut income parity (or better) among women who never married suggests once again that systemic variables have more to do with the statistics than the intentional decisions at the work place at which the statistics were collected.”
He wrote this in 1980 so it’s safe to say that the gender pay gap canard was used as a political bludgeon for many years prior to 1980.
THOMAS SOWELL ON FIRING LINE
Dr Sowell is discussing the gender pay gap issue in this video from 1981.
Here is an article by Thomas Sowell titled, The Real ‘War On Women’. It was written in 2012, and covers the same gender pay gap fallacy. Here are some excerpts form the article.
“The old — and repeatedly discredited — game of citing women’s incomes as some percentage of men’s incomes is being played once again, as part of the “war on women” theme.”
“When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point — and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.”
“But why let mere facts spoil the emotional rhetoric or the political ploys to drum up hysteria and collect votes?”
THOMAS SOWELL ON ‘UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE
Here is a video of Thomas Sowell in 2008 on,Uncommon Knowledge, with Peter Robinson, talking about Gender Bias and Income Equality.
QUOTE FROM THOMAS SOWELL’S ‘ECONOMIC FACTS AND FALLACIES’
In Economic Facts And Fallacies, Chapter 3 titled, Male-Female Facts And Fallacies, covers gender pay gap and much more. Here is an excerpt form the chapter.
“Even when women and men earn the same incomes in the same occupations, differences in the distribution of the sexes among different occupations lead to differences in their average incomes.
“In principle it does not matter whether the attorney is male or female but, in practice, with women more often than men carrying the burden of domestic responsibilities for children and the care of the home, careers that involve much unpredictable night and weekend work are less attractive to women. Having it all – a career and a family and an upscale lifestyle- is fine but doing it all is often harder for a woman, given the usual division of domestic responsibilities between the sexes and the inevitable differences in childbearing.”
“Moreover since men are never pregnant, women are disadvantaged in such work by the physical limitations of pregnancy, which can be work limitations as well in obs that require long, irregular and unpredictable hours,….”
"THE COORDINATION OF MENS ACTIVITIES THROUGH CENTRAL PLANNING OR THROUGH VOLUNTARY COOPERATION ARE ROADS GOING IN VERY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, THE FIRST TO SERFDOM AND POVERTY THE SECOND TO FREEDOM AND PLENTY."
"THERE IS NO SUBTLER, NO SURER MEANS OF OVERTURNING THE EXISTING BASIS OF SOCIETY THAN TO DEBAUCH THE CURRENCY. THE PROCESS ENGAGES ALL THE HIDDEN FORCES OF ECONOMIC LAW ON THE SIDE OF DESTRUCTION, AND DOES IT IN A MANNER WHICH NOT ONE MAN IN A MILLION IS ABLE TO DIAGNOSE."
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F.A. Hayek - "Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunity it provides for unforseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom."
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Matthew McCaffrey - "Building a freer society means winning the battle of ideas, not the empty contests put on by the central Government every four years. Freedom is never obtained by endorsing the least offensive applicant for the position of chief villain."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle system of property that is hampered, guided, and regulated by government is in itself contradictory and illogical. Any attempt to introduce it in earnest must lead to a crisis from which either Socialism or Capitalism alone can emerge."
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F. A. Hayek - "While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization. It may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed."
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Murray Rothbard - "The market promotes and rewards the skills of production and voluntary cooperation. The Government enterprise promotes the skills of mass coercion and bureaucratic submission...and those who get to the top will be those with the most skill in that particular task."
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John Adams - "Government is instituted for the common good: for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people. And not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men..."
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Milton Friedman - "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
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Chris Rossini - "The state is a monster that destroys. Those who gain control of the levers, choose the targets."
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Murray Rothbard -"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics...but it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
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Murray Rothbard -"Democracy can be only a possible route toward a free society rather than an attribute of it. In a purely free society there would be nothing for democratic electors to vote about."
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Robert Bradley Jr. - "When Government tries to pick winners and losers, it typically picks losers. Why? Because the Free market consumers pick winners to leave the losers for Government."
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Benito Mussolini - "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Men must choose between the market economy and socialism....some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumer by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the Government by compulsion."
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F. A. Hayek - "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know, about what they imagine they can design."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Any intervention in the market (by the state) must direct resources away from how private owners would have employed them and toward how state officials and their economic advisers would like to see them employed."
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Henry Hazlitt - "The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible....the real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces."
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Murray Rothbard - "Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers goods.... Free markets tend to lead to abundance for all of its participants.... violent intervention in the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general poverty."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Inflation and credit expansion are the means to obfuscate the fact that there prevails a nature-given scarcity of the material things on which the satisfaction of human wants depends. The main concern of capitalists private enterprise it to remove this scarcity as much as possible and to provide a continuously improving standard of living for an increasing population.....but however remarkable these improvements may be, there will always be a strict limit to the amount that can be consumed without reducing the capital available for the continuation and, even more, the expansion of production."
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Ludwig von Mises - " It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of Governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights."
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Murray Rothbard - "To reduce the working population while the consuming population remains undiminished is to lower the standard of living."
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Murray Rothbard - "Increasing the money supply confers no social benefit. It relieves no economic scarcity. It simply benefits some at the expense of others."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe."
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Milton Friedman - "A society that puts equality- in the sense of equality of outcome- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
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F. A. Hayek - "It has already been suggested that it is not necessary, for the working of this free market capitalist system, that anybody should understand it. But people are not likely to let it work if they do not understand it."
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C. S. Lewis - "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
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Ludwig von Mises - "For the naive mind there is something miraculous in the issuance of fiat money. A magic word spoken by the Government creates out of nothing a thing which can be exchanged against any merchandize a man would like to get."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Many think that governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena....they maintain that the state is God."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Anti capitalistic policies sabotage the operation of the capitalist system of the market economy. The failure of interventionism does not demonstrate the necessity of adopting socialism. It merely exposes the futility of interventionism. All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure off capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market."
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F.A. Hayek - "The battle for freedom must be won over and over again, the socialists of all parties must be persuaded or defeated if they and we are to remain free men."
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Thomas Jefferson - "....To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with public debt....we must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude....if we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.... if we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
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F. A. Hayek - "The democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans."
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Jean Baptiste Say - "...The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce, for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone, furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of Good Government to stimulate production, of bad Government to encourage consumption."
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Thomas Sowell - "What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials."
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Alexis de Tocqueville - "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man, socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality, but notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
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Thomas Jefferson - "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
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Judge Leonard Hand - "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire, it cannot be preserved under the ideology of Government omnipotence."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."
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H.L. Menken - "Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods"
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F.A. Hayek - "Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's Government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
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Thomas Sowell - "The God like approach to social policy ignores the diversity of values and the cost of agreement among human beings."
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Henry Hazlitt - "Whenever men are allowed liberty, and freedom of choice, they will make mistakes. Liberty is not a guarantee of omniscience. But neither are the mistakes of free men a valid excuse to take away their liberty, and impose Government controls in its stead, on the ground that all wisdom and disinterestedness resides in the people who are going to do the controlling."
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Thomas Sowell - "Nothing is easier than to confuse broader powers with deeper insight. But almost by definition, those with the broadest powers are the most remote from the specific knowledge needed for either deciding, or for knowing, the actual consequences of their decisions."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Credit expansion is the Government's foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether to finance lavish Government spending."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Economic history is a long record of Government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."
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Chaderov - "Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by it's avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus in pulling society down it pulls itself down."
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Thomas Sowell - "If an informed citizenry is the foundation of democratic Government, than an uninformed citizenry is a danger."
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Thomas Sowell - "The free market works best when there is a level playing field but politicians win more votes by tilting the playing field to favor particular groups."
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Thomas Sowell - "However dramatic or attractive a particular vision may be, ultimately everyone must live in the world of reality. To the extent that reality has been filtered to fit a vision, this filtered information is a misleading guide to making decisions in an unforgiving reality, to which we must all adjust because it is not going to adjust to us."
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Thomas Sowell - "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name "Social Justice"."
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Murray Rothbard - "Bureaucracy incompetent enough to plan a stationary system, is vastly more incompetent at planning a progressing one."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Freedom is incompatible with equality of wealth and income. Men are born unequal and it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization."
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Murray Rothbard - "Government subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation (plundering)."
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Francisco Capella - "The right of property is a negative right of noninterference. Humans do not have natural positive rights that imply that others must do something for them, and there is no natural duties towards others (present and future). Positive rights and duties arise by means of contracts."
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Victor Davis Hanson - "Social justice sees the Government's proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we will all reach the finish line at the same exact moment."
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F.A. Hayek - "A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a Government with totalitarian powers."
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Thomas Sowell - "People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
"Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance."
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Thomas Sowell - "People have to be aware of the dangers in letting economic decisions be made through political processes."
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Winston Churchill - "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
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George Gilder - "Socialist and totalitarian Governments are doomed to support the past, because creativity is unpredictable, it is also uncontrollable. If the politicians want to have central planning and command, they can not have dynamism and life. A managed economy is almost by definition a barren one.
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George Gilder - "The ambitious agenda of contemporary liberalism simply ensures that Government will do nothing well, except to expand itself as an obstacle of growth and innovation. Government best supports the future by refraining as much as possible from trying unduly to shape it."
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Francisco Capella - "Markets are never perfect because human beings are limited in their abilities; proposing state fixes to alleged problems that individuals cannot solve freely seems to forget that the state is also made up of humans; and perhaps not the best ones. ( Bureaucrats are not disinterested angels, and the worst might get to the top.)"
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George Washington - "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, like fire it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I think we have more machinery of Government than is necessary, to many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I sincerely believe with you that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, it's but swindling futurity on a large scale."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "The two enemies of the people are criminals and Government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 