sexta-feira, 20 de fevereiro de 2009
A crise e os neomercantilistas
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quinta-feira, 19 de fevereiro de 2009
Adam Smith gets the last laugh
Adam Smith gets the last laugh
By P.J. O’Rourke
The free market is dead. It was killed by the Bolshevik Revolution, fascist dirigisme, Keynesianism, the Great Depression, the second world war economic controls, the Labour party victory of 1945, Keynesianism again, the Arab oil embargo, Anthony Giddens’s “third way” and the current financial crisis. The free market has died at least 10 times in the past century. And whenever the market expires people want to know what Adam Smith would say. It is a moment of, “Hello, God, how’s my atheism going?”
Adam Smith would be laughing too hard to say anything. Smith spotted the precise cause of our economic calamity not just before it happened but 232 years before – probably a record for going short.
“A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant,” Smith said in The Wealth of Nations. “If it is lett [sic] to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Therefore Smith concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it is rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it”. [281]*
Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading” as he politely called it.
The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s 30 private banks survived. The reaction to the ensuing credit freeze from the Scottish overtraders sounds familiar, “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith said, “were in honour bound to supply the deficiency, and to provide them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.” [308]
The phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary,” Smith said, “overtrading becomes a general error.” [438] And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin”. [266]
The South Sea Bubble was the result of ruinous machinations by Britain’s lord treasurer, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who was looking to fund the national debt. The Mississippi Scheme was started by the French regent Philippe duc d’Orléans when he gave control of the royal bank to the Scottish financier John Law, the Bernard Madoff of his day.
Law’s fellow Scots – who were more inclined to market freedoms than the English, let alone the French – had already heard Law’s plan for “establishing a bank ... which he seems to have imagined might issue paper to the amount of the whole value of all the lands in the country”. The parliament of Scotland, Smith noted, “did not think proper to adopt it”. [317]
One simple idea allows an over-trading folly to turn into a speculative disaster – whether it involves ocean commerce, land in Louisiana, stocks, bonds, tulip bulbs or home mortgages. The idea is that unlimited prosperity can be created by the unlimited expansion of credit.
Such wild flights of borrowing can be effected only with what Smith called “the Daedalian wings of paper money”. [321] To produce enough of this paper requires either a government or something the size of a government, which modern merchant banks have become. As Smith pointed out: “The government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments.” [570]
The idea that The Wealth of Nations puts forth for creating prosperity is more complex. It involves all the baffling intricacies of human liberty. Smith proposed that everyone be free – free of bondage and of political, economic and regulatory oppression (Smith’s principle of “self-interest”), free in choice of employment (Smith’s principle of “division of labour”), and free to own and exchange the products of that labour (Smith’s principle of “free trade”). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence,” Smith told a learned society in Edinburgh (with what degree of sarcasm we can imagine), “but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice.”
How then would Adam Smith fix the present mess? Sorry, but it is fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done.
We could pump the banks full of our national treasure. But Smith said: “To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families, by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.” [440]
We could send in the experts to manage our bail-out. But Smith said: “I have never known much good done by those who affect to trade for the public good.” [456]
And we could nationalise our economies. But Smith said: “The state cannot be very great of which the sovereign has leisure to carry on the trade of a wine merchant or apothecary”. [818] Or chairman of General Motors.
* Bracketed numbers in the text refer to pages in ‘The Wealth of Nations’, Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, Oxford University Press, 1976
Open the gates!
Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.
“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”
While his tongue was slightly in cheek, Gupta and many other Indian business people I spoke to this week were trying to make a point that sometimes non-Americans can make best: “Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”
While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.
Bad signal. In an age when attracting the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world is the most important competitive advantage a knowledge economy can have, why would we add barriers against such brainpower — anywhere? That’s called “Old Europe.” That’s spelled: S-T-U-P-I-D.
“If you do this, it will be one of the best things for India and one of the worst for Americans, [because] Indians will be forced to innovate at home,” said Subhash B. Dhar, a member of the executive council that runs Infosys, the well-known Indian technology company that sends Indian workers to the U.S. to support a wide range of firms. “We protected our jobs for many years and look where it got us. Do you know that for an Indian company, it is still easier to do business with a company in the U.S. than it is to do business today with another Indian state?”
Each Indian state tries to protect its little economy with its own rules. America should not be trying to copy that. “Your attitude,” said Dhar, should be “ ‘whoever can make us competitive and dominant, let’s bring them in.’ ”
If there is one thing we know for absolute certain, it’s this: Protectionism did not cause the Great Depression, but it sure helped to make it “Great.” From 1929 to 1934, world trade plunged by more than 60 percent — and we were all worse off.
We live in a technological age where every study shows that the more knowledge you have as a worker and the more knowledge workers you have as an economy, the faster your incomes will rise. Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter and attracts more smart people to our shores. That is the best way to create good jobs.
According to research by Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, more than half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants over the last decade. These immigrant-founded tech companies employed 450,000 workers and had sales of $52 billion in 2005, said Wadhwa in an essay published this week on BusinessWeek.com.
He also cited a recent study by William R. Kerr of Harvard Business School and William F. Lincoln of the University of Michigan that “found that in periods when H-1B visa numbers went down, so did patent applications filed by immigrants [in the U.S.]. And when H-1B visa numbers went up, patent applications followed suit.”
We don’t want to come out of this crisis with just inflation, a mountain of debt and more shovel-ready jobs. We want to — we have to — come out of it with a new Intel, Google, Microsoft and Apple. I would have loved to have seen the stimulus package include a government-funded venture capital bank to help finance all the start-ups that are clearly not starting up today — in the clean-energy space they’re dying like flies — because of a lack of liquidity from traditional lending sources.
Forbidden books!!!
Banning Books in Miami
Schools are supposed to introduce children to a variety of ideas and viewpoints, but the Miami-Dade School Board decided a few years ago to put one viewpoint off limits. It banned the children’s book “A Visit to Cuba” from its school libraries because it said the book offers too positive a portrait of life under the Castro regime. That was bad enough, but then last week, a federal appeals court upheld the ban. The Supreme Court should reverse this disturbing ruling.
“A Visit to Cuba” and its Spanish edition, “Vamos a Cuba,” are part of a series of books for children ages 4 to 8 that introduces them to the geography, customs and daily life of different countries. The Miami-Dade County Public School District had 49 copies in its elementary and middle schools.
The father of an elementary-school student, complaining that the portrait of Cuba in the book was inaccurate, petitioned to have “A Visit to Cuba” pulled. The school superintendent denied the petition, but the school board overruled him. The board said it was acting because of inaccuracies and omissions in the book, but Miami’s strong anti-Castro political sentiment was undeniably a factor.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued and argued that pulling the book violated the First Amendment. The Federal District Court sided with the A.C.L.U. and ordered the school district to keep “A Visit to Cuba” available. But on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta reversed and upheld the school board’s decision.
The appellate court’s ruling is a disturbing case of a federal appeals court upholding censorship. It is clear, as the lower court concluded, that the school board pulled “A Visit to Cuba” because of its viewpoint, not for any sound educational reason. The district court rightly rejected the board’s claim that it was concerned about inaccuracies and omissions in the book. Many books have minor inaccuracies. And the omissions in “A Visit to Cuba” were appropriate in a book written for such a young audience.
The Supreme Court should not let this ruling stand. School boards have some discretion about what books to place in school libraries. The First Amendment does not, however, allow them to suppress political viewpoints.
sexta-feira, 13 de fevereiro de 2009
Starting at home, women fight for their rights in Iran
TEHRAN — In a year of marriage, Razieh Qassemi, 19, says she was beaten repeatedly by her husband and his father. Her husband, she says, is addicted to methamphetamine and has threatened to marry another woman to “torture” her.
Rather than endure the abuse, Ms. Qassemi took a step that might never have occurred to an earlier generation of Iranian women: she filed for divorce.
Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years.
And it is not just women from the wealthy, Westernized elites. The family court building in Vanak Square here is filled with women, like Ms. Qassemi, who are not privileged. Women from lower classes and even the religious are among those marching up and down the stairs to fight for divorces and custody of their children.
Increasing educational levels and the information revolution have contributed to creating a generation of women determined to gain more control over their lives, rights advocates say.
Confronted with new cultural and legal restrictions after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some young women turned to higher education as a way to get away from home, postpone marriage and earn social respect, advocates say. Religious women, who had refused to sit in classes with men, returned to universities after they were resegregated.
Today, more than 60 percent of university students are women, compared with just over 30 percent in 1982, even though classes are no longer segregated.
Even for those women for whom college is not an option, the Internet and satellite television have opened windows into the lives of women in the West. “Satellite has shown an alternative way of being,” said Syma Sayah, a feminist involved in social work in Tehran. “Women see that it is possible to be treated equally with men.”
Another sign of changing attitudes is the increasing popularity of books, movies and documentaries that explore sex discrimination, rights advocates say.
“Women do not have a proper status in society,” said Mahnaz Mohammadi, a filmmaker. “Films are supposed to be a mirror of reality, and we make films to change the status quo.”
In a recent movie, “All Women Are Angels,” a comedy that was at the top of the box office for weeks, a judge rejects the divorce plea of a woman who walked out on her husband when she found him with another woman.
Even men are taking up women’s issues and are critical of traditional marriage arrangements. Mehrdad Oskouei, another filmmaker, has won more than a dozen international awards for “The Other Side of Burka,” a documentary about women on the impoverished and traditional southern island of Qeshm who are committing suicide in increasing numbers because they have no other way out of their marriages.
“How can divorce help a woman in southern parts of the country when she has to return after divorce to her father’s home who will make her even more miserable than her husband?” said Fatimeh Sadeghi, a former political science professor fired for her writing on women’s rights.
Janet Afary, a professor of Middle East and women’s studies at Purdue University and the author of “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” says the country is moving inexorably toward a “sexual revolution.”
“The laws have denied women many basic rights in marriage and divorce,” she wrote in the book. “But they have also contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health and infrastructural improvements that benefited the urban and rural poor.”
To separate the sexes, the state built schools and universities expressly for women, and improved basic transportation, enabling poor women to travel more easily to big cities, where they were exposed to more modern ideas.
Ms. Afary says that mandatory premarital programs to teach about sex and birth control, instituted in 1993 to control population growth, helped women delay pregnancy and changed their views toward marriage. By the late 1990s, she says, young people were looking for psychological and social compatibility and mutual intimacy in marriage.
Despite the gains they have made, women still face extraordinary obstacles. Girls can legally be forced into marriage at the age of 13. Men have the right to divorce their wives whenever they wish, and are granted custody of any children over the age of 7. Men can ban their wives from working outside the home, and can engage in polygamy.
By law, women may inherit from their parents only half the shares of their brothers. Their court testimony is worth half that of a man. Although the state has taken steps to discourage stoning, it remains in the penal code as the punishment for women who commit adultery. A woman who refuses to cover her hair faces jail and up to 80 lashes.
Women also face fierce resistance when they organize to change the law. The Campaign for One Million Signatures was founded in 2005, inspired by a movement in Morocco that led to a loosening of misogynist laws. The idea was to collect one million signatures for a petition calling on authorities to give women more equal footing in the laws on marriage, divorce, adultery and polygamy.
But Iran’s government has come down hard on the group, charging many of its founders with trying to overthrow it; 47 members have been jailed so far, including 3 who were arrested late last month. Many still face charges, and six members are forbidden to leave the country. One member, Alieh Eghdamdoust, began a three-year jail sentence last month for participating in a women’s demonstration in 2006. The group’s Web site, www.we-change.org, has been blocked by the authorities 18 times.
“We feel we achieved a great deal even though we are faced with security charges,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, one of the founding members of the campaign, who is now forbidden to leave Iran. “No one is accusing us of talking against Islam. No one is afraid to talk about more rights for women anymore. This is a big achievement.”
Women’s advocates say that the differences between religious and secular women have narrowed and that both now chafe at the legal discrimination against women. Zahra Eshraghi, for example, the granddaughter of the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, signed the One Million Signatures petition.
“Many of these religious women changed throughout the years,” said Ms. Sayah, the feminist in Tehran. “They became educated, they traveled abroad and attended conferences on women’s rights, and they learned.”
Because of the government’s campaign of suppression, the process of collecting signatures has slowed recently, and many women do not want to be seen in the presence of a campaigner, let alone sign a petition. Most feminist groups limit their canvassing now to the Internet.
But while the million signatures campaign may have stalled, women have scored some notable successes. A group that calls itself Meydaan has earned international recognition for pressing the government to stop stonings.
The group’s reporting on executions by stoning in 2002 on its Web site, www.meydaan.net — including a video of the execution of a prostitute — embarrassed the government and led the head of the judiciary to issue a motion urging judges to refrain from ordering stonings. (The stonings have continued anyway, but at a lower rate, because only Parliament has the power to ban them.)
terça-feira, 10 de fevereiro de 2009
O Risco Protecionista
Retirado do sensacional blog que recomendamos: www.rodrigoconstantino.blogspot.com
Rodrigo Constantino
Quando uma nação entra em guerra, a primeira medida tomada pelo governo normalmente é atacar os principais pontos de comércio do inimigo. Os militares sempre buscam destruir pontes, portos e aeroportos do país em conflito, estrangulando seu comércio e tentando isolar o povo dos produtos estrangeiros. Isso demonstra que qualquer governante entende os benefícios da globalização, e sabe como é prejudicial ao povo o isolamento comercial. Não deixa de ser curioso, portanto, que os próprios governantes tomem medidas similares a esta estratégia de guerra, só que contra seu próprio povo. Afinal, o aumento de tarifas protecionistas acaba surtindo o mesmo efeito: dificulta o acesso do povo aos produtos importados.
Ocorre que os poderosos “lobbies” pressionam seus governos em busca de privilégios que prejudicam os consumidores. A crise econômica fornece a desculpa perfeita para estes grupos de interesse: todos devem lutar para proteger os empregos locais. Mas as leis econômicas não mudam com a crise, e o protecionismo sempre irá representar um fardo econômico para a nação. Adam Smith, em A Riqueza das Nações, já havia explicado em 1776: “Todo pai de família prudente tem como princípio jamais tentar fazer em casa aquilo que custa mais fabricar do que comprar”. E ele compreendia que esta lógica econômica era igualmente válida para uma nação: “O que é prudente na conduta de qualquer família particular dificilmente constituirá insensatez na conduta de um grande reino”. Não faz sentido um povo tentar fabricar algo que pode ser comprado com menos esforço de fora.
O risco de uma “guerra comercial” na crise atual não é desprezível, e deve ser monitorado de perto. Diante da pressão com o aumento do desemprego, os governantes de todos os países terão o incentivo de apelar para o nacionalismo populista, que encara o comércio internacional como um jogo de soma zero, onde para alguém ganhar, outro deve perder. A retórica de “exportação de empregos” ganha mais força, colocando em risco os ganhos mútuos com o livre comércio. O Congresso americano já aderiu ao discurso protecionista, e o pacote de estímulo econômico quase incluiu uma cláusula determinando que o aço usado nas obras fosse americano. No Brasil, a disputa entre Usiminas e Transpetro pode ter marcado o início da escalada protecionista.
A Transpetro, subsidiária da estatal Petrobrás, realizou uma grande compra de aço através de um leilão no qual onze empresas participaram. O preço oferecido pela brasileira Usiminas foi o maior de todos. A empresa não gostou do resultado, e através do Instituto Brasileiro de Siderurgia, pressionou o governo em busca de medidas protecionistas. Em seu “esclarecimento à sociedade”, divulgado nos jornais, a Usiminas afirma que “entende ser necessária a adoção urgente no País de salvaguardas contra práticas desleais de comércio, sugerindo a introdução temporária de preço mínimo para a importação de produtos siderúrgicos, até que o movimento de redução dos estoques mundiais se encerre”. A empresa mistura seus próprios interesses com o interesse do país. O preço oferecido pela Usiminas ficou 60% acima do menor preço, ou 35% acima se ajustado para o frete. Por que seria do interesse da nação a Transpetro rasgar dinheiro? É preciso lembrar que a Petrobrás é uma empresa de capital aberto, com milhares de acionistas minoritários, e seu foco deve ser a maximização do valor da empresa. Sem dúvida não é do interesse dos acionistas a empresa comprar aço mais caro do que o necessário.
A Usiminas termina sua nota destacando a qualidade dos seus produtos e seus diferenciais, como o atendimento pós-venda. O ponto é que tais qualidades devem ser julgadas pelo comprador. Logo, não tem cabimento a empresa usar a força do governo para garantir seu mercado. A Transpetro deve ser livre para escolher de quem comprar, sempre levando em conta o interesse dos seus acionistas.
Por fim, a Usiminas chama de “prática desleal de comércio” a decisão válida das concorrentes de reduzir preços para baixar os estoques. A decisão sobre o preço de venda é estratégica e deve ser livre. Além disso, cabe mencionar a irônica petição escrita por Bastiat em nome dos produtores de velas e querosene, contra um competidor implacável que sempre pratica preços predatórios: o sol. Este terrível concorrente oferece iluminação grátis durante boa parte do dia. Deve o governo construir janelas para barrar a luz solar, permitindo a geração de mais empregos para os fabricantes de velas?
quarta-feira, 4 de fevereiro de 2009
Os sexos não são iguais.Os salarios tambem nao podem ser.
Por Rodrigo Constantino
O novo presidente americano Barack Obama assinou sua primeira lei dia 29 de janeiro, quinta-feira passada. Trata-se do Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, em homenagem à luta de Lilly Ledbetter contra a empresa Goodyear, na qual a funcionária alegava ter recebido salário menor que o dos homens pela mesma função. A essência da nova lei, aplaudida por muitos, pode ser resumida na seguinte expressão: “salários iguais para funções iguais”. A questão que automaticamente surge é a seguinte: quem foi que disse que diferentes indivíduos exercendo a mesma função apresentam o mesmo resultado?
Deve-se lembrar que o importante para qualquer empresa é a produtividade final, o valor agregado por cada funcionário. Da diferença entre esta produtividade marginal e o custo com o trabalhador é que a empresa consegue extrair seu lucro, reinvestir no negócio, sobreviver e crescer, para continuar atendendo os clientes e garantindo os empregos que gera. Os consumidores, atuando livremente num plebiscito ininterrupto chamado mercado, querem o melhor produto pelo menor preço, e votam de acordo. Como colocou Roberto Campos, “é pela automaticidade do castigo, e não por inspiração divina, que os empresários privados não param de pensar em custos”. Logo, cada empresa terá incentivos para pagar um salário dependente da produtividade ofertada pelo trabalhador. Se ela pagar algo muito acima disso, terá prejuízo e irá à falência; e se ela pagar muito menos, alguma concorrente poderá contratar seu pessoal pagando mais e ainda obtendo um bom lucro.
Quando esta lógica econômica é compreendida, fica mais fácil entender o erro dessa nova lei, no fundo de cunho populista. O economista de Chicago Thomas Sowell, no seu livro Barbarians Inside the Gates, explica como é sem sentido falar em “igualdade” quando se está comparando coisas diferentes. Para falar em igualdade, antes é preciso ter um padrão de mensuração. Uma sinfonia não é igual a um automóvel, para usar o exemplo de Sowell, tampouco é superior ou inferior. Ela é apenas diferente, e ambos não podem ser comparados. Para Sowell, muito da luta emocional para tornar as mulheres “iguais” aos homens sofre deste mesmo problema. Desde que mulheres têm filhos e os homens não, comparar os dois sexos ignorando essa diferença pode levar a um resultado sem sentido.
A diferença fundamental entre um tratamento igual e um desempenho igual é freqüentemente confundida. Em termos de desempenho, praticamente ninguém é igual a ninguém. Até um mesmo indivíduo não apresenta desempenho igual todos os dias. Muito do que chamamos de “engenharia social” vem do fato de que estatísticas para diferentes grupos são diferentes. Logo, é assumido automaticamente que a diferença estatística só pode ser explicada por um tratamento diferente. Sowell acredita que este dogma está tão enraizado que uma discussão racional sobre o tema é quase utópica. A própria expectativa de que os resultados deveriam ser iguais é totalmente arbitrária. Se existe alguma coisa que não é igualitária no mundo, essa coisa é a própria natureza. Mas existe um grupo grande de pessoas que acredita que quando o mundo não se conforma com sua teoria, então algo deve estar errado... com o mundo!
Voltando ao fato de que mulheres engravidam e têm filhos, tamanha diferença em relação aos homens não pode nunca ser ignorada numa análise correta dos resultados entre os dois sexos. Ao menos não por quem gostaria de contar com a sobrevivência da espécie humana. Tendo em mente que um dia terão filhos, as mulheres já tomam decisões levando isto em conta. Na média, as ocupações que demandam constante renovação nas habilidades tendem a atrair menos mulheres do que aquelas ocupações que permitem mais tempo para ter filhos e depois regressar ao trabalho. É possível tirar uns meses ou anos de folga para cuidar dos filhos na fase inicial do crescimento, e depois voltar para dar aulas, escrever, advogar. Mas começa a ficar mais complicado se afastar tanto quando se é uma engenheira de computação, pois na volta tudo pode ter mudado. A obsolescência da ocupação, em outras palavras, será um fator importante para atrair homens ou mulheres.
Quando os “engenheiros sociais” cospem estatísticas mostrando que as mulheres ganham menos que os homens, eles ocultam estas importantes diferenças. Na média, faz sentido mulheres ganharem menos mesmo. Claro que isso não diz nada sobre casos individuais. Mas naturalmente, não são os casos individuais que esses defensores dos “resultados iguais” se importam. Afinal, para casos isolados de injustiças, já existe a lei. Ou, como já foi explicado, o próprio mercado de livre concorrência ajuda a eliminar discrepâncias injustas, pois faz todo sentido contratar alguém pelo mesmo salário se a produtividade é a mesma. Se fosse verdade que as mulheres recebem menos de forma geral para uma mesma produtividade, então haveria um “almoço grátis” na mesa. Qualquer empresa poderia contratar essas mulheres pagando um pouco mais do que antes, mas ainda menos que paga aos homens, e pela mesma produtividade teria um lucro maior. Ao longo do tempo, essas empresas que não discriminam as mulheres seriam as vencedoras no livre mercado.
Espero ter deixado claro que a máxima “salários iguais para funções iguais” não faz muito sentido. A função pode ser a mesma, mas a produtividade pode ser bem diferente. Um atacante de um time de terceira divisão pode exercer a mesma função que Cacá, mas nem por isso eles merecem um salário equivalente. Da mesma forma, os jogadores de basquete da NBA, na maioria negros, podem ocupar a mesma função dos demais jogadores de basquete, mas nem por isso vão receber os mesmos salários. E não há racismo algum nessa diferença. Afinal, os negros da NBA não ganham milhões porque são negros, mas sim porque são os melhores no que fazem. O que importa é o valor gerado de acordo com as preferências dos consumidores.
Quando Obama assina uma lei que enxerga apenas uma característica de grupo, como o sexo, ele está ignorando as diferenças entre esses grupos, e o principal, as diferenças entre indivíduos dentro de cada grupo. Se uma mulher resolve abdicar do lado materno, se dedicar de corpo e alma ao trabalho, e se torna uma diretora bem mais produtiva que outros diretores homens, então ela terá que sofrer uma redução em seu salário em nome da “igualdade dos sexos”? Mulheres podem ganhar mais que homens numa mesma função? Essas leis apenas fomentam a segregação em grupos, seja de raça ou sexo. O ideal seria o governo não se meter nas trocas voluntárias entre empregador e empregado, e respeitar que seres humanos muito diferentes sempre irão gerar resultados muito diferentes também. E os “engenheiros sociais” fariam um favor à humanidade se abandonassem o típico “pensamento de grupo”, passando a enxergar diferentes indivíduos em vez disso.