url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Holcombe_Cronyism_web

should pay the same as comparable but different jobs that
are primarily worked by women, was born. Experimental
research on job evaluations under comparable worth policies
suggests that implementing comparable pay may be
not be possible. 8 The study found that three job evaluation
firms presented wildly different value estimates for the
same list of twenty-seven jobs. This finding suggests that
job evaluations will tend to be tinged by the biases of the
person doing the evaluating, opening the door to cronyism.
The policy’s structure privileges several groups: female
laborers enjoy privilege over their employers who have to
subsidize their artificially high wages, skilled female (and
some male) laborers enjoy privilege over unskilled female
laborers who are pushed out of the market, and consumers
must pay higher prices to finance the policy. 9 Comparable
worth policies do not offset previous privileges but rather
create a host of new privileges and disadvantages.
Racial quotas and preferences for hiring and admission—affirmative
action—are also policies that replace
one kind of government privilege with another. Before
the civil rights–era reforms, US government policy
often provided advantages to white Americans while
job training program administrators and public social
service providers overlooked or sometimes deliberately
ignored African American citizens. In documenting
the many ways that African Americans were slighted
while privileges went to white Americans during the
1930s and 1940s, political scientist and historian Ira
Katznelson describes pre–civil rights public policy as
“affirmative action for whites.” 10 Following the liberalizing
changes wrought by the civil rights movement,
legislators were eager to atone for their discriminatory
82 LIBERALISM AND CRONYISM