The most critical point to make about the concept of "comparable worth" is one that its proponents try very hard to hide, and it concerns what comparable worth is not. It is not about making sure that, when a man and a woman are performing the same job, they are paid the same amount. Equal pay for equal work has been the law for many years now, and there is a broad consensus that discrimination in this situation is wrong. No, what comparable worth is about is the government requiring that a man doing one job and a woman doing another, different job be paid the same amount, on the grounds that, in someone's opinion, the two different jobs have "comparable worth." It would, as the Supreme Court put it in County of Washington v. Gunther, allow plaintiffs to "claim increased compensation on the basis of a comparison of the intrinsic worth or difficulty of their job with that of other jobs in the same organization or community." There is a fundamental problem with this approach: it is flatly inconsistent with perhaps the lesson of the twentieth century, namely, that the free market is infinitely better at setting prices and allocating society's scarce goods and resources than is a centralized bureaucracy. Deciding what something "should" cost--including wage and salary levels--is not something that a few mandarins, no matter how wise and conscientious, can do. . . .

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