Enough Excuses

...Congress is the most famous example, of course, but my favorite vignette involves Ralph Nader...

...Shrink government, especially the federal government, and you will make both libertarians and traditionalists happy...

...Olson's book is less theoretical and more anecdote-crammed than Epstein's, although The Excuse Factory has plenty of sound theory and hard data to back up its arguments...

...And central planning is bad for the economy, bad for liberty, bad for the spirit...

...What Frank Meyer said forty years ago is still true today...

...Olson has page after page of canyou-top-this war stories...

...These regulations have every characteristic that drives the private sector crazy...

...Both books explain why the country's antidiscrimination laws are confusing, counterproductive, and wrongheaded, and each concludes that we would be better off with a return to the old "employment at will" principle—that is, that either employer or employee can voluntarily end the employment relationship at any time for any reason, or for no reason...

...Yet the private sector's response basically has been, Thank you, sir, may I have another?—particularly in comparison with its loud protests over the excesses of, say, OSHA and EPA...

...Olson's book teaches another lesson of great political importance now to the Right: that there are many social and economic issues on which broad agreement ought to be possible...

...Maybe The Excuse Factorywill help give all those on the Right—and a lot of people not on the Right, too—the strength to come together and say that enough is enough...

...These are three very important traits in three very important areas, to be sure, but the scope of our antidiscrimination laws and the mischief they do is much broader...

...those inclined to blame the judiciary for all our woes, since it tells chilling tales not only of judicial activism, but of legislative overreaching and executive-branch tyranny...

...Take, for example, the issue of gay rights...

...And he is right...

...The Excuse Factory also should be required reading for Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity...

...And, conversely, if the government grows, it will likely make both libertarians and traditionalists miserable...

...Olson has written an account both thorough and entertaining, of drunken pilots, disgruntled and dangerous postal employees, and felonious job applicants—all apparently entitled to jobs for life under the current legal regime...

...Current law covers many more traits (disability, age, sexual orientation, and so on) in many more areas (public accommodations, credit, housing, and so on...

...Unfortunately, the latter is a real possibility...

...And even if we consider only race, ethnicity, and sex in the area of employment, there are many more issues than affirmative action, as Olson documents: harassment, accommodations for disabilities, outrageous jury awards, and permissible and impermissible testing of applicants, to name just a few...

...Such a statute fell just one vote shy of passing the Senate last year...

...To any true libertarian, such a law is highly objectionable, for all the reasons The Excuse Factory teaches...

...President Clinton recently reendorsed this bill, and it will be interesting to see whether Republicans of any kind mount a principled attack on it—or avoid any criticism lest they be labeled homo-phobes...

...One thing that The Excuse Factory is not is a screed against affirmative action—not that there would be anything wrong with such a screed, but Olson believes that conservatives have too readily overlooked the many other problems with antidiscrimination law by focusing too narrowly on the quota issue...

...And libertarians are already vulnerable to claims of being out of touch with the real world, traditionalists to charges of reaction and prejudice, and green-eyeshade conservatives to accusations of hardhearted-ness...

...When employees at the Nader-backed, small-circulation Multinational Monitor decided they wanted to bargain collectively, Nader responded with a ruthlessness that would have made John D. Rockefeller proud...

...The central-planning threat is alive and well, regulating the American workplace to death, as Walter K. Olson demonstrates in his lively and well-documented new book, The Excuse Factory...

...According to Olson, Nader frankly rejected efforts at the unionization of his employees since his groups, he said, "have a mission...

...Worthy of special mention are those recounting the unabashed hypocrisy of all those who insist on applying laws to others that they cheerfully ignore themselves...

...And it is objectionable to traditionalists, too, of course...

...Won't it make it harder to teach one's children that homosexuality is a sin when the government is punishing people who say so and refuse to hire them...

...It achieves true diversity in its villains: white males who have turned the Age Discrimination in Employment Act into a plaintiffs' bonanza, feminists who care little for the free market or the First Amendment, incompetent employees of every color, sex, and ancestry, and reptilian lawyers...

...They are so complicated as to be simply incoherent, are loaded with both direct and indirect costs, and affect both large and small companies in every sector of the economy...

...Bad, in the not-so-long run, for us all...

...Preferences are at issue with respect to basically three traits (race, ethnicity, and sex) in three areas (employment, university admissions, and government contracting...

...Enough Excuses Walter Olson Gives the Right a Rallying Cry By Roger Clegg For those gloomy, post-Cold War souls who despair that traditionalists and libertarians, social and economic conservatives, and Main Street and Wall Street Republicans will never again be able to make common cause—despair no more...

...Republicans may laugh at political correctness, but nobody wants to find himself on the wrong side of the barricades when any serious name-calling starts...

...Indeed, Olson writes, "If allowed freedom to contract, both sides [employer and employee] have every reason to contract vigorously out of today's employment law...

...It is increasingly clear that our civil-rights activists and regulatory bureaucrats are today's central planners...

...Before [the employees] knew what had hit them, the locks had been changed and Nader had transferred the operation's ownership to a new company that, as the Washington Post put it, 'chose not to continue their employment.'" The Excuse Factory is similar in many respects to Richard A. Epstein's 1992 book, Forbidden Grounds...

...A leading item on the gay agenda is the enactment of a federal statute banning employment discrimination against homosexuals...

...That makes principled opposition to any anti-discrimination laws particularly difficult...