It wasn’t exactly wisdom from the mouths of babes. Then again, say critics, the remarks didn’t originate in any babe’s mind. Hillary Clinton is well known for staging events (as well as personalities), and “staged” is precisely what many are calling a question on the intersex pay gap the presidential candidate fielded last Tuesday at a New Hampshire town hall-style campaign stop (shown).
The question came from nine-year-old Relic Reilly, twin brother of “River” and son of Massachusetts residents Michael and Bita Reilly (video below). Reports the Daily Mail:
“My mother, over there, is complaining that she does not get much more money than my father,” young Relic Reilly asked the former secretary of state.
“My mother is an engineer, I meant, teacher. My father is the engineer. And I think that my mother is working more harder than my … I think my mother is working much harder, is working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money, like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of children and I just don’t think it’s fair.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9VGNFh375Q
Mother Bita, who the Mail tells us is “a pre-K teacher at a cooperative preschool on the grounds of the tony Groton School, a co-ed boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts,” denies her son was coached. She claims that she and Relic talked the night before about what they’d say were they called upon and that he chimed in and “asked me why I would not ask Hillary about teachers not getting paid enough.” She then suggested he pose the question himself.
While this certainly is plausible, it seems a distinction without a difference. Whether Relic was “coached” per se, or simply was regurgitating ideas his parents relentlessly drummed into him over time, the thoughts were not his own.
It’s fairer to say, in fact, they’re Karl Marx’s. While the boy’s question does actually reflect a legitimate cause of the male-female wage gap — men typically enter more lucrative fields than do women (e.g., hard sciences as opposed to soft ones) — the notion that a preschool teacher should be compensated as handsomely as an engineer is straight from The Communist Manifesto.
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Since Mrs. Reilly “is complaining that she does not get much more money” than Mr. Reilly, however, perhaps it would please her if her husband’s salary were lowered to the level of her own (this is precisely the outcome Marxism breeds). Or is that not what she had in mind?
As for using malleable minds as props, Clinton frequently calls on young children at town halls. Even liberal Time noted this, pointing out that the “strategy ensures that she’ll get a softball question,” and that the intersex pay gap is “not exactly a top concern of most American … school playgrounds.” Then again, perhaps intersex pay-scale anomalies are a major topic of conversation among nine-year-old Relic and his friends — when they aren’t discussing String Theory, biases and heuristics, and the feasibility of high-temperature superconduction.
As for Clinton’s cottoning to the callow, she called on another child during the N.H. town hall; there was no pretense with him, however, as he asked about gun-control reading from a cue card. And Clinton was also scripted, rendering an answer that had little to do with the question (video below).
Yet there’s an irony to Master Relic’s query: He may want to be careful what he wishes for. Just consider that, as writer Carey Roberts reported in 2008, “for dozens of majors and occupations, women coming out of college are getting better offers than men…. Female physicists are getting $6,500 more. …Women computer programmers are being enticed with $7,200 extra pay.” And should little Relic follow his father into engineering, he may want to note Roberts’ last example: “Co-eds who majored in petroleum engineering are being offered $4,400 more.”
The reality is that women don’t get paid less for the same work; they get paid less for less work. As the Washington Post’s Carrie Lukas wrote in 2007:
All the relevant factors that affect pay — occupation, experience, seniority, education and hours worked — are ignored [by those citing the wage gap]. This sound-bite statistic fails to take into account the different roles that work tends to play in men’s and women’s lives.
In truth, I’m the cause of the wage gap — I and hundreds of thousands of women like me. I have a good education and have worked full time for 10 years. Yet throughout my career, I’ve made things other than money a priority. I chose to work in the nonprofit world because I find it fulfilling. I sought out a specialty and employer that seemed best suited to balancing my work and family life. When I had my daughter, I took time off and then opted to stay home full time and telecommute. I’m not making as much money as I could, but I’m compensated by having the best working arrangement I could hope for.
Women make similar trade-offs all the time. Surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay. Women tend to avoid jobs that require travel or relocation, and they take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do.
Also note that this is partially driven by necessity: Men generally have to focus more on money because they’re more likely to be a family’s primary or sole breadwinner. Women tend to bear the burden of greater domestic duties, but also enjoy the luxury of prioritizing “personal fulfillment” over pay.
Moreover, handicapping men economically via social engineering actually harms the majority of women and children. Why? Because decreasing men’s earning capacity takes money from not just them but also their wives and kids. Of course, their wives could avail themselves of the affirmative-action climate, but then women who might rather tend to hearth and home are driven into the workplace; this leads to even more children raised in daycare and further declining fertility rates (already below replacement level in the West). I treated this issue more exhaustively in my 2014 piece in The New American magazine: “Equal Pay for Equal Work: Means Paying Men More.”
As for poor Relic, his hippie-born name and use as a prop have fueled comedic observations. American Thinker’s Jeannie DeAngelis writes, for instance, “The direction of Master Reilly’s statement is not surprising because according to Kabalarian Philosophy, his unusual name describes someone who, ‘too often … [looks] … for an easy way of making money,’ which could explain Relic’s obsession with seeing a glorified babysitter be paid an engineer’s salary. The name Relic also describes an individual who associates with people who ‘could influence [them] unfavorably and thereby mislead’ them….” As for teacher Mrs. Reilly, some have pointed out that given her son’s grammar (“more harder”), she apparently is already overcompensated.
The reality, though, is that children should be kept out of politics. Their use as props is manipulative, morally wrong, and only somewhat less silly than the recent claim that Koko the gorilla supposedly rendered the New Year’s message, “Man stupid…protect Earth.” If primary-school students and primitive primates appear your most passionate followers, a bit of growth and ideological evolution may be in order.
Photo of Hillary Clinton taking questions from children at a New Hampshire “town hall” meeting: AP Images
