Save The Corporations!

Megan lives in an alternate universe where corporations are constantly being victimized by over-empowered villainous bureaucrats of the type seen in such masterworks of storytelling as Transformers 2. In our reality the US treated one horrible wound, slavery, with a Constitutional amendment that eventually created another; the era of corporate empire, and the rest of the world, especially including the US government, has been playing a generally badly unbalanced game of catch-up since. The dice are loaded, and Megan should know it, because she's one of the countless people employed to help drill them and add weight. She's paid to (dishonestly) place the interests of crony capitalists disguised as noble corporations accumulating wealth for their shareholders above the interests of humanity, and in a sense she's good at it. Megan fits into the disinformation machine, giving her the chance to pull herself up by her own bootstraps tongue, one asshole at a time.
And now to Meganworld;

A few days ago, I wrote about employers using FICO scores to screen potential employees. One thing that neither I nor Kevin Drum really answered is: why are employers using them? They're at best a weak proxy. Of course, corporations do stupid things all the time, because they're not infallible. Still, it's a question that bears asking.

Over at CoyoteBlog, an employer offers one possible answer: because we've made other forms of information gathering illegal. IQ tests are out, as are any other tests that have disparate impact on minority groups. And references have become useless...

Links not reinserted because I don't care.
I love that she needs to remind herself that corporations aren't infallible. Anyway, you can see where she's going with this, I'm sure, so let's skip to the obvious conclusion;

I'm not sure why credit reports should fall into the category of sacred information that no one else has a right to see. The amount of money someone has is private--but not paying your bills is a very public action with large repercussions for others. Why do you have an absolute right to keep others from knowing that you've stiffed a third party?

What matters here is whether a person paid a corporate interest everything the corporate interest wanted, and that corporation's right to badmouth you to anyone who will listen. Perhaps we should make wearing a yellow star a condition of filing bankruptcy. (Hi Godwin, how's yer summer going?)
Back to the glibberish;

We seem to be in a situation where we are systematically depriving employers of any potential information about employees. This is both bad for businesss, which end up with unnecessary turnover, and bad for employees, because it results in the use of less accurate proxies that aren't banned. As Alex Tabarrok pointed out, banning inquiries about criminal history is likely to result in (illegal, but harder to detect) racial discrimination. Imposing liability for truthful bad references results in the use of things like FICO scores. And banning FICO scores--well, it may not be a good proxy, but what are bosses likely to use instead?

The question is not "how much should a potential employer be able to know about you beyond your employment history and competency at your job?", that's something a libertarian might ask. The question is "if you don't let your potential employer fuck you in that hole, which one will they fuck you in?", and don't you forget it, wage-slave.
One thing that seems clear to me since returning to occasional posting is that Megan is evil, not stupid. She ain't bright, being smarter than Jonah Goldberg is like saying you have better personal judgment than a meth addict; not an achievement, but she knows she's lying and doesn't care. She wants to get hers and keep it, full stop. Megan knows her arguments are dishonest, though she may be in denial as to the degree, because she cannot make her actual argument, which is that the obscenely rich are simply superior beings who deserve an even more disproportionate share of the world's resources, as proven by the paychecks and added perks David Bradley gives her. She's one of his favorite pets, and he gives her yummy table scraps to keep her tongue wagging.

< / rant >