The proposed NPEA prohibits employers from paying less for jobs that are held predominately by women than jobs held predominately by men if those jobs are equivalent in value to the employer. Though its proponents state that the government will absolutely not set wages, this is exactly the NPEA's effect by mandating job equivalence and requiring identical wages for them.

According to the most vocal and organized proponents of the NPEA, the National Committee on Pay Equity, equivalent jobs are those whose composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar. Currently, basic economic factors dictate paying more for talents and skills in less supply than their demand. In lieu of this fluidity however, the NPEA will require pay rates in accordance with a necessarily bureaucratic and unchanging governmental determination of job equivalence.

The advocates of the NPEA insist that once implemented, it can help businesses recruit and retain the best-qualified workers. However, legal mandates predetermining employee pay scales remove the incentive to pursue less comfortable, high demand jobs simply for the larger paycheck. The failure to adequate plan for the consequences of this likelihood is not only detrimental to workers applying for positions that most suit their needs, but it will wreak havoc on employers attempting to calculate their bottom line expenses. Without harmful and unceasing social pressure, what worker would want to continually do a more difficult and distasteful job than their "equivalent" colleague without being properly compensated for it?

Nevertheless, the propaganda to create the basis for this social pressure has already been begun. The National Committee on Pay Equity asserts that wage discrimination is deeply rooted in our legal system and that women are still often steered into the more traditional female occupations. Even if this were true, the best correction to it would be market forces rather than governmental intervention. The tangible tipping point in virtually every profession is its compensation. A perfunctory glance at the demographic of the world's oldest profession demonstrates very clearly that women are not immune to this principle. Furthermore, "women's" companies would be monopolizing every field with their ability to undercut the competition if women were truly legally discriminated against in the work-place by being paid less for doing the same work as men.

The legislative popularity for the NPEA doesn't come from a desire to uniformly end the discrimination against certain groups to advance and gain traction in the market place. It works precisely in the opposite direction. Instead of allowing advancement to flow from economic forces that in turn bring the best goods to the most people for the lowest price, it artificially inflates the cost of production and devalues the emphasis on the two twins required for success, hard work and smart work. Shaded in the political nomenclature of "fairness" and "justice", its overarching intrusion into the way businesses are run at the most basic level is an affront to the American ideal of opportunity and the pursuit of happiness.