Are Republicans closet communists? If not they should pass the Lilly Ledbetter A

A picture is worth more than a thousand words...2,035 to be exact in this article.
On January 21, 2015 Steven Garnett posted on Facebook a picture captured at the last State of the Union Address by video or some other process showing a passel of Republican congress people reacting to President Obama as he told them again they should pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
I could not find the picture yesterday on Steven Garnett’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/backdoor.draft?fref=photo, but I have it preserved on my Facebook page. In order to fully appreciate the article that follows you really should see Steven Garnett’s picture, posted on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397, to get the big picture.
Take a good look at the Republicans in the picture, elected to one of the highest offices in the land, who pretend the equity theory of management does not exist—a theory asserting people who produce the same should be compensated the same, and people who produce unequally should be compensated unequally.
While there could be several interpretations of the equity theory of management, the first writer to produce significant publications about equity theory in general was apparently John Stacey Adams. You can easily find several articles about equity theory on the Internet at https://www.google.com/search?q=the+equity+theory+of+management&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8.
The men in the picture look like a gang of sheepish naughty schoolboys who had been caught red handed stealing cookies from the cookie jar, and picking on girls, sitting there in their drab coat and tie uniforms, trying to look innocent, with no affect or animation, as joyful excited well-coiffed women among them wearing bright colorful dresses stand up and clap for President Obama as he again tells Congress in his fifth State of the Union Address that congress people should pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act mandating equal pay for equal work for women.
It’s absurd President Obama should have to tell them this again, for several reasons. One reason I have not seen or heard mentioned in any medium is that only communists believe productivity is irrelevant as a wage and salary determinant. Only communists believe the needs of individuals should be the main determinant of wages and salaries. As Karl Marx put it, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," which is what most employers are doing today in the US in the case of women, when in reality they should be using this wage and salary policy, "From each according to her/his abilities; to each according to the value of his/her production."
Republican politicians sell themselves as exemplars, promoters and defenders of free competition and capitalism, yet in this case they are stubbornly perpetuating a communistic idea.
In my opinion the equity theory of management should apply to students in classes, to players on ball teams, and to workers in any productive group or organization; but Republican congress people do not agree, in the case of grown women competing with men for money in gainful employment throughout the US. They apparently think women are special, so special they should be excluded from wage and salary equity considerations.
How can Republican congress people justify this unfair idea?
Well, it seems a serious answer must entail religious beliefs, specifically what Republican politicians perceive to be the religious beliefs of people who vote for them. They apparently think their unfair behavior, denying women equal pay for equal work, will please their constituents and help them get reelected, implying their constituents also believe in theories and tenets contrary to free enterprise and capitalism.
They might also have you believe as a defense they voted against equal pay for women because their "faith" made them to do it; and they might have you believe this morally takes them off the hook, making them not responsible for their inequitable inhumane legislative action, or inaction, denying women equal pay for equal work.
In some ways they are like the Taliban in Afghanistan, religious fundamentalists who think they have a divine right to lord it over women, having no responsibility to answer to anybody for their religious beliefs.
Another possible justification is they think men have special needs, more financial burdens in families, and the like, and therefore men should be given special help, a form of welfare, by governmental action, or by a willful denial of governmental action.
At issue is whether Republican politicians voting against equal pay for equal work are aware their beliefs determining their vote are in some ways communistic? If so, they should put this in writing, making their intentions clear to everyone by proposing new laws overtly stating the incomes of citizens working in the US economy should be determined by needs, not productivity.
Most US fundamentalists say they believe Christian dogmas and doctrines. Some say they believe every word printed in the King James bible. In it Jesus taught employers should pay workers what they were worth, with no mention of discriminating among males and females. He also said it was permissible to pay one worker more than another for equal work based on different needs, so he too apparently believed in both capitalistic and communistic tenets. Most people have heard Jesus had a very low opinion of human greed, making money, and getting rich, especially money-changing. He emphatically warned people in the bible about accumulating too much money and getting rich, asserting it significantly lowered their chances of making it into heaven. He said rich people ought to give everything they had to the poor and follow after him, wandering around the country visiting, praying with, and preaching to people who would provide them meals and lodging in return, giving no thought to enriching themselves, living simply and naturally like lilies in the field—which seems a bit communistic. I think it’s fair to say Jesus preached against extreme income inequality.
Most fundamentalist Republicans also oppose raising the minimum wage so employers can pay unequal wages and salaries to both male and female workers producing equal output doing the same jobs, based on the needs of workers of different ages. Some believe adolescents living at home with their parents working part time should be paid less per hour than others regardless of their hourly productivity, another practice applying the communistic notion of “to each according to his need.”
Wages and salaries paid to individual employees at most levels in corporations are not made public, to protect the privacy of employees, but also to insure employees cannot compare their incomes with others to make sure their compensation is equitable, applying the equity theory of management.
In most organizations you will find an unspoken rule that employees should not talk about their compensation with fellow employees. While I have never heard of a corporation publishing the yearly compensation of all employees, some states, such as Georgia, publish the salaries and incomes of individual university professors and employees in auditor’s reports once a year that are made available in libraries, but most professors, employees and citizens do not pay much attention to them. I decided to look my salary up at one point in my career and compare it with others, and I was astounded by the comparisons. When I started out at my university in 1970 I was the highest paid professor in the business school excluding the chairman who had an equal salary; by 1980 or so all administrators, the dean, department heads and the like, and several professors made significantly more. In universities with merit raises salaries can become increasingly inequitable through time for several reasons, as can wages and salaries in corporate hierarchies, applying the equity theory of management. Consult my book Business Voyages, a business bible, at http://www.amazon.com/Richard-John-Stapleton/e/B001KHS3P6, for more elaboration and documentation showing how seemingly small differentials in yearly percentage-based merit raises can exponentially expand through time creating ever-increasing salary inequities from year to year, a process analogous to what is happening among economic classes in the US today. In the case of state universities, administrators generally race ahead while long service professors are left behind, implying ordained administrators do more valuable and difficult work than professors, when the converse is probably true.
For sure you do not need a PhD to do what university administrators do. As in private sector corporate hierarchies, the primary determinant of compensation is bonding skill with other administrators, the ability to be a good crony.
On the other hand, most sports fans pride themselves on being able to remember the number of touchdowns, yards gained, passes completed, tackles, interceptions, baskets, assists, blocked shots, home runs, strikeouts, and other achievements football, basketball and baseball employees produce for professional teams and how much they are consequently compensated. Sports customers are inundated with such facts published in newspapers and magazines, on TV and elsewhere, and they pay serious attention to them, considering them to be relevant and valuable, however inequitable the compensation of athletes and coaches might be relative to the wages and salaries of most people. Some professional athletes and coaches, and some college coaches, now make more money per year than some corporate CEOs, receiving several times more compensation per year than the President of the United States, the Chief Executive of some 3 million civil service workers, and the Commander in Chief of some 2.25 million military workers, as I also discussed in Business Voyages.
But scores, contributions, production, achievements and compensation for most employees in capitalistic societies are generally hidden so most people have no way of knowing how contributions relate to compensation. Better to keep employees in the dark than to have them constantly bickering about their inequitable pay. Only professional sport corporations and industries provide open competition with real-time result transparency for employees and spectators.
You don’t have to be a woman to get screwed at work when it comes to compensation based on your contributions; but no doubt about it, women in the private sector getting paid on average 30 or so percent less than men doing the same jobs, when the quantity and quality of their production is the same or better, is an absolute travesty, a travesty that can be eliminated by merely passing the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Republican congress people need to man up, as they say, vote with their Democratic colleagues, and get it done ASAP.
On the other hand, one can build the case most private sector employers could care less about the fairness of general economic and political principles and policies governing how much employers should compensate their employees. One can build the case the only thing most of them care about is compensating individual employees as little as possible to leave more profit on the bottom line for the CEO and his cronies. If women in general are willing to work for lower pay than men, for whatever reasons—psychological, social, cultural, biological, religious—then so be it.
And Republican congress people, bought and paid for by employers in the so-called private sector, know this. Furthermore, since their taxpayer-paid congressional salaries are not much more than professor salaries, regardless of general principles of equity and fairness, Republican congress people almost certainly will refuse to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act, to preserve the status qou and the current morality of the system, including their campaign contributions from private-sector employers for their next election, and the other compensation they receive from their private sector paymasters, such as expense paid trips when in office, and speaking and consulting fees, job offers, lobbying fees, and the like if they don’t get reelected or refrain from running again to cash in.
Perhaps Republican congress people should pray Jesus really was merely a fictional character made up to sell a religious book, commissioned by a Roman Emperor to help him control disparate superstitious populations within his empire, as many people theorize.
Richard John Stapleton is an emeritus professor of business policy, entrepreneurship and ethics who writes on business and politics at Effective Learning Company at www.effectivelearning.net and on his Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397. He is the author of Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, a business bible, at http://www.amazon.com/Richard-John-Stapleton/e/B001KHS3P6.