elfs | Really, Michael Medved? You went there?

This afternoon, on the drive home, I was rolling through the channels and stopped on KVI 770 ("The Truth!"). It was Bigfoot-hunting "Intelligent Design" supporter Michael Medved, and he was talking about the problems with the American educational system. He was interviewing Davis Guggenheim, the Director of Waiting for Superman.

And somewhere in there, he suddenly went on a tear about how, when he was a young man, girls weren't encouraged to become doctors, physicists, or mathematicians. Therefore the pool of highly skilled women with career aspirations was funneled into teaching and/or nursing, and because there were so many of them, it was an employers' market and the cost of hiring them was lowered.

He whined that he misses social structures that created artificially low wages for women, and would appreciate it if we went back to a cultural standard that shackled half the intellectual capacity of the United States into low-paying, low-prestige roles.

If Medved is satisfied with a segmentation of the employment market based on an arbitrary attribute not associated with job performance, I have to wonder if he would be satisified with segmenting the employment market on some other arbitrary attribute, such as race, religion, age, or an interest in Bigfoot.