This is why I don't give you a job

My point was only that the system is not _that_ bad that you wouldn't have a choice. Of course, that choice is yours to make.

Politics. Most people don't see or hear about payroll taxes, but they would notice if you added 5% to their income taxes.

Plus, in a lot of cases it's administratively easier to say "the funding for this social program comes directly from this source of taxation".

You're right that taxes should be designed better; in a lot of cases they provide disincentives for a lot of beneficial behaviour. Taxes are just really hard to design correctly. It's a huge problem no one has control over.

Corporations don't receive limited liability. The owners of a corporation have limited liability.

Where I live, there's plenty of laws that stop companies from discriminating against women, thereby removing the competitive advantage, which in turn forces the companies to do the right thing.

1) You overstate the likelihood of the market driving out discrimination. Racist and sexist discrimination has existed for centuries without the market ever reaching the equilibrium state of no discrimination that would result if people were rational market participants (1).

2) Inevitably people bring up Scandinavia in these discussions, and for good reason. Scandinavian countries have both very generous family benefits (including paternal leave!) and high representation of women throughout the workforce. This isn't dispositive, but it does suggest the situation is much more complicated than the original post would suggest.

All in all, I prefer to live in a world where everyone pays their fair share instead of trying to eke out a couple extra cents of profit by not providing parental benefits to mothers and families.

(1)This is actually an even subtler issue, because it's possible for markets to exist where racism and sexism offer a competitive advantage, due to consumer preferences.

I don't think it's a black-and-white issue of giving or not giving a job. These types of government restrictions cause a change in the supply and demand for the protected individuals. This results in a change in their average salaries (i.e. more restrictions reduce salaries). Women are still worth hiring, just at a lower salary, to account for the added risk.

So in the end, the cost ends up being fronted by the women anyway.

I would imagine that those who don't discriminate would continue to not discriminate while those who do discriminate would continue to do so. Removing the law doesn't make women less likely to get pregnant. I am not sure your concept that we should remove the laws so that everyone can discriminate against women equally is really advantageous or very upstanding. Nor do I think the idea that people are going to discriminate despite the laws & it's too hard to prove that they're discriminating is a valid reason to remove the laws either.

You say it's a scam, but if so, who manufactured the scam? Are you telling me that those in power got together and decided to build a system which punishes the hardworking and rewards the lazy? Since when do people join a conspiracy to help others and hurt themselves?

You also make gross generalizations in describing the people that benefit from social programs. It's repulsive.

What if the woman was not poor or not unwed at the time of conception? What if her husband lost his job? Do you think having children should be a privilege limited only to married couples with at least a quarter million dollars in savings? And if so, do you at least support the state giving out free contraceptives to the "leeches" who aren't in such a financial position?

If a person can't afford their child, what do you recommend? Leave the kid near the dumpster to fend for him/herself? That'll teach a strong work ethic, right? Because we all know maternity leave is just a euphemism for vacation.

A sampling from one paper:

>We find considerable associations between early returns to work and many of the outcome measures [regular medical checkups and breastfeeding in the first year of life, the receipt of all DPT (diptheria, pertussis, and tetanus)/Oral Polio immunisations (in approximately the first 18 months of life) and cognitive and behavioural assessment scores at age 3 or 4]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0013-0133.2005....

@brown9-2 In theory it does, but if businesses don't hire said unwed mothers because government policies make it too expensive, it doesn't benefit anyone.

It might be the case that the balance in Hungary is off as the author of the article claims, but that claim was buried in a one-sided rant against the cost of accessing the labour pool.

The point of my post was to even the scales, to remind everyone that it costs a lot of money to employ people, because creating employable people costs a lot of money. The CS college graduates we want to interview as potential employees of our dot-com startups don't materialize out of thin air. As cheesy as it sounds, previous generations invested in their future; we have to do the same.

What an absurd, and incredibly disingenuous thing to say. Water's good for you - in fact if you don't have it you die. So let's throw you in a huge pool and see how you like it!

Stop putting words in OP's mouth, and argue against his argument instead of twisting it into an easy straw man.

So like most things, "it's complicated". This article oversimplifies to the point of it being flat out wrong.

And not only that, it's completely unoriginal, being an exact transcript of what every shopkeeper in Europe will tell you after you've bought him a few drinks.

The problem here is that Hungary's cash salaries are much cheaper than average, whereas Hungary's non-financial compensations are merely quite cheaper than average.

The only systemic problem described in the article is that private bosses have to shoulder the burden of helping mothers and older workers. Helping them is a societal decision, it ought to be supported by society: if you want to help pregnant women, let bosses fire them, then have the government compensate them with tax money coming from all companies, not only from those which hire child-bearing-age women.

This causes problems, to be sure, in that it disincentivises some, but not all wellfare recipients from trying to escape their poverty, but it prevents people from dying of hunger in the streets, which is, imho, a good thing.

Not really. It's a matter of risk pooling and public good. In health insurance, for example, it's understandable for a healthy person to pay a premium higher than the value of the services he actually receives. In exchange, if he suddenly gets in a car accident, an expensive procedure may be affordable. Additionally, his disabled neighbor may be able to afford his otherwise extremely expensive care. This sort of scheme only works effectively when everyone participates, especially the healthy, low-cost folks, who bring down the cost for everyone else.

The same or similar concepts apply in unemployment insurance. Someone with a stable job may not feel he needs unemployment insurance, but paying into the system makes the system possible. If only the unemployed and underemployed paid for unemployment insurance, we wouldn't have such a thing.

With education, things are a little different. There are some people who will never have children to benefit from paying for public education, but these people indirectly benefit from living in an educated society. I don't have children, but I'm more than happy to contribute to public education, since I value literacy not only in myself but in others.

Arts (e.g., your TV, symphony, and museum examples) are basically an extension of education, though I suspect some people would probably argue against me there.

Infrastructure in rural areas is expensive, but in my experience, at least, those rural areas are often poorer than the more urban areas. Your options seem to be (a) cut those people off from society, (b) subsidize their infrastructure, or (c) pay them to move elsewhere. I think (b) is the most reasonable option.

In the end, the people in the most need generally have the least to offer, so the people with the most to offer either have to subsidize, or the least have to go starving. Universal, progressive taxation seems like a very reasonable way to accomplish the goals of a civilized society.

As for maternity leave, the same issue exists in the USA, to the extent that any firing of an employee has to be non-discriminatory. As for health-care : That's a very expensive nightmare in the USA, and it would be far more efficient IMHO for it to be wrapped into a % tax levy, rather than flat monthly rates (but that's a rather political statement in the US).

Anything that increases the base costs of starting a business, such as these, will reduce entrepreneurship.

He might be a HR manager in a larger company with good resources, happily hiring all kinds of people for all we know.

I took it as an example of why he won't hire anyone and why he won't even sell his apartment and start a venture. As such he would have no company to represent in saying those things. Further if you never hired anyone, I am pretty sure you could state your reasons in America and not run afoul of legislation. Now if you openly stated such and then hired only 25-50 yr old males, sure you are asking for it and are going to get it.

IMHO, Silicon Valley works because it houses a hugely disproportionate amount of the very best engineers, and from my experience the top .1% or so of engineers open up possibilities that otherwise simply aren't there.

Yes, the capital is here, but I think that's an effect and not a cause. If you took Facebook and started it in any other place in 2004 (with just a handful of exceptions) with exactly the same access to funds I highly doubt it ends up as it is today.

Actually, towards the end of the post he delineates the real tragedy: nobody starts a legal small consulting business in Hungary, for all the reasons he states. It's cheap to hire hi-tech labor in Hungary as long as you just send checks to individuals and leave the government out of it as much as possible.

So the situation is that the gov't, through heavy-handed social legislation, makes it basically impossible to start a small business legally. Big business I suspect has ways and means of gaming the system and making a profit regardless. Bad for Hungary.

It's not the best, but you won't go broke if you have any sort of health emergency.

Then you'd have to remove our 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare (employers pay another 7.65% on employees behalf).

(For the record I am for at-will quitting and firing)

But, as an employer, I feel I am clearly at a disadvantage.

It's easy to put clauses in a contract, but it doesn't actually mean they could be enforced in a court of law, even in one as bad as Romania's.

Having seen the restrictions the local Labour Department (ITM) puts in place, including the kind of stuff you may add to a contract makes me doubt what you say is more than a scam. I have never seen such a contract nor do I know somebody in IT working under such conditions.

Even a non-compete clause is something that I cannot add to a contract because it's super-expensive. According to the law if I want a non-compete on an employee, I have to pay him at least 50% of his salary for the duration of the non-compete.

It is a very grey area. Too much government regulation and how the hell can it be profitable to hire someone. Too little and individuals get borked if they get pregnant/sick/etc.

Personally I would sacrifice less pseudo stability for less regulation. I believe many problems start off with good intentions, especially when it comes to more regulation.

I was comparing the average lean startup to the average large corporation. Neither made-up example was his company.

Politics has more than one dimension, and we're not even sure which dimension is described by this left-right dychotomy.

1. Anti-discrimination laws still apply, even in at-will states in the USA, but all that means is that the employer has to state that they fired the employee for ANYTHING ELSE, even if it's actually for a discriminatory reason.

2. Being fired without cause means gives greater opportunity for employers to abuse their employees - and, considering the general principles of game theory, it WILL happen.

3. Notice vs. cause can be separate things, but many people nowadays don't have the ability to survive longer than a couple of weeks to a few months without a job, and being fired without any notice can literally ruin someone's life.

Again, this is only a personal view - I'm no economist, and I don't pretend to have all the answers. So, please take this with several grains of salt :)

Now, you might say "the company that fires all the blond haired people will eventually die at the hands of a company that gains an advantage by accepting blond haired people." True, but it's a slow bleed, and that certainly doesn't help the blond haired people who were arbitrarily fired.

In case you're skeptical, all this and more can be observed in the case of US black people up until the civil rights era.

Not even remotely the same.

Because those two, worker and employer do not even remotely share the same power...

If I'm walking into work every day wondering if my door badge is going to work that day (one of the psychologically damaging aspects, IMO, of door badges -- I've had co-workers comment "well, I've still got a job" as they walk into the office) based on the capriciousness of a boss (some of whom are very capricious), well, I'm not going to be focusing particularly on the long-term elements of my position. In fact, I'm going to be spending a fair bit of time looking at alternatives and networking.

In ecology, the growth you get in an environment that's continuously disturbed and disrupted is best described as "weedy". There may be vegetation (and even some animal life), it's not going to be particularly productive. What you're getting is lifeforms that are selected for survival capacity, not, say, wood or food production, or even necessarily stability.

Nial Fergusson, though frequently not the best guide, does point this out in his Ascent of Money, noting that one of the requirements for successful and productive economic activity is stability. This applies equally to firms and individuals. Many of the structures we've adopted (debt, savings, finance, subsidized mortgages, various "golden handcuffs") exist either to buffer change or incentivise stability.

Kicking (or threatening to kick out) the legs from under someone isn't that.

Unfortunately, there's also been a lot of cargo-culting built around this: people in the U.S. who bought houses to ensure personal financial stability .... because buying houses is what financially stable do. Unfortunately, that's confounding cause and effect. You buy a house when you've got an assurance of lifetime (or at least long-term) employment, in part to help cement you with that employer. Similarly, establishing large lines of credit (or revolving debt): useful when you've got a reliable, if perhaps fluctuating, income stream to meet those debts.

Anti-discrimination measures, seniority rules, tenure, unions, labor review boards, and the like, all seek to change the power balance of the employer/employee relationship. Which, for any employer with n>1 employees, is greatly skewed in the employer's favor. While this may make for an economic climate which doesn't expand as quickly, it may also make for one that's more stable in a downside movement. Looking at economic growth between the US and established (e.g.: not modernizing, BRIC nations) economies, particularly in Europe and Japan, might be instructive (I haven't done the analysis). However northern Europe (particularly Scandinavian countries) have done quite well over the past 20 years or more.

If your landscape is rapidly shifting and/or doesn't sustain the level of existence you're trying to establish, you're going to want to move elsewhere (physically or figuratively), reduce your needs, or strengthen your foundations.

As to Mr. Andor's statements concerning his employment growth plans and policies:

1. He could move his business to a more hospitable environment.

2. He could find himself competing (successfully or otherwise) with those having different policies. This is "letting the market sort it out".

3. He could petition his government for changes in law and/or practice that better suit his business goals.

I'm not sympathetic to the arguments he provides, and suspect that he'll find that he's greatly limiting his enterprise's growth prospects by foregoing any possible payroll expansion.

Even if he disagrees then, so what?

Company owners/directors vs employees is a 1:x ratio, where x can get to 100,000 and more.

The law should protect the general population (employees) more than the few directors.

And if you are worried about other companies having an unfair advantage make this mandatory in all states. And penalty-tax international goods imported from countries without something similar.

Else, you are competing with the lower common denominator, ie. with what people are willing to do in a poverty stricken country somewhere on the world, where even kids are allowed to be put to work, etc.

Which is unfair to both you and to them (because it makes it possible to perpetuate their relative misery as a "strategic advantage").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal

In the UK it can be up to 11months and 3 weeks before the main employment laws kick in.

Of course, if both parties agree, it's a wash.

"At will" means there's no contractual agreement and an employee can be terminated for documented performance issues or for business reasons (i.e. layoffs) without it being treated as a breach of contract.

That's not true at all. You are misunderstanding contract law. An employer-employee relationship is a contractual relationship, even if not formally memoized in writing.

"At will" simply means that the length of the employment arrangement is not defined, and continues so long both parties agree it shall continue. If either party decides it should not continue, that party may end the arrangement (the employee by quitting, the employer by firing). An at-will employee can be fired for any reason, so long as it is not one of the prohibited discriminatory reasons (i.e., age, gender, etc.). There is no need for the employer to document the reasons for termination, though many due as a matter of course (usually, to defend against discrimination lawsuits).

That said, it's usually not in a person's interest to pursue a wrongful termination lawsuit. It's much easier and less risky, in most cases, to get another job.

LOL. If a person is fired for discriminatory reasons, it is definitely worth the effort to sue. In addition to salary for the period of reasonable unemployment, they are also entitled to punitive damages (usually 3x actual damages).

Why can't we just let in more Chinese immigrants if there's not enough people? China already has plenty of people who want to have more children without me having to pay them to do it.

Yes, that is the way it is in India, and it has been for many years now (as long as I remember). Here are the current rates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_India#Tax_Rates

Also note that the rates are lower for those (of either gender) above 60, and lowest for those above 80.

What's anti-government interventionist? You don't believe in having police to intervene if you're getting your ass beat? Don't believe in courts to intervene in contract disputes? Man, I am so right I can barely stand it.

I'm none of those things. I'm a geolibertarian.

The math part of it was the resolution in the supply demand curve when government intervention increases the burdens on commerce, not whether or not the government should provide services to new mothers.

Perhaps genetics and racism are not the only factors affecting demographic representation in colleges. See: Asians.

That's a good point for employers, where they can perhaps reasonably ask a new graduate for a copy of his transcript and see how well he actually did, but in a lot of cases someone evaluating a graduate does not have access to such details.

For instance, if I have to choose between two lawyers, or two doctors, and all I know is that they have degrees from the same school, and that one of them is in a group that was significantly under represented at that school before Affirmative Action and was not under represented afterwards, then it is, from a probabilistic point of view, in my interest to pick the one that was not from an Affirmative Action group.

Example: suppose a school has 1000 people in a given class. Before Affirmative action, the breakdown was 950 from group A and 50 from group B. Group B is 10% of the general population, so is under represented at this school. The school institutes an Affirmative Action program that lowers the standards for group B, so that they are able to change their class distribution to 900 A, 100 B.

If I later have to pick, say, a lawyer, and all I know is that they were both in that class, and one is an A and one is a B, if I pick an A then I get someone who I know met the original admission standards for the school. If I pick a B, there is a 50% chance he met those standards, and a 50% chance he was one of the ones who got in under the lower standard.

Without any other information, I'm clearly better off going with the A.

Note that this only applies to school where they lowered standards for group B to increase their numbers. There are other ways a school can try to get more B. Caltech, for instance, wants more females. Rather than lowering standards, they just try really hard to get any qualified women who apply to accept. They will send a representative to visit the woman and her family to pitch the benefits of Caltech, for instance, whereas if you are a man you'll only get that kind of treatment if you one of those once in a decade prodigies like a Peter Shor or an Arthur Rubin.

Why do you believe a black applicant has higher future potential than an equally or more qualified white applicant?

At university of michigan, blacks were given 20 extra points on the admission point system, equivalent to 1 full point of GPA. A black student with a 2.6 GPA would be more likely to be admitted than a white or asian student with a 3.5. Why do you believe that this hypothetical black student has more future potential than the white or asian student?

And if there's nothing genetically wrong with black people, then blacks should be demographically represented in colleges.

Ignoring for the moment that we have little good data on whether or not there are relevant genetic differences between blacks and non-blacks, why would there need to be something genetically wrong for blacks to be underrepresented? Why couldn't (for example) cultural factors cause blacks to be less likely to perform well in school?

That certainty is a sign of ignorance and therefore I am ignorant because I am certain is false because that argument is circularly invalid. This statement: "If you are certain about something, it's time to re-examine your assumptions." Seems pretty certain to me.

But I'll cede that I do struggle with the complexities. A couple months ago I wrote this: http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/11602694501/on-economics where I outline past beliefs and why economic policy is hard to study empirically. To me it fundamentally comes down to ethics.

However, I do fully grapple with the opposing arguments that are in favor of Affirmative Action. I just reject them. I understand their side, I've just been lead to believe it is suboptimal.

"[I]f there's nothing genetically wrong with black people, then blacks should be demographically represented in colleges. "

That sounds like you are projecting your way of western thinking onto a subculture you probably don't fully understand. Maybe blacks culturally value things that we don't, like exercise or leisure. I don't know and I don't care because to me it is racist to favor or disfavor one group based on race. Furthermore it is an affront to liberty to force another institution to commence a transaction they do not want to do (allow a substandard applicant to join).

"Why should employers take into account how someone got into Harvard, instead of judging them solely on their performance at Harvard?"

I'm not saying they should, I'm saying that they do. If the side effect of them doing so (if their rational ends up being right) is that they get higher preforming workers then they will grow and this system of discrimination will grow with them. If they are wrong, then their competitors are able to get black graduates cheaper, and, at the margin, grow faster.

Alan Greenspan only hired female economists because he was convinced that they were just as smart as men, and he could pay them less. Of course his firm ended up being wildly successful.

I'll end with saying that Canada does not have an Affirmative Action policy, And I saw absolutely no systemic intellectual difference between them and the rest of the school.

"The things that you (I presume) and I (I'm Asian) take for granted, many black people cannot." Thomas Sowell, a world class economist, the black son of a poor single mom agrees with me on Affirmative Action. I go with appeal to authority because it is my only defense against an Ad hominem.

Affirmative action in college admissions is little more than tokenism. A way to cover up for the disparities in quality in K-12 education, to pretend socioeconomic differences dont aff

Affirmative action in college admissions is little more than tokenism. A way to cover up for the disparities in the quality in K-12 education, to pretend socioeconomic differences have no impact on college preparedness, and to white wash the fact that increasingly a high school diploma is no guarantee of a certain level of mastery of mathematics, literacy, etc. In short tweaking college admissions rates based on race is about the least effective way to try to fix problems in educational disparity or even to fix problems of race bias in college admissions.

This is vague and not good reasoning. You say "nothing wrong with black people" (p) --> "demographically represented in colleges" (q). In your attempt at proof-by-contradiction, you notice that NOT(q) is true, which should imply NOT(p)--something is wrong with black people. We know that's not right either, so what's wrong here is the initial p-->q. So you set up a new p-->q with "there is nothing wrong with admissions" --> "blacks are admitted in a demographical proportion", note NOT(q) again and conclude that NOT(p) is true, that is, there must be something wrong with admissions. Whether one wants to accept this new p-->q is completely separate from the issue of something being wrong with black people. Outside of this logic, NOT(q) could be a sign of any number of things besides "there's a problem in admissions."

Of course, the reality is that there are several feedback loops, and the actual causality doesn't flow one way, so it's hard to reason about (1-bit logic is insufficient) and even hard to influence. One might go around starting with blacks were once thought of as genetically inferior which led to some aspects of their current culture, and now that the genetically-inferior problem is taken away, the bad aspects of some black culture are still there, and they in turn go on to feed the continuation of the culture as well as produce subpar students and other bad individuals who will then be noticed by well-off folks who will associate the race with bad people, not because of some thought that they think black people are genetically inferior, just that they've noticed a lot of bad black people--of course, this leads to effects that are barely different from those caused by people actually thinking black people are genetically inferior, so you have "racism" where "racists" can be backed by observation (limited or not) instead of prejudice which will continue to feed into parts of the loop. And forcing employers to hire substandard black workers is not sufficient to fix the problem in the cycle of substandard black workers being produced in the first place, which has many sources like black culture, "racists", its members being on average poor since no one wants to hire them and other reasons, and more. So you try to fix the poor problem, but you don't because it's not as easy as just making sure they can't be refused a job just on their race. So you get employers complaining about the ineffectual overhead, and you spawn a new type of racist who assumes all black people with jobs were put there instead of a more qualified white man due to affirmative action, and these new types of racists start feeding into the cycle too.

These two variables are highly correlated. Do you think adding a fudge factor for students from disadvantaged groups will give you a more accurate predictor of future potential than just looking at past performance? Is there any data to support that claim?

> Why should employers take into account how someone got into Harvard, instead of judging them solely on their performance at Harvard?

Judging them solely on their performance at Harvard should still lead you to the conclusion that AA students are worse performers on average. That's true even in the hypothetical world where AA students don't come from a disadvantaged group in the first place. If blue weasels and red weasels have exactly the same distribution of skill, and you add affirmative action in favor of blue weasels, then blue weasel students post-admission will underperform their red weasel peers on average, for reasons that seem mathematically obvious.

Yes, women have uteri and lactate while men don't. It really is that simple and societies have compensated for this for millennia by putting (or pressuring) an obligation to provide for a woman on the father of her children, a practice later institutionalized and extended in marriage.

Is there a better solution? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the reasons for that one are pretty clear.

Also, I'm a little concerned with the fact that this private family matter now involves government and employers. There is a worrying, at least to me, trend of corporations and governments regulating more and more of our private lives.

And I think that regulations mostly do good and are important to stop bullies from eating up society.

I'm sure most business thought that outlawing slaves in the US would ruin them. Now business are thinking that hiring women of child bearing age will ruin them. They probably also think that not being allowed to dump their waste in the river will ruin them too.

I'd also push back on "not much in the way of a safety net". I'd like universal single-payer health care, but in the meantime it's worth remembering (a) once you hit retirement age, you very much do get public health care, and (b) retirement age is when you're most likely to incur medical expenses.

As tptacek pointed out you are ignoring that the state tax is federally deductible and that the income tax rate at the 25% bracket is the marginal rate.

(I'd personally guess that culture and corruption have more to do with the large economic differences between Sweden and Hungary than taxation or parental-leave policies do, so I think he's barking up the wrong tree.)

for example, in hard times, or to pay debts, allow to sell oneself into lifetime slavery.

The owner of a 100/1000/10000 people company has much more power than the employee in need of work negotiating his salary/working conditions.

Not everyone is a "rock star" employee that managers are bending over backwards to accommodate.

That doesn't mean that the rest of the hundreds of millions of workers have to work with whatever conditions they can arrange for themselves. If managers could have their way, everybody would be working 18/7 for substinence salary. A society has to make laws to protect the public from that.

Politics used to mean: "a way to protect the common folk from bigger powers".

If the state believes it's a good idea to have a parent at home, the money for maternity and paternity should come out of the state's coffers.

And I'd encourage everybody to be open about their plans to have kids or not. If this results in undue discrimination against people raising kids, offset it with a corporate tax break for employing people with dependents.

This would be really expensive, but probably cheaper than the costs that a destitute single mom or a poorly-parented kid can inflict on society. And at least the costs would be borne by everyone, and both businesses and their employees could be honest and plan realistically.

1. Split your workers into departments. No one single worker should handle all the processes.

2. Use forms to guide people through the process. It will make your processes easier to automate.

3. Take some upfront payment. That will discourage customers from dealing with your employees on the side.

Another trick that I learnt from somebody else is to hold one key process to yourself.

Someone I knew gets clothing manufactured in China. But before it is sold, they do an adjustment to it that is not known to the factory.

Just as Coke has its "secret recipe", you have to make clear to your freelancers that you have a secret step. It will be enough to discourage them from running away with business.

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You need to find a business which is less easy to copy and/or one in which you can offer significant benefit vs. an illegal competitor. It's that simple. In the U.S. we have an identical situation to what you describe in the services industry: outsourcing. I need to charge X in order to survive as, say, a web developer, whereas someone in India or Vietnam can charge 1/X for essentially the same service. Now it's my decision whether to create enough benefit for a customer to continue in that field, knowing that many potential customers will simply outsource, or identify another field where I can provide a service that is not as easily outsourced.

Competition is competition, in respect to your business plan the legality is irrelevant.

The reason that the article irked me:

Imagine this combination: brilliant, an MSc in CompSci, being over 50, female, not white, and an immigrant.

I tried to get her hired for the IT department where I worked. Instead she was cheated out of her pay and fired before the standard employee trial period ended. Standard practice for the place. (900 employees in four years, avg occupancy of 50 workers, anyone mid-level and up is white only, and as soon as a project was over almost everybody is fired, continuity of work is not the issue).

I've heard all the same excuses before in a much friendlier business environment. All in an attempt to treat people like they are not human beings. I know nothing about the author and I'm not disputing the realities of business in Hungary. But damn I want to shoot the message.

And a swath of downvotes in an attempt to do so is worth that...