President Obama signed his first bill, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, into law on Thursday. This act reverses the Supreme Court’s 2007 Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision, which stated that, “An individual wishing to challenge an employer under this [Title VII] provision must first file a charge with the EEOC … Such a charge must be filed within a specific period (either 180 days or 300 days, depending on the state) after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred.” Since Ledbetter failed to file for discrimination within 180 days of the decision to pay her less than her male coworkers, the Supreme Court sided with Goodyear and overturned the decision to award Ledbetter with $360,000.

Under the new Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the employee has 180 days from the time of his or her last paycheck to file. Obama said, “It’s not just unfair and illegal — but bad for business — to pay someone less because of their gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion or disability.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act states, “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

Although the President may consider this to be what is fair, that is not necessarily the case. This is a classic example of the government telling people — employers in this case — what they can and can’t do with their money. If an employer — for whatever reason they wish, or no reason at all — decides that they don’t want to trade a certain quantity of their money for a person’s labor, the government should have no right to step in and force them to.

In the Ledbetter case, Ledbetter and Goodyear made an agreement that Ledbetter would work for a certain amount of money. If either of them became unhappy with the arrangement, they both had the right to end or attempt to change the agreement.

But the agreement was between the two of them. It has nothing to do with the other employees, and certainly nothing to do with the government. If Ledbetter wanted to be paid as much as her male coworkers, she should have specified it as a term of her employment.

Whether Ledbetter’s unequal pay was a result of her gender, her performance as an employee, or some other factor is completely irrelevant. Ledbetter was perfectly content with her pay for nearly 19 years. It wasn’t until she became aware of what the other employees were making that she decided she hadn’t been happy with the rate at which she had spent years trading her labor for Goodyear’s money.

Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t until she realized she could sue that she decided she hadn’t been happy with the rate at which she had spent years trading her labor for Goodyear’s money.

We must be cautious. Every time our government is allowed to mandate what we can and cannot do with our own money, no matter how good the intention, our money becomes less our own and more the government’s.

– Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt.