Forced equality and sectoral socialism

A friend from Liberty Institute, India, Barun Mitra, wrote a good article,
"The political fallout of the battle of the sexes"
Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review, April 2010
http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2010/04/the-political-fallout-of-the-battle-of-the-sexes/

Barun looked at the proposed constitutional amendment in India which is seeking to reserve one-third of the seats in legislative assemblies, on a rotational basis. Barun said that "While I am all for greater political participation by women and all other sections of society, I am completely against this idea of reserving seats for any section of society."

I told Barun that in the Philippines, this is similar to the party-list system in the House of Representatives. The Constitution mandated that "up to 20 percent" of the House should be alloted to party-list groups. The result is ugly. I made a short discussion about it, "Party-list as a marginal concept" (article below) and also posted in
http://www.thelobbyist.biz/perspectives/columns/back_to_personal_responsibility/838.html

A friend who worked in Norway once also observed that the law mandating that up to 20 or 30 percent of management position in private corporations should be reserved to women, is putting many Norwegian companies at a disadvantage in global corporate competitions. Not because women are "inferior" but when female managers take maternity leave of up to 1 year, the company is somehow crippled.

Wholesale socialism is still difficult to advance now as the fall of the berlin wall and east european communism is still fresh in the minds of many people. So many socialists advocate "sectoral socialism", like forced gender equality (gender socialism?), forced health equity (health socialism), forced and heavy environmental regulations (ecological socialism), and so on.

There are a number of successes with sectoral socialism compared to wholesale socialism.