The other day, the MSN Web site ran an advice column entitled “Illegal Questions.” Like Kid Gavilan’s bolo punch in slow motion, you could see what was coming.

Some questions in job interviews are “illegal,” it reported, although such questions help employers evaluate the practicality of hiring certain candidates.

Funny thing is, for all we hear about “illegal questions,” we never hear about the punitive laws that establish government’s unconstitutional and unjust dominion over business and private property.

“Do you plan to have children?” the writer avers, is illegal because an employer has no need to know and might discriminate against a woman applicant. The job candidate has three ways of answering:

“To answer the question honestly even though she did not want to; to tell the interviewer it is none of his business and the question is illegal; to deal with the concern behind the question, ignoring the illegal question itself.”

Except for that careerist sniffing the wind for a whiff of “discrimination,” most job candidates mightn’t care about such a question, and if they did, they’d probably ignore it and work all the harder to get the job.

A second example: Years ago, I ran a small weekly paper in Northern Virginia; a writer’s job worth about $20,000 a year opened up.

A woman earning about $70,000 annually and who lived in the wealthy Great Falls neighborhood called to inquire about it (everyone wants to be a writer). The conversation to determine whether she could afford the pay cut went something like this.

“Are you married?” I innocently asked.

“You can’t ask that question,” she huffed.

“I’m asking,” I firmly replied, “not because I care about your marriage, but because I can’t hire you if you can’t afford a $50,000 pay cut. You might quit in two weeks, and I’ll have to do this again. So I need to know if you have a husband who can support you.”

Conversation over.

Presumably, the lawful question would have been, “can you afford and are you willing to take the pay cut?” Even the MSN writer admits an employer wants to “make sure you are the solution to a problem, not the source of more headaches.” Still, such questions are forbidden because a man would never have to answer such intrusive inquiries.

Well, men can’t get pregnant, they typically don’t leave jobs when children arrive and most wives don’t support their husbands. Even that snippy woman from Great Falls knew the “illegal question” was good sense.

Ironically, these prohibitive laws harm the job candidates, men included, they are intended to protect. Unable to ask questions, an employer can simply avoid hiring a potential problem.

More importantly, the federal laws are unconstitutional, and all of them, state and federal, are immoral and unjust. They punish employers for asking questions that ultimately maximize efficiency and profits; they are fiscal vandalism, an insidious, hidden tax.

And they wrongly assume a person’s “right” to a job supersedes the private-property rights of the employer. Imagined “rights,” of course, are the impulse behind all “discrimination” and wage laws.

In a free society that protected private property rights, an employer could ask any question without fear of retribution in court. What is illegal might not be illicit or unfair, and even if so, the law needn’t forbid it.

But who says we live in a free society?

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: [email protected].