So, your state has the highest unemployment in the nation, is losing population, is on track to having its per capita personal income exceeded by places like Alabama, and is viewed by potential job providers as having toxic tax, labor and regulatory environments - whatcha gonna do?

"I know," said the Michigan House on Tuesday, "Let's take a road trip from reality. Lets end those archaic institutions of free enterprise and business owners making their own decisions about how to run their firms. Let's visit Marxist-Land, where the state decides how much each worker will be paid - not those nasty capitalists."

The road signs on this little trip to Workers Paradise read, "House Bills 4625 and 4627." Here's how MichiganVotes describes the former:

"Passed in the House (59 to 48) on April 22, 2008, to prohibit paying a person a wage or salary that is less than an amount established under an interpretation of `comparable worth' devised by a proposed commission composed of various special interests and advocacy groups. The bill would prohibit different levels of compensation for work of `comparable value,' meaning a `comparable composite skill, responsibility, effort, education or training, and working conditions.' The bill does not specify how different kinds of work would be compared with regard to these various criteria."

And get a load of who is on that "proposed commission," the subject of House Bill 4627: The directors of the Department of Civil Rights and the MEDC, and representatives from the Michigan Women's Commission, the National Organization of Women, and the Michigan Women's Studies Association, the AFL-CIO, and the UAW. This phalanx of apparatchiks, victimologists, Marxists and union goons would be "balanced" by two lonely members of the business community, one each from the Michigan Chamber and the Small Business Association.

On the House floor Rep. Dave Robertson, who is rarely at a loss for words, claimed that the English language did not contain terms that could adequately express the depth of this pernicious folly, and observed that even though the bill is DOA in the Senate ("Senate Republicans kill pay discrimination bill" as the "unbiased" headline of WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids put it), the fact that a state legislative body would pass such a measure sends a loud-and-clear message to any investor or entrepreneur thinking about putting capital at risk in Michigan: "You gotta be nuts."

Thank you Comrade Representatives - you have made the economic development officers of all the states competing with Michigan very happy today.