Altruism Will Now Be Mandatory

Hillary Clinton has had a decent week. Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee both withdrew from the nomination race, and Joe Biden announced he wasn't running.

I never thought Bernie Sanders was serious about being president. I believe all he wants to do is pull the Democrat party further to the left. Martin O'Malley doesn't stand a chance. The Democrat party may never again nominate a white male.

Just like that, all of Hillary's competition has been swept aside, and she has nothing but open field ahead to the nomination. The media will do everything possible to shepherd her candidacy all the way to the White House.

Media submission to Hillary's agenda won't just be reflected in direct advocacy, such as CNN's Carl Bernstein boasting that he was correct in predicting that she would "make monkeys" out of the Benghazi committee.

Subordination of journalism for the progressive agenda will also take the form of indirect advocacy, which will coincidentally approximate Hillary's platform. Her campaign is going to depend on large turnouts for women and minorities, so expect her to go full social justice warrior.

The Democrat Party is not only counting on broad demographic trends, media servility and their Electoral College advantage (dominance in large cities can carry whole states). The Democrats have also harnessed Silicon Valley's best and brightest, using technology to deploy data mining, targeted advertising, and confederated opinion pieces that will be focus-group tested and amplified across the media spectrum. A prime example is this Bloomberg article on paid leave, entitled, California Shows How Paid-Leave Law Affects Businesses: Not Much.

Notice how easily and subtly an analytic article becomes an opinion piece. The columnist just has to pick out one of Hillary's policy positions, then frame an article demonstrating how little impact it will have on businesses. A few carefully chosen anecdotes, full of emotional heft, show how desperately welcome these policy ideas are.

Bloomberg contributor Esmé E. Deprez states that "Papua New Guinea and the U.S. are the only countries to not offer cash benefits to women taking maternity leave, according to the International Labour Organization." I had no idea the United States was as backward as Papua New Guinea. Maybe more so! I believe their national currency is a fish bone that can be worn in a nose-piercing.

Mandatory paid leave is good, Deprez argues, because of California's experience. Since 2004, California workers can be paid for up to six weeks to care for a newborn or a sick loved one, and "California’s employment growth outpaced the U.S. average by 2 percentage points during that time." Er, last time I checked, California's unemployment rate is a full percentage point higher than the national average.

Mandating paid leave is a de facto subsidy on absenteeism, and the business will have to hire more people or pay existing people overtime to make up the shortfall. The decision should be left to mutual agreement between workers and employers.

Socializing paid leave puts America more firmly on the path to Sweden. If the money comes from the payroll tax withholding, then the worker is paying for it anyway. If the government helps the business offset the expense with a tax deduction, then it comes from the general fund. How is it moral to borrow money from our grandchildren to pay for the votes of a few more women?