Property Is Theft

California Governor Jerry Brown signed another employment-related bill yesterday. It's called an expansion of paid family leave benefits, but it's really an indirect tax on employment.

There is a unifying logic behind the progressive push for mandating these type of employee benefits: the belief that being an employee is a form of slavery. This is informed by the progressive repulsion to capitalism, and belief that property is theft.

Progressives make a distinction between property and a possession. Property is something like a factory, where someone owns the means of production, and the workers have to work for the property owner, to produce his surplus. A piece of property like a house is a possession as long as it isn't being used to exploit workers.

The California paid family leave isn't just a tax on employment. Since women are usually primary caregivers, the law is a subsidy on females in the workplace. Paid for by men.

The only good thing about this expansion of benefits, is that it is totally funded by employee contributions into the SDI fund. Employers in San Francisco aren't so lucky, though. With California providing partial pay for six weeks off, San Francisco employers are going to have to cough up the rest, to give the employee 100% pay for six weeks.

This benefit will come at the expense of pay raises. The reason we have a system where health insurance is connected to employment is a vestige of the wage-and-price controls of World War II. Employers could not attract scarce workers with higher pay, so the benefit of health care was added as enticement.

Now the government is mandating higher pay and benefits. Because, according to the L.A. Times, The United States lags behind other countries in providing parental leave and is the only major industrialized nation that doesn't require paid leave.

The United States also lags behind other countries in intractably high unemployment rates.

California Governor Brown has lost all reason. He said the paid family leave law is "to compensate for the gross inequality that is not an abstraction but it's bringing down the lives of a lot of people who live in California."

Why not stop importing unskilled, illiterate workers, then?