In September of 2016, Ivanka Trump proudly announced: “My father’s policy will give paid leave to mothers whose employers are among the almost 90 percent of U.S. businesses that currently do not offer this benefit.” In May, in his 2018 budget, Trump called for six weeks of paid family leave for mothers and fathers after the birth or adoption of a child. The estimated $18.5 billion cost over 10 years would be funded through the unemployment insurance system and offset by reforms to the system, such as eliminating or reducing improper payments. –RealClearPolitics.com
Authoritarian politicians and their cronies in media have misled us. Well, that is until now. Now you have the Liberty Block to cut through the deceitful manipulation that’s been disguised as ‘political correctness’. Before understanding why forcing private companies to pay women while they take maternity leave is a terrible policy, you first need to understand some simple terms that constitute the foundation of economics.
Asset – Any thing or person that provides value to its owner or business.
Liability – Any thing or person that decreases value for its owner or business.
Imagine 2 columns: Assets vs. Liabilities (or Operating Expenses vs. Revenue). If your business spends more each year than it makes, it will be in debt or go bankrupt.
Employees are assets to their businesses because they give their business more value with what they produce than the cost to employ them. If they did not produce more than the cost to employ them, the business would not employ them. For this reason, forbidding companies from paying anyone less than $15 is not a good policy. Companies would then be forced to hire less people, since the increasingly expensive employees would become liabilities.
Now, we’re ready to address the female employee who gives birth. If our politicians do fulfill their campaign promises of forcing companies to provide maternity leave for females, women of childbearing age will instantly see their value plummet from asset all the way down to liability. If you were forced to pay employees for 6 weeks after giving birth despite them not coming into work, you would not hire any pre-menopausal women, and you would probably not pay them as much as the others if you did hire them. Additionally, you would discriminate against women who are fertile and reward those who have had tubal ligations. Why would you want an employee who may easily become a liability when you could hire someone who will show up to work every day and who will not cost your business more money?
We already have many ‘protections’ from ‘discrimination’ for many groups. In addition to all of the other labor laws, there are currently many federal laws concerning discrimination of pregnant employees. This may be one of the contributing factors to women only comprising 47% of the workforce, and it seems to help explain the gender wage gap. Some of these laws include section 7 of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which states that ‘Employers must provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child’s birth. Employers must also provide a place for nursing mothers, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public’.
This same reality applies to mandatory paid parental leave for both parents of the new child. If employers are forced by threat of law to pay them both to sit at home, we will see a decrease in jobs among those expected to have children. As someone who plans to have children within the coming years, this law would directly discriminate against (my girlfriend and) me. By making me into a liability, the government would make it more difficult for me to find a job, and make me less valuable (meaning that I would earn less as a result). Think about your job now. Would your boss have hired you if you had glass bones like that poor fish-man from SpongeBob who suffers infinite fractures in the show? Of course not! There’s a reasonable expectation that the employee made of glass will get injured frequently and therefore not be able to work as much as the average employee. We all know this. If you are a champion Fantasy Football League owner like me, you avoid players who are inconsistent/likely to sustain injuries, because each week that they are sitting out, they are hurting you by occupying a spot on your roster. The same concept applies to every business, only instead of one spot, we are talking about real money. We know that consistency and dependability make prospective employees more attractive to employers. There’s a reason that I held my first job for 4 and a half years before moving on. I very rarely missed work for any reason, and my boss knew that. We know that our inconsistent coworkers are not regarded as valuable employees. We know that they should not be. So why do we let the socialist politicians and the lame-stream media stop us from applying common sense and economics whenever a female or a gay person is involved?
Let’s apply what we now know to minimum wage. As we discussed earlier, employers will only ever pay employees a salary that corresponds to the amount of value they produce for the business. If I create widgets that sell for a profit of thousands of dollars, I may be paid quite well. This is, of course, also affected by how replaceable I am and by how many widgets I produce each day. If I produce few widgets that sell for little profit, I will likely earn quite a low salary. This is especially true if my job does not require lots of experience and if any random person off the street could replace me with minimal training. Imagine that I do only have little training, and that I do not produce much value for my company, and that I am paid $6 per hour. It’s the best job that I’m qualified for, so I gladly go to work each day to earn as much as I can and to climb the ladder of my company. What would happen if the law suddenly dictated that my company could either pay me twice my current salary or nothing at all? This is exactly what minimum wage laws do. Knowing what you now know about economics, you understand that my company would fire me immediately. I simply cannot provide enough value to be worth that high of a salary. Would you keep Ryan Fitzpatrick on your roster all season long? Would you trade your RB1 and WR1 for him? Of course not! He simply isn’t worth the value. This is precisely why forcing a minimum wage on employers would cost people jobs. In fact, it would cost the lowest wage and lowest skilled workers their jobs. Why do big government liberals pretend to support low skilled workers if they perpetually campaign for a policy that would make them all impossible to hire?
If I had 10 employees, and I paid them each $7.50 an hour, and the government forced me to pay them $15 or $0, I would do one of 3 things: I would fire them all and replace them with robots, I would keep half of them and work them twice as hard, or I would go out of business. I’m sure that we could all agree that none of those are good for the low skilled/low wage employees. This is the message that we need to be teaching our young and misled voters. We should teach them to support workers’ rights to find jobs instead of the ‘equality’ BS that socialists pretend to care about.
What if the government paid the new mothers? First off, since you listen to and read the Liberty Block, you already know that whenever ‘the government’ says that they’ll pay for something, they mean that they will increase the taxation of their constituents and then redistribute that money to another group of people, generally to win favor among specific voting blocks. For the record, no politician has the right to take more money from us and give it to whomever they choose. This is true regardless of whether they give the product of their theft to poor people, new mothers, Ryan Fitzpatrick, or imaginary fish whose bones are made of glass, or anyone.
The government does not have the authority to steal & redistribute any more than people have the right to steal & redistribute. Theft is theft. Having a ‘majority’ does not authorize theft. If I assembled enough people to outvote you at a meeting, that does not mean that we could hang you or take your money. Over the past 240 years, Americans have increasingly forgotten this.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Liberty Block or any of its members. We welcome all forms of serious feedback and debate.
