Washington Post Whines That U.S. Insufficiently Socialist, Not Like Other Cool Kid Countries
28th May 2013
As this graph from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows, the United States is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee its workers either paid vacation or holidays.
Yeah, because if the U.S. did that, then we too might have unemployment rates hovering around 20%, like the Europeans.
Of course, in practice, richer workers are able to negotiate for both paid vacation and paid holidays. It’s poorer workers who can’t take any time off.
Perhaps that’s because ‘richer workers’ (i.e. those with useful skills) are worth more than ‘poorer workers’ (i.e. those who could be replaced by a robot)? Naw, that couldn’t be it. (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen ‘richer’ and ‘worker’ combined in an article in the Washington Post. Where was the editor? Didn’t he know that ‘workers’ aren’t ‘richer’, and ‘richer’ don’t actually ‘work’?)
This is one more way in which the poor often end up working much harder than the rich.
The others being things like minimum wage laws, mandatory union dues payments even if you don’t want to belong to the union, uncontrolled immigration of low-skilled workers, and mandatory benefits that make ‘poorer workers’ uneconomical to hire.
Of course the goal here is not to ensure that ‘poorer workers’ don’t work as hard, but to make sure that they don’t work at all, by pricing them out of the market and guaranteeing that they’ll wind up on taxpayer-provided benefits and therefore augmenting the voter base of the Democrat party.
But that’s not on your copy, of course….