No, Paid Sick Leave Isn’t “Government Intervention”

Bloomberg View usually offers economics-heavy reporting with right-of-center viewpoints. Today, Tyler Cowen continued this trend. He takes issue  with Hillary Clinton’s chief economist, Heather Boushey, and her reliance on government-mandated solutions. After reading Boushey’s “thoughtful and intelligent book” ( buy it here ), Cowen believes she has some troubling remedies for rebalancing the work-life conflict. He thinks her policy proposals, like “paid sick leave, paid parental leave, subsidized child care and better care for the elderly” are “an extensive set of government interventions.” (In the interest of full disclosure, Heather is a friend of Civic Skunk Works and has appeared on one of our podcast episodes .) Think about how Cowen frames these, let’s be honest, pretty generic policies. Interventions. Just reading it makes me think of a greedy government bureaucrat coming for my private property. But how can someone genuinely call policies like paid sick leave an intervention? If you were to say that in any other developed country, you’d be laughed out of the room (as we pointed out in our latest podcast —  listen to it !). These interventions are merely acts by government to fix problems that the free market hasn’t touched. That’s what FDR addressed with the Fair Labor Standards Act, where he intervened and imposed dreadful policies like the minimum wage and limiting child labor. Just like then, it’s not as if Americans today haven’t given the market enough time to deal with these issues. The market clearly just doesn’t care. How else can you explain why 40% of private sector workers don’t have access to paid sick leave? Note to Cowen: sometimes the government needs to set a minimal standard so that the market cannot continue to undermine the best interests of our society. Whereas Cowen thinks Boushey “holds too much faith in mandated and centralized solutions,” the same can be said for Cowen and the free market. He
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