[st3v3r]

"Companies that can't afford this will be at a market disadvantage"

I disagree entirely that this "disadvantage" is enough for them to worry or care. If the disadvantage was real, you'd see more companies sacrificing profits to do it.

"The most American thing about America is "it's a free country". That means that unless there is a vast social cost with allowing a certain behavior, it should be legal and people should be allowed to prosper or fail on the basis of their own choices rather than governmental policy that states "we know what's best for you"."

That statement ignores an awful lot about reality.

[cookiecaper]

>I disagree entirely that this "disadvantage" is enough for them to worry or care. If the disadvantage was real, you'd see more companies sacrificing profits to do it.

Most professional workplaces offer some form of parental leave. My workplace offers 1 week for men (I don't know what they offer women, I assume it's much longer). It's not the 20 weeks that Amex just announced, but it's not nothing.

The disadvantage is real. I've tried to hire professionals in a place that didn't offer benefits before. They wouldn't come aboard -- not a single one (and yes, IMO, parental leave is a standard benefit). I had to draw from a pool of college kids who needed a break into the industry.

>That statement ignores an awful lot about reality.

I disagree. I think that's always been the American way. Government should be small and only interfere with specific legislation when very significant macro-level damage is likely. Other than that, the government's role is to preserve order (including both a criminal and a civil justice system) and promote freedom of conscience within the law, and free people will be free to act in their own best interests without burdensome constraints or regulation. That's how I define "freedom".

Whether you think every company should offer 20 weeks of parental leave (itself debatable from a business perspective, though obviously not a perk many employees would willfully decline) is different from whether you think they should be forced to do so.

[st3v3r]

>The disadvantage is real. I've tried to hire professionals in a place that didn't offer benefits before. They wouldn't come aboard -- not a single one (and yes, IMO, parental leave is a standard benefit). I had to draw from a pool of college kids who needed a break into the industry.

So, to the higher ups, they were still able to hire. Did they eventually decide this was a disadvantage, and try to rectify it? Or did they not change?

>and free people will be free to act in their own best interests without burdensome constraints or regulation. That's how I define "freedom".

Having to pay rent and buy food are definitely huge burdensome constraints. Hence, most of this "If you don't like it, you don't have to work there!" is ignoring much of that, and reality. You said you had to hire college kids who didn't have any bargaining clout. But people out of college have kids too. Do you honestly think that this kind of benefit is something that should only be reserved for someone who is lucky enough to be in a good bargaining position?

>Whether you think every company should offer 20 weeks of parental leave (itself debatable from a business perspective, though obviously not a perk many employees would willfully decline) is different from whether you think they should be forced to do so.

Not to me. But then there are many things I don't believe should be dependent on where one works, or how good they are at bargaining.

[cookiecaper]

>So, to the higher ups, they were still able to hire. Did they eventually decide this was a disadvantage, and try to rectify it? Or did they not change?

I was the higher-up. I couldn't afford a full benefit package and decided to try the market and see who would work without them. The answer was "only people who didn't have the option". I hired two of those people instead.

I would've liked to hire someone with 20 weeks of parental leave and a full benefits package, but it was the second hire in a bootstrapped consulting company. I had to lay them off after about 14 months when two of our major clients ran out of money at about the same time (we mainly consulted with startups, obviously a bad market). I got hired by a client full-time about 2 months after that.

So yes, it was a real disadvantage, and yes, it would've been nice to rectify it. I just didn't have the cashflow for that.

>Having to pay rent and buy food are definitely huge burdensome constraints. Hence, most of this "If you don't like it, you don't have to work there!" is ignoring much of that, and reality.

Those are real-world survival constraints, not artificial government-imposed constraints. The government can't just wave a magic wand and make everything in the world free and automatic. That's been tried before and that blatant denialism results in stunning evil and poverty. The organic market that allows real-world risk and reward to be passed through with minimal artificial influence is the only system that functions reasonably well.

The people of the country do not owe you a ticket to free rent. The government's role is to not make sure that everyone is rewarded or even that everyone survives. Your prosperity is now and always will be your responsibility. The difference is that in a socialist system, that prosperity is almost impossible to attain. In our system, opportunity is everywhere for the people who want to stop whining and go out and take advantage of it.

>Do you honestly think that this kind of benefit is something that should only be reserved for someone who is lucky enough to be in a good bargaining position?

I honestly think that this kind of benefit is not something that should be forced, and it's not something that's owed, just as a job isn't owed. You have to earn these things. You have to convince someone that they need to give them to you in exchange for something else you're going to give them. I really don't understand the rules of the world you're envisioning here. Everyone should just get whatever they want because they want it? That's simply not how reality works, and it's not how it's ever going to work, even in the most ideal conditions. There must be a functioning risk-reward system or the whole thing falls apart with stunning rapidity.

>Not to me. But then there are many things I don't believe should be dependent on where one works, or how good they are at bargaining.

Personally, I think it's quite frightening that you believe that you should have the authority to force everyone in the country to do what you think should be done. That's not freedom, it's dictatorship. We only use force and compulsory means when an action threatens our social structure's fundamental operations. Everything else must be allowed to prosper or decline on its own merit, and we must allow people to do things we don't personally agree with, or the system doesn't work.

The scary part is that when most people have the perspective you're sharing, when the respect for competition and the ability of each individual as a sovereign and independent actor to make his own choices and prosper or fail by them is gone, that's when freedom is crushed. It takes a society that truly respects these principles to secure the kind of government we've enjoyed in the US for the last 200+ years, and I fear more and more that as a society, we're losing that. And once we lose it culturally, it's just a few short years until the politics follows.