EU Calls for Shorter Work Week, Had More Stuff to Say But Took Off for the Day

posted at 8:48 am on May 8, 2009 by dougpowers
[ Politics ]   

European Union leaders have called for a shorter work week in order to create jobs.

Legislating people working less to lower the unemployment rate isn’t new — this has been the economic strategy of France for quite a while.

The European theory behind limiting the work week is, in part, that any overtime forces an employer to hire more staff instead of just pay fewer people to work longer.

You have to appreciate the thinking there, which is not unlike that of the American left, meaning that it’s creative and sounds logical to the grey matter challenged, but can’t hold water. If the reasoning behind shortened work-week laws sounds like a good idea, consider this: if making up ground on a high unemployment rate can be solved by lowering the number of hours worked per person, at what point does that become a stupid idea (hint: at any point).

Let’s assume that shortening the work-week to, say, 32 hours, doesn’t achieve the intended purpose of dramatically lowering the unemployment rate. This will lead to the next great idea in socialist theory: the 20 hour per week maximum… then ten hours… then five hours. The decline in working hours will continue until nobody is working at all. Somehow this culminates in full employment.

It actually works out well in the end, because through it all, these governments will have to raise business taxes through the roof in order to send checks to people who can’t survive on just a few hours of work per week, so the businesses will go under and there won’t be anywhere to work anyway.

The scary thing is that this kind of thinking has made its way to America due to the somewhat recent idiocy pandemic. The only work-week I’m for placing mandatory restrictions on is the government. If private sector people work hard, that’s good for the economy. If the government works long and hard, we’re screwed.

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