Mark Perry on the latest mandated paid family leave

See More on government-mandated paid family leave: Aparna Mathur responds to her critics. Excerpt:

"One quick comment and a few questions about the costs of a government-mandated paid family leave program: Aparna, Abby McCloskey and Angela Rachidi address the direct costs of government-coerced paid family leave here:

In the end, our paid parental leave plan called for eight weeks of leave with a 70% wage replacement rate, up to $600 per week. National paid parental leave policy along the lines we proposed would cost roughly between $8.3 billion to $10.5 billion per year, depending upon how many employees take up the program. The costs are not inconsequential, but it translates to a payroll tax increase of less than $100 per year for the average worker. We encourage lawmakers to balance them with the benefits of paid parental leave, from the perspective of the economic and health and well-being of American parents and children.

But what about the indirect costs to the employers, who have to hire replacement staff during the 8-weeks of absence, or pay existing staff overtime to cover for the absent employee, or impose higher work burdens on existing staff, or turn down business for the temporary lack of staff, etc. especially in cases when more than one employee could be on paid family leave at the same time. Wouldn’t all of those necessary and disruptive adjustments result in a inevitable losses of efficiency, reduced revenue, and/or increased costs for employers that would make the total cost much higher than $8 to 10 billion in direct out-of-pocket costs? Doesn’t the economic health and financial well-being of employers have to be considered along with the “health and well-being of American parents and children?”

Sure, there are “positive externalities to allowing women to stay attached to the workforce while also allowing them to take time off to meet family needs,” but don’t those positive externalities have to weighed carefully against all of the negative externalities imposed on employers, including all of the indirect costs mentioned above? Have all of those indirect costs been considered?

Finally, I think we should be cautious and very suspicious about supporting a government-mandated program because it imposes “a payroll tax increase of less than $100 per year for the average worker.” That logic honors a long-standing tradition of “legal plunder,” protectionism, and crony capitalism that is justified by saying “We’re only picking the pockets of workers, taxpayers or consumers a little bit at a time to satisfy Special Interest Group X, so think of all the benefits of Program X while ignoring the small amount of legal plunder per person.” For example, US sugar producers are only picking $5 per year from the pockets of each US consumer, so the trade protectionism and legal plunder for that special interest group has been justified for many generations. All government-mandated programs bestow benefits on concentrated well-organized special interest groups while imposing much greater costs on dispersed, unorganized taxpayers, workers and/or consumers. How would mandated paid family leave differ in any significant ways from other forms of government-mandated “legal plunder” that provide concentrated benefits on a special interest group?

And Aparna mentions the word “women” 33 times in her response and focuses exclusively on mothers, but never mentions the word “men.” In the interest of gender equity and fairness, I assume that men will also be eligible for mandated paid family/parental leave as fathers, and have those costs been accounted for?

Update: Don Boudreaux responds with celerity and swiftness on Cafe Hayek — “Another Open Letter to Aparna Mathur.” Here’s Don’s conclusion in a post that specifically addresses Aparna’s “market failure” claim that labor markets fail to supply adequate amounts of paid leave in the absence of government intervention:

The bottom line here is that any legitimate case for government action requires more than mere assertions that decision-makers fail to account adequately for the social costs and benefits of their decisions. Instead, what’s required is a plausible case, grounded in sound economics, for market failure. Yet you offer no such case. Again, neither listing the social benefits of women working nor describing in the abstract conditions under which markets would fail to supply adequate amounts of paid leave counts as such a case."