Vacation blogging

I completely disagree with Good Klein when he says this:

Luckily, there are alternate ways to test my hypothesis that people actually wouldappreciate more vacation. A major presidential candidate, possibly a Democratic nominee, could make a proposal for enforce three weeks paid vacation a major issue in the campaign. If this turned out to be popular, well, then we'd know it was popular, and accorded with the nation's preferences.

First of all, this wouldn't be a true test at all. If phrased in that way, very few people could follow the line of logic to its natural conclusion. Therefore, very few people would say that they opposed this mandate. After all, who doesn't want more vacation?

But that's not the appropriate question. The appropriate question is whether people want more vacation time more than they want more income. There is a pretty clear trade-off here. It's not just the productivity or dis-employment effects which Klein (sort of) discusses later in the post. It's just that mandating an extra week of paid vacation for all the country's full-time workers will have effects elsewhere; most likely, it will come at the expense of salary growth. Or, other benefits (e.g. health insurance, pension plans) will be less generous. Unemployment isn't the only concern here. In fact, it is well down the list.

Of course, this says nothing at all about the philosophical question; to whit: Who is Klein to arbitrarily say that an employer must grant three weeks of paid vacation to everyone, even if the majority of public opinion is on his side? I mean, yeah... it would be nice to have more vacation. But it would also be nice to have more money. To the extent that there is a trade-off between the two, and it seems impossible that there isn't, Klein's decision to mandate one at the expense of the other for purely normative reasons (i.e. he personally wants more vacation, and is willing to sacrifice some salary to that end) is patently absurd. It is not the job of government to legislate preferences. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

If this truly was something that was important to people, then labor unions would be pushing hard for the expansion of vacation time. Instead, they lobby for higher wages, more lucrative retirement plans, and more expansive health insurance. Those are the priorities, and forcing more vacation time on to people works against those ends. The fact that this isn't already a political issue, at all, should be enough of an experiment for Klein.