California Gov. Gray Davis signed into law today the nation's first comprehensive paid family leave bill. This new law offers up to six weeks of paid leave to anybody caring for a family member (parent, child, spouse, domestic partner) or anybody who wishes to "bond with a new child". The ever-generous State of California will pay up to 55% of workers salary, up to $728 a week, and funded by employee payroll deductions of up to $70 a year. Labor unions hail the measure and hope it will serve as a "model for the nation". Pardon me while I go off and vomit.

Yes, it's just another $70 a year skimmed off my earnings, which is just another drop in the barrel of the tens of thousands of dollars of various taxes and compliance costs that are separated from my income every year, most of which may as well be converted into dollar bills, and dumped into the San Francisco Bay.

This $70 is especially interesting to me because it's for a benefit that I don't want, never asked for, and can't even use because I'm self-employed. And while I would really like to take six weeks off at half pay to bond with my child or visit my parents, I can't, because my business can't run itself and it's not like the State of California is going to supply an expert who can run it for me.

So it's just another $70 picked out of my pocket by our whore of a governor, in a quid pro quo for a contribution to his re-election campaign from the AFL-CIO

I'm probably not going to miss the $70 a year, unless something really bad happens to me and I actually need the money to take care of my own son some day. So meanwhile I will enjoy the satisfaction of paying for somebody's else's daddy to take an extra 6 weeks of paid vacation every year.

In the long run, though, this kind of misguided bleeding-brained Easter Bunny legislation will continue to pile up, and laws like this are always expanded and never contracted. And year by year we continue to creep in the name of social progress toward a European-style social welfare state built on the principle of "to each according to his desires and from each according to his abilities, if and when he feels like getting off his ass and actually doing a little work for a change", which inevitably comes with higher unemployment, and less innovation and a lower standard of living. Because workers need to be protected and have a right, a right! to receive their paychecks and to attain their spiritual fulfillment from the workplace, and business owners are inherently greedy (the bastards!) and they need to be controlled and taxed and regulated and kept in their place. So the constraints on starting and growing a business and hiring someone become a little tighter every year and the more it costs to employ someone and the harder it is to fire someone, the less likely an employer will be to take a chance to hire someone in the first place. So it is no surprise that a country like Spain, which has some of the strongest "worker protections" in Europe also has 22% unemployment for workers under 25. And yes folks, we can have all that here too, if we only keep making the workplace more worker friendly. And why not? Why should anybody take a chance and risk their life savings to start a business and expose themselves to endless idiotic government regulations and the ever-rising threat of employee lawsuits? I mean, who says you have to start a business, why can't you people just get a steady job working for the government like a normal person? And at the end of the day, high unemployment and a constipated economy are more of an opportunity than a problem for the leftwing politicians, because it means a constant supply of needy constituents who have to be taken care of, and to whom the politicians can sell increasingly elaborate government interventions that people like me get to pay for.

And yes, this new law also says that a company with 50 or more employees has to guarantee to hold your job for you when you return from your annual six-week taxpayer-paid vacation to provide psychological comfort to your dad in Hawaii. Now imagine, if you will, how many companies with almost 50 employees will go out of their way to avoid hiring any more people, especially someone who is planning to have children.

So this dumb law was the last straw for me with Gray Davis and the California Democrats. I was planning to vote Libertarian, because I'm not thrilled with either major candidate and I just wanted to make a statement. But now I'm going to vote for Bill Simon who actually has a shot at beating Davis. I'm even going to make a donation to Simon's campaign, and I don't usually make donations to political campaigns. Because for all the idiocies of the California Republican Party (and I'll save that rant for another time), at least they don't make it their life's work to undermine business as do the bleeding-brain Democrats.