by Rick Lowe
The Employment Act amendments discussed here… and here… don't seem to amount to anything more than rank emotionalism.
It seems very little rational thought was put into the amendments regarding paid lunch hours, and consecutive hours off.
Is Government of the opinion that all employers and employees work in the same type of business and do not work shifts etc.
In other words, the responsible government official makes a decree , and because he says so, that's how it will be. Kinda like fitting a square peg in a round hole.
Yes, there are mean employers, but that is no reason to make a mean law that could marginalise the majority of employers. Let business flourish with reasonable policies so the economy can grow and new businesses come on stream. That way, those employees stuck with unreasonable employers will have another option for employment.
But no, it seems the only option is damn the torpedoes and let emotionalism reign.
Is rational thought an option with public policy making?
But the great F.A. Hayek pointed out in his essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society":
"If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system."
"How much knowledge does he need to do so successfully? Which of the events which happen beyond the horizon of his immediate knowledge are of relevance to his immediate decision, and how much of them need he know?"
I wonder if the bureaucrats that devise legislation ever even think about this? Like I asked earlier, is rational thought an option with public policy making?
