It should never be done :: Woman proposes to tax women's work :: Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Quote:

Expatica news reports that Dutch MP Sharon Dijksma proposes fining women with college degrees who choose to stay at home instead of entering the paid workforce. Dijksma explains: "A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work -- that is destruction of capital. If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at the cost of society, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished."

A gift is a gift. If society gives away education why should it have any moral authority to say how it should be used?

And besides, women who stay at home are making the best use of their time. Don't they know the highest and best use of their time?

After all these years of disparaging the omission of the value housework in measures of GNP we are now faced with the irony of a female MP saying those never should have apologized for leaving out the value of housework - it has no value.

There's an even more fundamental error of economic logic being made: Ms. Dijksma seems to think that society gets an external benefit from your private sale of your labor services to an employer. Wrong. There is no externality, and therefore there is no national duty to get educated and go to work.

Luddites - workers who destroy machines because they believe the machines will replace them - destroy capital. Workers who choose to apply their human capital at home are simply deploying capital to its best use, not destroying it.