Mike Bloomberg Puts Out Mussolini Style Labor Plan, But is He Serious?

Presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg has put out his labor plan. It would make Benito Mussolini proud.

It features more interventions between employer and employee than the average number of interventions faced between your San Francisco druggie and his family before he was thrown out of the house.

Consider, Bloomberg calls for:

• Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour
• Guaranteeing that all employees have 12 weeks of paid family leave and 7 days of paid sick leave
• And he wants to strengthen unions

The Hill notes, Bloomberg’s plan also includes several other proposals that have widespread Democratic support, such as preventing gender discrimination in the workplace, expanding the government’s power to enforce labor laws and supporting legislation to protect pensions and retirement savings.

Bottom line: Bloomberg continues to display his technocratic interventionist side that puts him in line with the central planning-leanings of all the other Democratic candidates---and, btw, in line with the former plans of Mussolini when he ruled Italy.

 From My Autobiography by Mussolini:

I have wanted the Fascist government, above all, to give great care to social legislation...I think that Italy is advanced beyond all European nations; in fact, it has ratified laws...All this shows how, in every detail in the field of labor, I stand by the working labor...

All the programs and regulations proposed by Bloomberg would make it more difficult for employees to find jobs and would push the economy, at a minimum, in the direction of sluggishness.

Bloomberg has to know this.

In a video, which appears on the IMF’s YouTube channel and shows Bloomberg in conversation with Christine Lagarde, then-head of the IMF, the former New York City mayor criticizes minimum-wage laws.

“The first thing to do is to get rid of some of these impediments to job creation,” he told Lagarde. “For example, in the United States we have two things, one of which is brilliant, and one of which is used all the time but is dysfunctional, [though] we just don’t think of it this way. We have minimum wages. And a minimum wage means that the employer has to pay up to that level for their employees.”

Bloomberg continued:

So, what would go through an employer’s mind if they have to raise the amount of money they have to pay one of their employees? It is ‘Ah, can I do with fewer employees?’

So what gives?

Will he carry on with his economy suffocating labor proposals or is he just lying to get elected?

And if he gets he elected, will he implement those proposals so he can get reelected? 

-RW