Yes, Obamacare will reduce work:
[Liberals] have turned to claiming that ObamaCare's missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren't cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we're told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.
Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this "eliminated from the drudgery of labor market" argument, which he views as a form of trahison des clercs. "I don't know what their intentions are," he says, choosing his words carefully, "but it looks like they're trying to leverage the lack of economic education in their audience by making these sorts of points."
You may not have an employer willing to put you on a more than 30-hour work week to avoid Obamacare provisions (or have an employer willing to hire you if he's at 50 employees), and the act will over the next decade reduce work by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs, but that doesn't mean we have to use Bush-era pejoratives like "underemployment" to describe their situation!
No, free to write poetry (perhaps even government-subsidized cowboy poetry!), and compose interpretive dance pieces (be still, my heart), what artistic wonders will we see in the future?
Now we can say that we have Obama-era wonderemployment instead of Bush-era underemployment!
Wow. Life is better in the era of Hope and Change. Words do have meaning, after all.
