Consider a limiting case. Upon hiring employee 50, you have to sell your company and donate the proceeds to charity. I hope that sounds crazy, but in case it se

Consider a limiting case. Upon hiring employee 50, you have to sell your company and donate the proceeds to charity. I hope that sounds crazy, but in case it seems warm and fuzzy bear in mind that all 50 employees are now out of work. Are you a greedy bastard for wanting to stay at 49? Now relax the assumption. At employee 50, you have to start complying with a bunch of onerous and expensive regulations. This limits your ability to make profits and to continue growing your business—which, among other things, means being able to hire fewer workers and having to pay them less. The magnitude of the effect is less than that of the forced-charity sale, but the sign is the same. These kinds of laws are based on a fallacy: they assume that the interests of companies and employees are not well-aligned. What is worse, such laws guarantee misalignment—thus exacerbating the very problem they're (ostensibly) meant to ameliorate. In medicine, this is called iatrogenesis. Did the bloodletting not work? That must mean we need more bloodletting! These laws also create a decoy, which has effectively distracted you from the real enemy. The object of your ire should be boneheaded labor laws, not the "greedy" corporations trying to evade their restrictions. It's a diabolically clever political strategy, and it ensnares many a well-intentioned voter. But it's never too late to escape the trap.