No, he's right. It's people from that side of the aisle who are most interested in forcing employers to do things like offer paid maternity leave and birth control. That's paternalism, at least the way I see it.
As stated, I'm not going to engage on the politics of the situation. It was a point about language.
If you ask one of those "far left" people why they favor those policies, you're going to get an answer along the lines of "fairness" or "safety net", etc... That is, they want that stuff because it seems like a good idea. But if you don't want that stuff and want to argue against it, yet have at best a subtle or abstract reason, you end up being on the side of "unfairness and danger" in the argument.
So you make up a term like "paternalism" (or better: "nanny state") to describe the same policies that evokes a negative connotation. Problem solved!
Politicians do this all the time, and it's just something we live with. But the danger to the thinking person is that you end up internalizing this kind of language to such a degree that it pops out in a completely non-political discussion about Japanese corporate culture.
Don't do that. Leave the spin to the talk shows. If you feel competent to have an opinion about someone else's ideas, you should be capable of discussing it in a neutral manner without resorting to Orwellian newspeak.
Again: "bemoaning the lack of paternalism" ... WTF?
