Bank Holidays... for the hard of thinking

From the Daily Hate:-

Millions of workers will be given a special four-day weekend to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, it was revealed last night.

To mark the Monarch’s 60 years on the throne, her official birthday on Monday, June 4, will be declared a one-off Bank Holiday.

That's the thing... they won't be "given" a Bank Holiday, they'll pay for it.

OK, some employers might choose to take less profit from the business, but most won't. So, your bank holiday either means that some days of holiday get lost, or your pay rises don't go up so much.

Something that's occurred to me about Bank Holidays is that they're a good example of Bastiat's broken window fallacy. People see them as a "good thing", a freebie. They don't see the lost opportunity that occurs because of them, that they lose flexibility because the government decides when they should take time off. They don't see the waste of time and energy that occurs because of the peaks of demand that bank holidays create on roads, entertainment and hotels.