In Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, he's got a brilliant chapter on the the difference between market transactions and social interactions, and the confusion that occurs when you mix the two. Try going to dinner at your mother's house and offering $100 for the meal, he suggests. From a traditional economic standpoint, her refusal would be strange. It's free money! But folks will perform free services for friends and family that they wouldn't do for $10 bucks. When you change the context to a market transaction, you force them to ask whether the money, rather than the social bond or the gratitude or the warm n' fuzzies, is worth it. And it often isn't. After all, lots of us will go down to the soup kitchen for a day for free. Few of us would take a job ladling soup for $10 a day. But Ariely applies this insight to employer benefits. In particular, he's worried that employers, by taking health care away from their workers, are destroying their "social relationship" with their employees and converting over towards a straight market relationship. This, he fears, will lead to less productivity, less commitment to the company, more willingness to jump ship, and so on. You can see him make some of these points in his diavlog with Will Wilkinson here. But this is a good thing. The relationship between an employer and an employee is a market relationship. The social overlay just causes confusion. Employers don't give you health care because they like you. They do it because otherwise, they can't attract talent. High value employees will accept jobs at companies that do offer health care. So they give you health care. Sometimes, though, the company's birthday parties and kindly managers and apparent concern for your well-being makes it seem like they do care, like the relationship is social. But it's asymmetrically so. The folks you know socially -- the middle managers and so forth -- don't decide whether to outsource, to change the benefit packages, to cut back on vacation, or to seek out a merger. Those decisions are made by folks higher up the ladder, who know you as a cost of doing business. Fundamentally, corporations are market creatures, and the social overlay is just another market strategy. Telling workers to treat their employer like a friend just leaves them in a worse position if the employer decides to maximize resources by firing that individual. After all, friends don't do that. But employers do. The corporate welfare state, the corporate social responsibility movement -- it's all misguided. It's fine for corporations to do nice stuff, but fundamentally, they seek profit, and public ends like health security or environmental improvement require a better enforcement mechanism than misunderstanding the nature of private businesses.