What these tell me in simple words is that, more and more, some smart asses are taking decisions on our money. I really can't understand people arguing this as a good think as I can't understand how 300-1000 (representing government and parliement) persons do know better than we what we need. This trend is taking more and more from our rights to decide how, when and what we need. It also reduce the incentives to perform (as Jakab Andor put it in his article) and increase the stimulus for free rides. It also increase the chances of monopolies to develop with all the disadvantages that these are bringing (as a side note, by Misses these are the only real monopolies). Unfortunately, under current conditions, I don't believe this trend will change any time soon and we (both US and EU) have a good chance of becoming socialists with democratic hats in the next 50 years or so. This unless some major shift happens, but most probably this won't be a nice and quiet change. And, frankly, I'm not sure what freaks me out more: going in this direction or hopping for a sudden shift.
Secondly, I think discrimination per se is wrong and not productive. However, there are two contradictory types of laws that together increase the cost for a company: the ones that punish discriminations and the ones that adds taxes or additional costs for complying them. This leads to a natural behavior from the business side to reduce their cost. So, in this case I don't believe we are talking about discriminations per se, but about reducing costs in order to compete in a given market. In this respect, I totally agree with him. Whenever this conditions appears there's a good chance to create a black market. The size might differ from country to country based on culture, public enforcing power, the level o burden brought by regulation, but it will exist at some extent.
Coming back to the example with pregnant women, I don't think it's fair to say that we as a society want to stimulate birth, but "you" should bear the cost. It would be much fair to have this done on the society cost not on a particular business that have this case… for example, not by making the employer keep the job (or bear any other costs), but by supporting women until they get a job and perform additional activities to increase their changes to get a job. I'm not saying this is what I would recommend, but I think it's much better than the alternative.
However, I couldn't stop noticing that Jakab Andor only mentions to ways of doing business (besides the "do nothing" option): struggle with a regular business model with a small margin or cheat. These are both sadly choices. I think he missed the "think bigger", at higher margins, be faster or smarter approach.
