Advice is free, and often worth exactly that. And when writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry offers advice to conservatives about how to “steal the left’s thunder on maternity leave,” he misses the point of conservatism.

Moms are great. Maternity leave is also pretty awesome. It’s a wonderful tool companies can use to attract and reward high-value women employees.

But it shouldn’t be mandatory. One reason is the clear economic effect of passing such a law. The second is the whole point of conservatism.

“Obviously, if you believe in family values, as I do, maternity leave is good,” Gobry writes for The Week. “Paid maternity leave is even better. And it’s true that the issue sometimes looks like a reminder of conservatives’ annoying tendency to privilege corporations over family values when the two conflict. … You will almost always hear someone intone that America is the only advanced country that doesn’t ‘have’ maternity leave, when, in fact, that’s not true: many companies offer paid maternity leave.”

Right off the bat, Gobry acknowledges the economic consequence of mandating paid maternity leave: fewer jobs for women.

“Maternity leave of any kind is basically a tax on hiring women, paid leave even more so,” he writes. “And more generally, all labor regulations make hiring people more expensive, depressing employment, as is evident in my home country of France. Progressives typically angrily brush off concerns like these instead of offering solutions. “Don’t you see that it’s a matter of principle?’ they say. But that only reinforces the image conservatives have of progressives who are much too reckless about government intervention and much too ignorant of some basic laws of human behavior, like ‘when you tax something you will have less of it.'”

That’s true. Requiring paid maternity will inevitably mean fewer women in the workplace.

“Companies will try to avoid hiring potential mothers in the first place,” writes the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk. “No employer wants the financial liability of paying a worker full wages over several months of not working. Employers will simply hire applicants — namely men — who are at no risk of going on maternity leave. A law intended to help parents balance work and family would harm the very people it is meant to help.”

(Interestingly, Gobry briefly suggests making paid parental leave for both parents, as if different economic laws would apply.)

The solution he offers is a government benefit program that would pay women on maternity leave. Big questions aren’t answered. Who gets the benefit? How much is the benefit, and is it the same for all women? Where’s the money coming from?

These kinds of questions illustrate the other thing that’s wrong with the proposal. Conservatism is about the government getting out of the way and letting markets work. And they do — more and more companies now offer benefits such as paid maternity leave as incentives to their workers. As competition for those high-value women employees increases, so will the availability of such benefits.

Gobry’s advice is probably well-intentioned. That doesn’t mean it’s good advice.