Some more food for thought about social security and how its going to be "fixed."
Can you imagine a government-free social security system? Or would old people die of hunger without the caring state?
The movement to privatize Social Security (fully or partially) may be the most ideologically duplicitous and fiscally irresponsible I've seen in my lifetime. It was proposed by Clinton and now by Bush. Whether it dies in the next few months or generates some monstrosity of a bill to be voted on, don't believe that there is anything in the works that is going to bring you more freedom.
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There are many puzzles to this bizarre forced-saving program, not the least of which is why it is that so many people who claim to be for free markets are backing it. Perhaps this can be chalked up to the usual pandering of Washington think tanks. But I don't believe that this explains all of it. There seems to be a genuine intellectual error at the root here, stemming from a failure to believe that a genuine free market can actually provide for people in their old age.
Herein we see the cultural problem that government programs create. Once the system is in place, people have some internal sense that the world would fall apart without it. If the government made all our shoes and clocks, we might have a hard time imagining it could be any other way. Post-socialist governments of the old Soviet empire had a hard time understanding how society could work if people were allowed to move their residencies without government permissions.
The urgent task that genuine market thinkers need to take on is to help people imagine a pre-FDR world in which individuals prepare for their own futures, without government forcing them to or stealing from others in order to enact a central plan.
But, you say, that's not politically viable. Maybe not. But it makes a lot more sense than the creation of a new forced savings program to sit on top of the old forced intergenerational wealth transfer.
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Once this faux-privatization idea is out of the way, we can get back to doing what believers in a free society should be doing: working toward getting government not more involved in society, but toward creating the intellectual conditions that enable people to imagine a world where government leaves the choice over how to use resources to individuals.
If more choice is the goal, let people drop out of the system. Don't create another coercive system and tell people they are being liberated.
Save or Else