Other Thoughts on Social Security

These comments are from "This is Ridiculous...", below. I like them so I'm reposting them. Hope nobody minds.

At 1:37 PM, Andrew P. Connors said... Wow. That statement is astonishing..."...the government provides the goods and services that ensure continued prosperity and a decent standard of living..."Social Security is a straight money transfer. If you hate brokers so much and their fees (and you certainly have a valid point), then you should hate the double fees that you incur in the Social Security system. First, government bureaucrats eat up a bunch of your dollars. Second, since Social Security is a money transfer and is not actually savings, it doesn't create wealth in an investment sense; that is, when you stick your money in the bank, it gets loaned out to other people, and those people invest it in businesses and the like, and then down the road all of society has more infrastructure and is better off. In contrast, none of that happens with social security since there is no account and there is no savings.Learn more about this in my article Social Insecurity.And pick up a book on monetarist economics. Anything by Milton Friedman works.

At 5:00 PM, me said... First, government bureaucrats eat up a bunch of your dollars.Ummm, not the case with SS. The administrative costs of SS are quite low, much lower than privatized systems. Do your homework, precious. I hereby declare that the phrase "government bureaucracy" and any derivative thereof be removed from public discourse on the grounds that it is a meaningless phrase, a political football, used to obfuscate discussion from either side of the political aisle.Besides, private business eats up a hell of a lot of public dollars (compare the growth percentage of CEO pay vs. min. wage in the last 30 years, for instance). Even a cursory examination of current business practices makes this clear.If govt. does "eat up dollars," that's nothing but a call for demanding fiscal responsibility from the government - our government - something the Bush admin. talks about but grossly fails to act on.Get over your free market fetish. It doesn't exist, and it shouldn't exist. Markets are neither magic nor moral. They are amoral human constructs. You say down the road all of society has more infrastructure and is better off. Be careful using the word "all." The facts contradict this. Unless by "all" you mean a small percentage of people with more money than god. Quit fucking with our ability to house and feed ourselves. It's anti-democratic and counterproductive. And dammit, it's not nice.

At 6:47 PM, WhiteCollarDetroiter said... Markets and competition produce only two products on their own: winners and losers. It's the function of competition to allocate resources to the most capable, right? Are there any arguments against that as a capsule summary of competition? No? Good. One of these products - losers - is intolerable in the fields of retirement savings, schools, critical medical care, national defense and law. There simply can not be any losers when all have a right to expect the same performance as their neighbors. Would we accept privatized police forces? It would drive down costs in some communities. Some would get better services than they had. Some private police forces would go bankrupt (as many charter schools have) and leave their citizens unprotected. The same applies to retirement funding. The proponents of privatization of SS like to state that on average the returns on the stock market outstrip the returns on SS. "Average" is an underexamined aspect of this statement. What about the people who reach their old age and find that their particular account, reason irrelevant, has underperformed and they have much less to live on than they had expected? Maybe much less than they actually invested? Why, I suppose they would demand that the government cover their losses, and if there were enough of them they'd get their way at the public's expense. Retirement payments must be consistent on some minimal level. I have been suporting SS payments for 30 of my 45 years and I am not about to get shafted out of my retirement by a political party bent on routing future SS revenues through the pockets of their cronies.