You know the standard libertarian anti-conscription talking point about how the reason societies are so willing to engage in it is because of age-based majoritarianism (i.e., older people who would not be drafted outnumber younger people who would be drafted)?
Scratch that one off the list:
Want to do something truly patriotic to help preserve the American way of life? Don’t retire. At least not yet.
That’s the advice of Andrew Yarrow, a vice president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization Public Agenda and the director of its Washington, D.C., office. Yarrow urges the nation’s 78 million baby boomers to forgo traditional or early retirement and work for a few more years, for their own sake and the good of the country.
If boomers all turn in their keys at age 55, 62 or 65 and head for the Tuscan hills, that great sucking sound you’ll hear is untold amounts of taxpayer dollars being leached from the economy. That is money heirs will have to replace or do without.
It’s an act Yarrow calls “profoundly selfish and unpatriotic.”
Behold the new “patriotism” — same as the old patriotism: Arbeit Macht Frei. To Yarrow and his ilk, the only way to be a “good American” is to work (for others) and pay taxes (to others) for longer than you want — perhaps until the day you die.
Any other perspective is, we are told, “selfishness.”
The fact that our entitlement programs are unsustainable isn’t the point. The fact that something, somewhere has to give isn’t the point. The point is that, to this “patriot,” people should actually be sanguine about it. You work an entire career, paying taxes day in and day out, relying upon the premise and the promise that your taxes actually earn you a benefit, and then suddenly you’re told that to accept, even to expect, those benefits — that you paid for all your adult life — is “selfish” and “unpatriotic.” You “selfishly” expect the government to actually uphold its end of the social contract? What kind of American are you?
It’s same lethal collectivist rhetoric, merely with a fresh coat of “econo-patriotic” varnish. From “you exist to serve God” to “you exist to serve the state” to “you exist to serve GDP.” Your life belongs to anyone and everyone, who can demand that you report for duty at any time — maybe carrying a rifle, maybe carrying a shovel, maybe carrying a checkbook — and shame on you if you’re not “patriotic” about complying.
Because, we are told, the one thing that is always, unconditionally “un-American” is to be “selfish.”
Plus ça change…
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Further down in the piece:
Economist and actor Ben Stein says a change is going to come.
…
“I would guess that in 20 years, there simply is not going to be any Social Security for wealthy people. That will be thoroughly means-tested, and probably should be,” Stein says. “I mean, why should very rich people get Social Security?”
Because, as I explained recently (and also here), Social Security is simply not welfare.
There’s no reason, a priori, why it couldn’t be welfare, but if we were to repackage it as such then there would be no basis for payroll taxes (as opposed to higher federal income rates), and no way to remove the stigma of receiving it (i.e., being on the dole).
You can structure Social Security as an old-age pension program with no stigma attached, or you can structure it as an anti-poverty program with lots of stigma attached. (Yarrow, meanwhile, has found a way to structure it as an old-age pension program with lots of stigma attached. Go figure.)
But there is simply no way to openly and notoriously package Social Security as an anti-poverty program with no stigma attached. That is why the current system tries to do it through back-door tactics such as wage-replacement formulas and post-retirement taxation of benefits that covertly turn the program into a progressive taxation, redistributionist income scheme. But the key is the word “covert” — if the government were to openly declare that Social Security is now unambiguously a welfare check, Granma and Granpa would riot in the streets.
