Should Social Security be reformed to include personal retirement accounts?

No

1 of 14

by Hugh Mann

• 

Write now Print Invite a writer™ Add to Favorites RSS Feed Contact this writer

Social Security: A Full Disclosure

The implications of this seemingly routine question, concerning which permutation or aggregation of Social Security's construct is most optimal, are so profoundly far reaching that I urge the reader to prepare a coffee prior to sitting down and proceeding to read further.

The question, as posed, prepackages the responses to a debate about social security to be confined to only the options of "yes" or "no" concerning some proposed reform, in an attempt to appear "fair and balanced", but in fact shamelessly dodges the heart of the matter. If the question were posed in court, an astute defense would demur emphatically on the grounds that it "leads the witness". As posed, the question is biased in implying the assumption that the validity of the existence of social security is a foregone conclusion that rests beyond the realm of possible options over which to deliberate. Given that the ultimate purpose of any deliberations regarding social security is to produce that solution which bestows upon citizens the greatest benefit it necessarily requires the exhaustive consideration of any and all possible courses of action, regardless a priori assumptions.

This sly question so typifies the dishonesty that pervades the times we live in that it does not just deserve mere commentary, but outright wrath for presenting yet another insidious inroad to the outright corruption of its destination. As America teeters ever so precariously on the verge of complete moral attrition, it can no longer slough off such questions as mere intellectual insults, but must finally come to terms with the fact that they are the instruments of a covert intellectual assault.

Washington is tempting a perilous fate by testing the degree to which its Constitutionally armed citizens will tolerate the moral, intellectual, and financial consequences of such carefully sterilized, multiple choice polemics. Therefore, we must urgently swivel the rostrum, away from protracting what is metaphorically a debate over the "arrangement of chairs on the deck of the Titanic", squarely into the face of this apocryphal, imploding $650 billion institution and intrepidly demand an answer to the most verboten, fundamental question of all. Should social security exist at all?

When FDR signed The Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, he launched America down the slippery slope of taxation and deficit financed social programs. In 1940, benefits paid totaled $35 million, rising to $32 billion by 1970, and to $650 billion in 2008 with the system now literally stalling; starving for cash flow as the accelerating rate of retirees and other claimants overwhelms the tax base provided by earners. Social Security is now as financially bankrupt as the socialist principles upon which it is founded.

Is this the not the same America that once was the most vehement opponent of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba due to the financial, intellectual, and moral bankruptcy that their inhumane socialist systems ravaged upon them?

Is this not the same America to which the beleaguered and oppressed peoples of the world have turned to for generations as the arbiter of individual liberty, self-responsibility, and capitalism?

Why did intellectual luminaries like Albert Einstein, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand flee to no other country in the world, but the one before FDR's Social Security, an America without social guarantees?

Despite all the foregoing, unfortunately experience really appears to be the only teacher. The question then is, to what abject depths of depravity must America itself descend before it calls the bluff on its own socialism?

In order to avoid fully collapsing under socialist policies America must address the question of how it can dismantle social security, before it's too late. Of course, most people are conditioned, after three generations since its inception, to summarily dismiss any such notion as not only preposterous because it would presumably be impossible, but moreover, as most "unfair", especially to those who had already contributed to it all of their lives.

So, how would America undertake the seemingly monumental task of terminating social security? By weaning. First, to equitably address and assuage them, all contributors heretofore would be refunded their contributions first, and this can easily be accomplished across two to three administrations if Washington terminates its bellicose foreign policy today. The multi-trillion dollar cost savings that recalling all its forces from the 130 nations America occupies today would not only support the weaning of terminated social security, it would also support the weaning off from the termination of over half of all government programs. Moreover, it would also extinguish the need for either personal or corporate federal taxes, and leave a surplus with which to pay down the deficit. Isn't it about time to repeal the "temporary" imposition of levies and taxes to support first the Civil war in 1862, and then the Spanish American war in 1898?

But what if such a proposition is completely wrong? Well, if nothing else, it would eliminate the impetus for potential retaliatory military responses from 130 nations. Now that's what I call homeland security. Let's face it, not all 130 nations are going to tolerate U.S. military occupation, generation after generation, in perpetuity. Eventually, some government in one of them will ascend to power and amass enough nuclear weapons to issue a reply in the only language we have been communicating with them all along: military.

Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical line of history that finds a nuclear mighty Iraq occupying America militarily for 50 years, and then America secretly acquires nuclear weapons. Do you think America, or some rogue faction within her, might be tempted to make a statement with them?

Back in the reality facing us, let's take a cue from none less than the federal government itself. By its own tacit admission, by way of the 2008 Economic Stimulus package, apparently the economy stands to be stimulated when some portion of the taxes collected is returned to the taxpayers' pockets. So, to extrapolate their epiphany, if restoring some money to its rightful owner is deemed good for the economy, would not restoring all of it be the best?

With all of our money back in its rightful possession there would be no need for parasitic government agencies to oversee wealth redistribution through specious, obsolete, socialist programs like social security. As was the case with the former USSR, with socialism it is an all or nothing proposition. There is no such thing a small, tolerable amount of socialism in human society, just like there no such thing as small, tolerable amount of cancer in the human body, because it is almost impossible to stop the growth of either until the host is dead. Nobody mourns the death of parasitic cancer cells and nobody should mourn the death of parasitic socialists.

Until eradicated, I predict extreme social insecurity and a near death experience for America as she combats her socialist cancers.

References:

1 . http://www.mises.org
2. The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul
3. John Adams: A Life, by John Ferling
4. http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Social_Secu rity_Act#Creation:_T he_Social_Security_A ct

Learn more about this author, Hugh Mann.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.