Every developed, wealthy democracy has a social safety net and a welfare state. Even developing nations have them. Brazil and Chile has universal health care as well as mandatory elderly pensions. China and India are trying to implement elderly pensions and universal health care too.
There is something innate in human nature that makes us crave a welfare state (pensions for the elderly, universal education, universal health care, a social safety net) once the wealth to obtain one is there. Railing against it is like railing against the snow in winter. Its going to happen.
Either way, amendment X of the constitution says anything not laid out in the constitution was up to the states & people to decide. The people want a mandatory welfare state all over the world (north america, south america, europe, asia) once they have enough wealth to afford one. If you don’t believe me, run on a platform of explaining to your voters that you want to abolish social security, medicare, medicaid, public education, etc. and see how many votes you get.
But your voters have to actually understand what you mean. Many of the teabaggers are people who rail against the welfare state, then go home and collect their social security checks and see a doctor funded by medicare.
IMO there are generally 2 types of people who rail against the welfare state
Those who don’t need it
Those who need it but are too thick/in denial to know it
You are more group 1. The teabaggers (who are geriatric and dependent on medicare & social security) and most libertarians (who earn an average wage of 20-50k a year) are group 2.
There are people who need a welfare state, know they need it, but still oppose it. But they are the minority from what I’ve seen.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Of course there is no super-national court of justice that punishes those humans who treat other humans as a means and not as an end unto themselves. So, that rule is just something that I believe would make the world a better place if everyone followed it.
You apparently think the world would be a better place if all governments followed the rule of “it is OK to do whatever the majority says the government should do.” I doubt you think that is some cosmic law or moral absolute or whatever. So, my rule has just as much legitimacy as yours. I’m sure you are aware that the U.S. federal government is very much NOT based on your rule–there are a large number of things that the U.S. federal government cannot do even if a majority of people want it to. Same goes for the states.
I agree that there is something innate in SOME humans’ nature that craves a welfare state. And I believe that that something is the desire to force others to do things that one finds desirable. I think this part of human nature is a bad thing and should be resisted. Therefore, I think that governments should not force people to do things and should stop people from similarly using force against others.
Social security is not funded by progressive taxes. But people still want it.
You seem to feel welfare is always an ‘us vs. them’ proposition that consists of programs funded by progressive taxes that benefit people who don’t pay for them. However schools are funded via property taxes and SS is funded by a tax that is capped at 102k. So neither is progressive as far as I can tell. But the public still wants them.
Many people want to pay taxes for health care, social security and education. I’d love to pay more in taxes for a truly reliable, affordable, competently run universal health care system. I don’t think I’m alone.
You are absolutely free to pay for other people’s health care, retirement, and education if you so choose. I don’t have a problem with that at all. I think it’s super.
However, once you want to force other people to pay for those things, I have a problem. And that problem is not helped by the fact that you feel that you wouldn’t need to be forced.
I think you are conflating what constitutes a legitimate function of government with what you personally believe is the best form of government. Just because you don’t like social welfare does not make it an illegitimate function of government. Likewise, I don’t think tax cuts for the wealthy that balloon the deficit are sound economic policy, but that does not mean they are not legitimate.
In my theory of government, legitimate functions of government are conferred by the governed. In your theory of government, from what authority is the legitimacy of government function conferred?
Meh. We have been dealing in broad generalities. So what if goverment is not consistent with my theory at all levels. The perfect is not the enemy of the good.
Then run for office on a platform of abolishing medicare, social security and public education. And make sure your voters are bright enough to understand what that really means (aka, not teabaggers who rail against welfare then go home and open their social security checks). Then see how many votes you get.
That is kind of ridiculous. Many companies already manage many billions of dollars, trillions in the aggregate, without running away and stealing it all. The two main arguments I am seeing is that the evil corporations could steal all my money. Which means you must have a terrible time sleeping with them in charge of your investment and bank accounts.
Evil corporations taking people’s money and running off with it is not a serious problem here. When it happens organizations like the FDIC, FINRA and SIPC have been pretty effective at recovering investors’ funds. Even the major scandals have occured outside of the regulatory structure at hedge funds, offshore banks and the like.
In short there are already checks and balances on mutual fund and investment firms that don’t protect against market loss, but they do protect against Snidely Whiplash President of Megacorp Investments running off to Suriname with your money.
The financial industry just collapsed the global economy. There is a real risk we won’t even get the regulation to prevent that from happening again because of how much influence they have in congress.
Health insurance and the health industry too. There are tons of examples where legislation is designed to benefit them. They ban reimportation. They ban negotiation of prices, they ban pre-existing conditions (which prevents people from shopping around for different plans).
My point isn’t that these companies will run off to the Caymen islands. My point is that if these companies engage in extreme risk and lose all our money, there will be no recourse for the public. Like I said, we possibly can’t even get regulation to stop the financial industry from collapsing the global economy because of how powerful and influential they are.
Taking the money and running was a bad choice of words. Taking the money and losing it on unnecessarily risky ventures while leaving stockholders with no legal recourse (since these industries will have bribed the government into writing laws designed to benefit them and not their shareholders) is a better description.
The financial industry lobbied congress to remove regulations. Congress did. The global economy collapsed due to the mortgage bubble bursting. now we might not even get meaningful new regulations to stop it from happening again.
Yes and EVERY ONE OF THOSE COSTS MONEY TO RUN. Money that comes directly from the investors, not the adminstrators. You want to take a program that doesn’t have those extra costs, add them in and some how claim that it’ll make the program better.
Right, they cost money to run. Yet I can go to Vanguard and build an excellent portfolio of investments and pay administrative fees of 0.25%, or TIAA-CREF for 0.50%, of Fidelity for maybe 0.75%. I can invest in well understood equities, bonds and cash equivalents. They all use the funds they generate from those fees to support SIPC and FINRA, and it works. The instruments that collapsed the system were not the trading of vanilla equities. They were the province of unregulated hedge funds and large institutional investors. Exactly the kind of thing that would have no part in a private Social Security system.
Social Security takes money to run, but that isn’t its major problem. Its major problem is that the money does not belong to the individual and relies on inherently unreliable political calculations to survive. The return the system generates has been miserable. Far below the yield of a conservative portfolio of investments.
I find it baffling that given the evidence of how poorly Social Security is faring people think it is just fine as it is. Maybe you don’t like my idea, but there has to be a better way that isn’t this. How do the posters in their twenties and thirties feel about the system? Do you see the current system where younger workers will increasingly have to cover more and more older retirees as sustainable? Do you believe that under the current system you will have the benefits promised to you thirty years from now?
If you do, then I don’t know what to say. If you don’t, then how can you possibly plan for the future without ownership of this major part of your retirement resources?
I can reexamine where I am annually and by making small adjustments to my savings rate and consumption I can make sure I remain on track. Any prudent person does this on a regular basis without thinking maybe realizing it. In 1999 you might have seen your 401k rise astronomically and cut your contribution to live it up a bit. The balance dropped from 2000-2002 and you realized that maybe you had to cut back a bit and up that contribution.
I know the next question is , “But what happens to those poor people who are about to retire?”. Almost no matter how they invested those people would have more acccumulated through a lifetime of forced savings and investments in some combination of stocks, bonds and cash than they will recieve from Social Security. So they were about to retire with a hell of a lot more than Social Security and now they only have a lot more. I am willing to accept that.
I lost a lot in my 401 k and then in half when the stock market crashed. I don’t have much faith in private plans. Social Security is an excellent plan that was just badly abused by the government. It makes sense to me to have money taken out over my lifetime and placed in a government plan that will take care of me in my old age. We pay in more then we will use unless we live to be 100.
The problem happened when the government started tapping into it to pay for wars and other things that they were unable to pay back. It wasn’t their money to play with and I’m unsure how they obtained access to it?
What if they left Social Security alone and paid back what they took out of it and kept it in Gold reserves? Also that they made it a retirement account for the sole purpose of guaranteeing a retirement benefit to the people that paid in? No more borrowing from it just let it sit and make interest.
Sorry, I couldn’t edit. I was not talking about a working private plan. If the government does not take it out of peoples checks how many people are actually going to invest the money over their lifetime? What will we do with the people that didn’t invest? We can’t trust people to be prudent enough to handle this. I put 7 percent away and did the responsible thing and it didn’t help me. I would have been better off investing it in Gold and paying interest on it.
I’m not against private plans but think SSI could work if we kept our hands out of it. If we do go private who will pick up the slack for the people that don’t use it?
So you want to own the money? Think about this before answering. What if you could have a balance in the account and invest it in completely secure Treasury Inflation Protected Securities.? Wouldn’t that be cool? It would be your money, not the governments held in trust.
The goverment forces you to put the money in, and when you hit retirement age it has to come back out over your lifetime, but it is your money that would add to your spouse’s retirement if you died early.
Yes, That would be cool! That is why I thought of Gold because it seems to stay steady. This type of retirement account would be great as long as the government left it alone.
I’m not suggesting a different philosophy, just making sure we’re on the same page in terms of what you’re proposing to do. I’m accepting what you hold to be the legitimate function of government as being a fundamental part of the OP.
But if you’re suggesting that the private sector replace Social Security with an equivalent private sector program, my point is merely that an equivalent private program would be private annuities - not tax-sheltered mutual funds or such types of investments.
The executives of Enron (one or two of them) were punished severely. I’m sure that made the people who lost their retirement savings very happy.
Do you propose a reserve fund to make those who lose money through fraud whole?
Demonstrably false. You’d have thought that the number of people acting against their best interests by taking subprime mortgages would be the final nail in the coffin of this idea. But, if not, check out the chapter on the Swedish experience with 401K plans in Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. (I think it is Sweden - it is Scandinavian.) Given a wide selection of investment opportunities, the most popular one was the fund which had the best record over the past five years - which, as any prudent advisor caj tell you, means it is probably over-valued. Smart investors get out when the boobs rush in, right?
Obviously return is directly proportional to risk. The crash is at least partially due to people who knew better ignoring this rule for short term investment returns. Social Security is set up to minimize risk, not maximize returns. That is a feature, not a bug. I’d argue that those who have a chance of doing well in the market have enough spare money to invest in ways which allows them to choose their proper level of risk, and that is a good thing. Those who don’t probably have no business competing with those who do for returns. They are going to get fleeced.
This is a splendid example of the “because I (think) I’m smart enough to win in the market, everyone must be and it is eevil for the government to act otherwise.”