Social Security is in deep trouble. Politicians have been arguing over how to solve the program’s problems for a while, but they’re missing the point. The main issue is not Social Security’s funding woes, but that it should be eliminated because it’s politically unjust and inefficient.
In managing Social Security, the federal government is impinging on individual decision-making by forcing people to pay into their retirement system. The government does force people to pay other taxes–which certainly encroaches upon individuals’ ability to make their own decisions–but the key difference is that most taxes are meant to pay for services that individuals alone can’t pay for, but can only be properly financed by the funds collected from the multitude of individuals.
With Social Security, however, the government is taking money away from some to pay for others, when each person has the ability to provide for himself without government aid.
Clearly, funding for retirement is the province of the individual, since people are ultimately responsible for their own financial health, so this represents an overreach by the government. Since one has a better understanding of one’s own life and situation than others, one is in the best position to allocate funds for one’s retirement. Government intervention into the personal lives and expenditures of citizens is a form of tyranny that opens the door to other forms of despotism.
Those who support Social Security justify it by arguing that it benefits the greater good of the country by ensuring that people have the minimum amount of retirement income. But the greater good violates people’s freedom to make their own financial decisions and live life free of interference from others. Also, doing what’s best for the majority doesn’t justify violating an individual’s right to pursue happiness, for a majority is just a larger sum of individuals. So basically, the justification for doing what’s in the best interest of the majority is that those interests should be advanced simply because of the strength in numbers. This logic inevitably allows for majority tyranny and the violation of the individual. Yet this is the logic of Social Security and with this, the government can run roughshod over personal lives.
Furthermore, Social Security is unjust because it redistributes income. A congressional joint economic study published in 1997 found that the system shifted income from middle-income and high-income workers to low-income workers, thus benefiting low-income workers more. Some people support income redistribution because they think people have an obligation toward each other. Despite the emotional appeal of this argument, the government is not the proper avenue for imposing obligations upon people, unless those obligations benefit every individual whom the government is serving.
With Social Security, the government is taking from one segment of the population and giving to another, which means that it’s actually supporting the interests of one group over another. This represents a perversion of government’s purpose, which is to facilitate peace and prosperity insofar as it benefits everyone, and thus diminishes its binding strength.
If the government defends some people’s interests over another, this diminishes some people’s stake in the government, for the government simply becomes a tool that some use to extract wealth from others. This sort of system breeds corruption, discontent, and violates people’s freedom to do what they want with the fruit of their labors.
Not to mention, Social Security is inefficient. A report published by a branch of the Federal Reserve noted in 2003, “over 99 percent of the U.S. population would have earned a greater return by investing in the S&P 500, and over 95 percent would have earned a greater return by investing in 6-month CDs relative to the current Social Security system.”
The authors took market downturns into account. So not only is the government intruding into people’s finances in addition to taking their income and giving it to others, but it’s also ripping them off financially.
Social Security might not ever be eliminated, but if people value individual freedom, a system that attempts to maximize everyone’s self-interest, and prosperity, then they’ll realize that Social Security is unacceptable.
Leonardo Poareo is a senior journalism student and contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
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