OUR NATION'S Social Security program, much like the PATRIOT Act, was named with its own self-defense in mind. As a result, critics of these silly institutions are easily dismissed as unpatriotic radicals or callous blowhards intent on social insecurity. But as George Orwell so memorably admonished us, we should always get suspicious when our lawmakers feel compelled to give such vague and cheery monikers to their legislative pets. So at the risk of being cast into the anti-security camp, let me say what should be obvious to even the most casual observer of American government today: Our country's current Social Security policy has a place amongst the most mind-bogglingly, hair-pullingly, eye-gougingly insipid monstrosities ever to occupy a place in the pyrite pantheon of American legislative travesty.
Amid all of today's talk about the practical issues of Social Security reform, commentators rarely step back to appreciate the absurdity of Social Security as a matter of pure principle. Under the status quo, every time you get a paycheck, a percentage of it is forcibly taken from you and put into a collective Social Security fund. If you selfishly try to keep this money that your employer has voluntarily given to you, men with guns and badges will come to your house and drag you off to jail. After many years of this lovely process, once you've reached an age that the government deems to be sufficiently old and crusty, some money from this collective fund will be doled back out to you in a monthly allowance from your kind old Uncle Sam. You may be getting robbed today, proponents say, but you'll sure be secure tomorrow. It's for your own good.
The most obvious and ugly assumption at the heart of this system is the paternalistic idea that the government knows better than you do what's best for your life and your future. Suppose you want to save, invest, donate, spend or just light big fat cigars with the money you earn in your professional career. You might plan to continue working or rely on savings, investment returns or family assistance to sustain you once you reach old age. Yet coercive Social Security denies you the freedom to choose any of these options. Instead, lawmakers simply dictate to you how your income should be allocated, and then summarily force you to submit to this judgment. Any way you cut it, this illiberal situation flies in the face of justice.
The cash that you must pour into Social Security is quite obviously yours -- it's coming out of your paycheck. You've worked for it under a voluntary agreement with your employer. You own it. Surely, you have the right to decide what to do with it on the basis of your own individual values, preferences and circumstances. Your situation is different from your neighbor's, which is why you have your paycheck and he has his.
Further, most victims of Social Security would be much better off if they were to channel their money into private investments rather than government Social Security bonds. If you were to take all the money confiscated from you by Social Security in your lifetime and instead spread it around in a set of low-risk index funds on Wall Street, your return would almost certainly be much greater than the sum total of the benefits paid to you by Social Security before your death. Critics who say this is an unacceptably risky strategy miss three key points.
First, the long-term risks of smart and diversified stock investments are actually very small in today's world, while the compounded returns on such investments are typically quite high. Second, given the dire financial straits of the social security fund and the aging gaggle of baby-boomers preparing to retire, Wall Street is not the entity that's in greater danger of collapsing. But even if the risk were high, so what? It's your money. It's your life. If you wish, you should be free to carry your own financial risk in an effort to better your material condition. This is what American enterprise is all about.
Today's defenders of the Social Security status quo urge you to ignore the quaint old idea that you should be free to form and pursue your own conception of the good life by deciding how to spend or invest your own paychecks. Such pleas make them yet another sad contingent in history's parade of callow conspirators who have claimed to serve the people's interests while at the same time severely limiting the people's freedom to control their own lives. It's time we reject this model of condescending paternalism and reclaim our financial security from the claws of stilted bureaucrats.
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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