OASDHI must die! (and your little FICA, too!)

When I first heard Andre Marrou speak in 1988, then as the VP on the Libertarian presidential ticket (with then Libertarian Ron Paul), the Libertarian platform on Social Security advocated immediate liquidation of the trust fund and its distribution on the basis of what individuals had paid into the program. The elegance of this solution is beautiful: in one swell foop, it would end the most regressive tax in U.S. History, take one more unfunded mandate off the plate of employers and the self-employed, eliminate an agency whose mission and existence is not Constitutionally justified, infuse the economy with a lot of cash very quickly, and give individuals authority over and liability for their own decisions and actions. The Libertarians also wanted to point out the lie of the program, as implementing such a strategy would reveal that the trust fund is a fiction.

They don't advocate this anymore, which is too bad. I know it's not necessarily that feasible, but really, is turning the Social Security Administration into the largest investment brokerage in the country really a feasible idea? Now their platform calls for allowing individuals to opt out of the system completely, funding remaining obligations through sale of federal properties that the federal government has no Constitutionally justifiable reason to hold. You can read about it here.

Whatever the method, it is a waste of time and resources to try and "save" or "strengthen" Social Security. Even moreso is Bush's transparent intention to cause the program to limp along until it dies of neglect. It must be ended, neatly, cleanly, and with equal pain to all thereby affected. And here's why:

-- Look, there's just NO BASIS IN THE CONSTITUTION for the federal government to take authority over and liability for individual's failure to save for retirement. The way I see it, there are two ways to win in this game of life: one is to amass a fortune that renders one immune to disaster, the other is to form personal relationships with a sufficiently broad network of individuals to have the same effect. If you do neither by the time you can no longer earn an income, YOU LOSE. You don't have the right to use the fist of the state to take my money so you don't starve.
-- even if the Constitution did authorize the government to set aside individual savings accounts for citizens, which it doesn't, Social Security has never been a savings account, but a thinly-veiled redistribution of income. Much has been said and written about the ratio of workers to retirees, and I don't feel like reproducing that debate. It is enough to say that this is a tax, money extracted through the threat of force from individuals and employees for the benefit of somebody else -- a use of government power that is completely inappropriate.
-- as taxes go, it is particularly odious in that it is regressive. Someone making more than the wage cap (currently $87,900) pays a lower percentage of his income than someone making less than that (to be crude: at $10,000, you pay 6.2%; at $100,000, you pay 5.4%, and at $1,000,000, you pay .54%) -- again, this might be tolerable if this were an individual savings account, but IT'S JUST A TAX. Add to this that nothing -- NOTHING -- reduces income for purposes of Social Security, and this expropriation is even more odious. Even if one receives a full refund on personal income taxes because of low income, that Social Security tax is gone, buddy.
-- it creates the impression, about which I ranted not three paragraphs ago, that we have the right to the income of those who follow us. There's even this perverse notion among some commentators I have heard that this mutual deprivation binds us together, and forms our responsibility to each other. Balderdash. Our responsibility to each other is to help to the extent that we, knowing better than anyone else our own situations, are able and willing to help -- not to hand over an arbitrarily determined amount at gunpoint to the state. And to those of you (like the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate) who cite the 1930s as evidence that individuals won't help the less fortunate on their own, I would point out that IT WAS A DEPRESSION -- maybe old folks were fishing food out of the dumpster because the individuals who normally would have given charitably didn't have the assets to do so. I would also point out that this is a different time: from banking to the stock market, there is much greater democratization, for want of a better word, than ever before. Anybody can get lines of credit, almost everybody can get a home loan, and almost everybody owns some stock in one or more companies. Yes, I know, the FDIC and FSLIC had a lot to do with the availability of loans, and the SEC helps keep the stock market (relatively) safe from exploitation. The government also built our railroads in the nineteenth century, but it sold off those lines (except Amtrak, I guess): just because the federal government may be the best choice to initiate an effort doesn't mean they need to stay there -- and, to drag myself back to the topic, it certainly doesn't mean that it should be free to sieze our assets because somebody thinks we can't plan for our own retirements. And just because one or more generations gets shafted by the system doesn't mean we should perpetuate the shaftage so all can experience it. I mean, if you were beaten by your dad, do you feel your child should also be beaten? (I know that's weak, but really, the arguments underlying the position that we should indenture future generations indefinitely are just so absurd that I can't even bring myself to come up with a clever analogy. It's wrong to harm those who follow you just because you have been harmed.)
-- It violates individual sovereignty.

By the way, all of these arguments apply to Medicaid, too. Let's kill 'em.

The most likely solution would be a cut-off age, probably in the 30s or maybe older or younger, under which individuals would no longer be obligated to pay the Social Security tax, and would be entitled to no benefits. That would screw those in the group who had already put their hard-earned money into the program, but if the age were low enough the freedom from future taxation would help make up for the lost benefits. Maybe we could allow older individuals to opt out of the program on the same basis, although the older the individual, the less likely that selection would be. So to share the pain, those remaining in the program would probably have to pay more to keep the current benefits -- perhaps even removing the cap on taxable wage, or raising it ten-fold. I've read an argument against this, but really, the arguments against raising the cap are the same as those against the Social Security payroll tax itself. Even more brutally honest, the payroll tax should be eliminated completely, and remaining benefits funded out of the general budget. I know, that would oblige those who opted out of benefits to still pay for somebody else's -- but we're already doing that. At least the burden would be distributed the way the general cost of government is born: proportionally by income. And if there were a cut-off age, there would be a sunset for at least one cost of government.

Or maybe we should end the payroll tax immediately, and over the next three or four years pay, in lump sums, a portion of the benefits promised to each individual, out of the general budget. As with a failed corporation, perhaps the benefits would be pennies on the dollar (although, maybe, with a higher ratio for those closer to retirement age) but all the advantages I noted in the opening paragraph would apply here.

At any rate, the last thing we should do is add to the cost of administering Social Security, as President Bush is proposing.

Sovereignty

As an addendum to my discussions of morality and law, I wanted to say a little something about sovereignty, because I have come to conclude that individuals cannot be truly moral without it, and no society or state can be just without presuming it.

I define sovereignty as authority with culpability. For government officials, that sovereignty is limited properly to those areas necessary to protect all individuals equally. For individuals, sovereignty must be limited only by the sovereignty of others. Both aspects are necessary: authorty without culpability makes men into children, culpability without authority makes them into scapegoats.

Sovereignty means that individuals need not be questioned or second-guessed on any action: if it harms another, the action must be punished, but if not, it is the business of the actor. Sovereignty also means that individuals cannot duck or dodge their liability for the consequences of their actions. There's a certain obscurantism here, I admit: every individual is and must remain a black box, a source of action inescapably wedded to it. Insanity, trauma, PMS, or demonic possession (okay, you're right: those last two don't really exist), while interesting, do not modify the effect of an act, and therefore have no impact on the culpability of the actor. Knowledge and intent might, but we have to hold individuals to a minimum knowledge appropriate to the context: for example, if you drive a car, you must be expected to know that driving too fast, following too closely, and eating or doing anything other than driving while driving risks the lives of other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. And, of course, even an action that causes no harm can still have consequences in the reactions of others: a jerk has to expect that other sovereign individuals might refuse to hang out with him.

Sovereignty means that you can't expect somebody else -- or everybody else, through the government -- to bail you out when you make a bad choice. Or even, I'm sorry to say, if fate or Mother Nature shafts you. You can attempt to persuade others to assist, but you don't have the right to take or have somebody else take on your behalf property from any other sovereign individual. For example, no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, AFDC, or any other program that relies on forcing individuals to give money for the benefit of others.

And while we're at it, while we have the right to live, we have the right only to that life that we can sustain with our own justly acquired resources or those that other individuals have freely agreed to provide us. So, for example, the unborn baby, the fetus, has no right to take from its mother resources for its survival to term -- and no other agency has the right to compel a mother, through force or threat thereof, to continue a pregnancy for even one minute.

But y'all get the idea. Sovereignty is the central principle of personal morality and just governance -- so it'll show up again and again in my rantings.