At present, your Social Security benefits are yours only by grace of Congress: Congress could cut them if it wished. But if your privatized Social Security account were *yours*, then it would be yours not by grace of Congress but by right of property: courts would stand ready to defend it against any casual attempt to cut or confiscate it.
Of course, the good Professor isn't quite ready to fully admit to just what he's done:
The problem is that I cannot see any of these as a reason for George W. Bush to be in favor of Social Security privatization. (It does seem likely to me that (1) and (3) are Marty Feldstein's and Andrew Samwick's reasons for being strong advocates of privatization, and that (4) is Kent Smetters's reason for being a strong advocate of privatization. But their reasons aren't the administration's reasons, and hence whatever plan a second Bush administration might ultimately propose would be unlikely to be crafted to achieve goals (1), (3), or (4).
That's a Berkeley Defense Mechanism, and probably to be expected. And it ain't foolin' the usual suspects:
Christ on a bike! If you don't mind my saying so, Brad, these reasons range from "weak" to "mad".
.... This is insanity of a level which requires a very great degree of intelligence to achieve. In primitive societies in the Kalahari, they are aware that the duty of the young to support the old is a moral duty. This moral duty even made it into the Ten Commandments. It takes years of education to get someone to the point where they believe that it is "immoral" to believe that the old have a claim on the young for no better reason than that they gave birth to them and raised them.
So, it's true. There are no atheists in foxholes.
No comments:
Post a Comment