Social Security only persists because we have been conditioned to approach public-sector performance with lower expectations. FULL ARTICLE by Christopher Westley
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/16364/why-are-people-so-forgiving-of-government-failure/
Why Are People So Forgiving of Government Failure?
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There are actually very few government failures. Do not assume that the stated goals of the government and its proponents are the actual goals.
If you accept the false premise that the goal of SS is a comfortable retirement for senior citizens, then yes, it is a failure. If you accept the true premise that the goal of SS is an entrenched segment of the population beholden to the government, then it is an unqualified success.
It is especially true for schooling. If you accept the false premise that the goal of public schooling is an educated populace, then it is a complete failure. If you accept the true premise that the goal of public schooling is a dumbed down, functionally illiterate populace, then it is the most successful endeavor in human history.
How does it serve the government to have a dumbed down and functionally illiterate populace ?
Where does one begin?
More than a thousand military bases in foreign countries where none of them represent a plausible threat to people of the United States. (Unless you count “terrorism” caused by resentment of US imperialism, including its long-term massive support for Israel.) Mainstream media controlled by the CIA (“Operation Mockingbird”) and the banking elite. Belief in nonsense such as anthropogenic global warming, that planes colliding with steel-framed skyscrapers can cause them to turn into dust and then suddenly fall down into their footprints, that outlawing government-disapproved drugs will improve society, or that the government can spend its way out of the depression that its central banks caused. Ad infinitum.
Don’t forget the belief in crackpot conspiracy theories! Clearly, they’ve done their job.
Social Security is the most successful universal welfare program in the history of the world. The only fraud – perpetuated by Mises – is that SS is an insurance program and/or an investment program financed by the payroll tax.
The SS legislation has always required that the payroll tax go into the Treasury and be spent for current budget needs same as all other money in the Treasury. The detour of the money into Treasury paper is a book keeping fiction. All US funds go into the Treasury. All US obligations are paid out of the Treasury.
The Treasurer will pay any obligations that Congress and the President orders the Treasurer to pay. Thus it is silly to always worry about SS going broke and never worry about the military going broke. It is the same pot, the same treasurer, the same congress, and the same president.
Billwald, I seriously hope you’re close to retiring and your only “investment” is in social security
“Social Security is the most successful universal welfare program in the history of the world.”
If you live in la-la-land, sure.
” The only fraud – perpetuated by Mises – is that SS is an insurance program and/or an investment program financed by the payroll tax. ”
What are you on about? It’s neither. It’s a ponzi scheme.
“Social Security is the most successful universal welfare program in the history of the world. The only fraud – perpetuated by Mises – is that SS is an insurance program and/or an investment program financed by the payroll tax. ”
We’d argue it’s all going broke…
It isn’t a ponzi scheme – it’s a taxpayer-funded scheme. If there are fewer taxpayers then they’ll just have to pay more in taxes.
Actually it is by definition one.
“A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors. ”
“If you were born in the 1940′s the probability that you will receive 100% of your scheduled benefits is nearly 100%. The people in this age group will die before SS is forced to make cuts in scheduled benefits. If you were born in the Sixties things still do not look so bad. Depending on how long you will live the odds (76+%) are pretty good that you will get all of your scheduled benefits. However, if you were born in the Eighties you have a problem. The numbers fall off a cliff if you are between 30 and 40 years old today. In only 13% of the possible scenarios you will get what you are currently expecting from SS. If you were born after 1990 you simply have no statistical chance of getting what you are paying for.[10]”
I.e. future generations of taxpayers who will bear the burden of increased inflation/taxation.
Sounds exactly like a Ponzi scheme.
“The Treasurer will pay any obligations that Congress and the President orders the Treasurer to pay.”
Dear Treasury,
Please drop off that container of printed paper at the usual address. I will then distribute select packages to the poor, needy and military. You can get the stuff at the usual federal print shop.
Yours truly,
– The President.
Fantastic article! I would love to see more articles from Mr. Christopher Westley here in the future.
“Social Security is a microcosm of politicians’ tendency to let short-term political benefits blind them to the economic problems inherent in welfare and warfare programs.”
Some of them, sure, but I am not sure how ‘blind’ most of them are. They just have a completely different theory of human social behavior and of acceptable norms of conduct. It’s not like they’re unaware that war expands their power, they might know this and do it even if they thought war unnecessary BECAUSE they can use their increased power ‘for the people’.
Politicians aren’t so much blind of the effects as that there are a lot of effects that concern us but not them.
“Why Are People So Forgiving of Government Failure?”
I submit that the intelligentsia and government propaganda, have convinced the public that private industry is wicked, while government protects us from it. This class warfare view then does not hold government to the standards used to judge industry.
What is the antidote? We need simplified and commonsensical explanations as to why the free market is effective and moral, while government (at best) is a sacrificial effort to protect us from aggression.
Ultimately, the liberal view that the purpose of government is to provide material benefits and moral governance, is to be replaced by the view that its purpose is to defend our rights, while material gain is left to the private realm, and morality is the domain of the individual.
What Social Security is,is a tax masquerading as a retirement program. Yes it is true that all the future benefits will be paid out. It will be paid out by printing money. However the checks that future recipients will receive,when cashed, won’t even buy a cup of coffee.
Obviously one can sometimes be wrong but I tend to judge the consequences of political actions by a statement of the all-time champion con artist, FDR: “In politics there are no coincidences. Everything is planned.” I see a consistency in nearly everything which happens, and I’m seldom surprised.
Time for Michael Moore’s next movie on the Federal Government – “The Dumbest Guys in the Room”.
Give them the same treatment as Enron – “The Smartest Guys in the Room”>
Good article, however, Mr. Westley overlooks perhaps the most obvious and compelling example of the electorate’s tolerance of shockingly poor performance, i.e. the U.S. Congress. Imagine if you were the CEO of an corporation consisting of 535 “executives”, each of whom commands a 6 figure salary and has a staff and budget that is 5-10 times the annual compensation of the “executive” (not to speak of the health care and pension costs attached to these “employees”). Add to this the cost of all the committee staffs, etc. As CEO-or better yet, as a shareholder-of this coroporation, how long would you tolerate the performance of this organization? By any measure, this constitutes not only a colossally miserable performance, but worse than that, they sqaunder trillions of dollars on programs and policies that will be our undoing. It would be more cost-effective if we elected them, gave them their salaries and benefits and required them to stay home and keep their mitts off the levers of power and finance so they were unable to engage in social and economic engineering.
I had a GM car with a flaw that was obviously a design and manufacturing flaw and there was a bulletin on it. It was a kind of huge paint issue on a Buick Rendezvous. I had three dealers and a relative that worked at the Saturn plant tell me there was no bulletin, I was SOL. A small dealer printed out the bulletin, handed it to me and said, “You didn’t get this from me” and I got it repaired by another dealer with a great rep that never even wrote a ticket for it. I WISH this would keep me from buying GM. Even that regional adjudicator lied like a rug. Bold-faced. Why? We are monkeys about this stuff. Like “saying” the rumors about Obama’s birth certif had been de-bunked. Oh, yeah? Makes me feel small and ineffectual. Spewing words seems to help some of us.
Social security make national welfare important part of it
There was a time before Social Security and other New Deal programs. A Gilded Age for the railroad tycoons and backbreaking manual labor for the masses. Before child labor laws and civil rights laws. Private industry wasn’t exactly providing efficient social services free from government intervention. I’m not convinced we’d want to go back to that.
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