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Social Security for the Sixties Generation?

by Christopher Chantrill
January 23, 2005 at 11:15 pm

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“ALL my life I have wanted a pension,” said the retired naval clerk John Dickens to his son Charles in a BBC biopic that ran years ago on PBS. And many Americans agree with him. You put in your 40 years, or 30 years—or even a mere 20 years for some fortunate policemen—and then you get a pension. For life. This is the demand side of Social Security.

Then there is the supply-side, that thinks about retirement like Winston Churchill about his beloved nurse Mrs. Everest: “When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives, I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a help to them.”

Demand-side or supply-side, the one-size-fits-all approach to superannuation enshrined in Social Security seems oppressive and rigid for a rich and diverse nation such as the United States of America.

Indeed, given the postmodern injunction to celebrate diversity, it seems strange indeed to force everyone to conform to such an arbitrary and inflexible system, to tax everyone 15 percent for their labor for 40 years for the right to receive the same uniform pension. It curbs the wastrel and forces him to save for the future. It prevents the entrepreneur from deploying the full extent of his resources upon his exciting schemes of profitable enterprise. It misleads the timid into imagining that it is possible to drain this uncertain world of risk and contingency. It shortchanges black males, who experience a life expectancy about ten years less than average, and it really hits gay males, who experience a life expectancy about twenty years less than average.

President Bush aims to change all that. He wants to move the United States towards an ownership society and away from dependency, towards a society that he imagines will elect Republicans rather than Democrats. So he is about to propose a system in which young Americans will save for their own retirement with individual accounts that are personal property rather than political promise. By moving from a defined benefit system of national superannuation managed by government experts towards a defined contribution system managed by the American people themselves, Bush is making American superannuation more inclusive, extending it from the narrow vision of the nanny state to include that of the robust and independent householder.

Even with Bush’s reform, Social Security remains terminally 1950s, a 40-years-and-a-gold-watch, Organization Man kind of system. But in two years the leading edge of the baby boom will be 62 and eligible to take early retirement on Social Security. How can the Sixties generation be expected to endure a Life With Father retirement system?

All their lives, the Sixties generation has demanded relevance and meaning, and it expects nothing less for its golden years. The one-size-fits-all solution of Social Security is an insult to boomer creativity, and the defined contribution system proposed by President Bush a materialistic option that offends its commitment to live simply (so that others may simply live). Boomers will want to retire with relevance.

But where is the comprehensive national program to enable owners of tasteful homes in yeasty Victorian neighborhoods to mobilize their home equity to help the homeless? Where is the infrastructure to enable the heavy laden argosies of TIAA/CREF participants to donate their excess deck cargo to fund micro lending to oppressed women in Third World countries? We need a Social Security checkoff to help progressives donate their Social Security benefits to boost the Social Security Survivor Benefits of AIDS orphans. And that is just the beginning.

What will happen in twenty years when the boomers start to become “old old?” For a start, we will need a national system of cooperative meditating centers and hospices to provide dignity to progressives in their last days when they are no longer able to give to their communities. What happened to the radical professor Remy in the movie Barbarian Invasions should never have to happen to any progressive.

But where are the Democrats on this? Where is the outrage at the blandness of it all? Where is Hollywood with Suncityville celebrating creative boomer seniors turning black-and-white retirement blandness into creative color? When will the arts community challenge the status quo with the searing Incontinence Monologues?

Yet the Democrats are dead set against any change to Social Security. How could this be? Could it be that the fire has gone out of the great Sixties generation that gave us sex, drugs, and rock and roll? Could it be that all they really want now is to collect their Social Security checks and their Medicare benefits, just like their fathers? Is it all over?

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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