Right, so why not let the people who don’t want social security opt out, and the people that do want it stay in? Then both groups get what they want. Nobody’s arguing against voluntary social security. They’re arguing against the fact that people who don’t want it are still forced into it.
Quite honestly, it’s an insult to make Social Securtiy a mandatory tax on my paycheck, as my generation will not get jack squat from Social Security regardless, in addition to my own principles against receiving said Social Security in the first place.
I might as well be putting aside money to buy some land in Atlantis.
I would much rather have that percentage of my paycheck each week go into my pocket, where I could save it myself, then into some nebulous account that is already sucked dry.
But then again, government knows so much more than I do about saving my own money! In fact, why don’t they just try & take away the benefits of having a 401(k) to “protect” idiots who might’ve lost money in their 401(k)'s by not being on the up & up when their companies didn’t decide to pay up?
I brought this objection to my leftist friend yesterday over dinner, and while I almost got into a conversational tangent about “why object to government helping them out by eliminating 401(k)'s”, I stated “You cannot institutionalize responsibility, let alone fiscal responsibility. Gambling is proof enough of this already.”
I was met with an awkward silence that my leftist friend frankly did not have any answer to. “I guess if you still want a 401(k)” eventually was said. “No, the point is that I shouldn’t have the choice involuntarily removed from my disposal, and neither should anyone else. You can’t protect an idiot majority or minority versus the smart minority or majority from their own choices. Saying otherwise is the exact type of thinking that is driving the Nanny State around the world in style.”
People without qualifications? What qualifications? What arrogance it is for someone to assume there are qualifications needed to save one’s money. You either save or you don’t; whether one is qualified is up for the individual to decide.
Of course, in a culture where displacing responsibility & accountability onto others is the common gesture, this concept goes down about as smooth as a sex on a beach made with motor oil.
Obviously, getting my paycheck today has left me a bit disgruntled… lol.
So? I’m still providing a benefit to many people regardless of their soliciting it…
-Jon
Some kind of error you can’t get rid of when you copy and paste something.
I’m far from an expert in investing but it doesn’t take a genius to set up a 401(k) or IRA.
As it stands now, Social Security is pretty much bankrupt so even spending money on a new HDTV is a better investment: at least you’ll get some enjoyment out of it.
That’s a typical left statist attitude: people are too stupid to take care of themselves without the Big Brother telling them to do. The more education they have, the more condescending they are of the general populace. They must wonder how the humanity even managed to survive before the emergence of the modern socialist states.
My God, you mean that society managed to function without centralized government provision of services until the late nineteenth century? And are you suggesting that many people can more effectively provide for their own futures than can the government? But surely you don’t think that the “buying in” to Social Security is an illusion meant to entrench the program, rather than a method of encouraging people to save (quoth the FDR: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”)! It almost sounds like you’re suggesting that communities might be able to address poverty at a local level, and more effectively than the federal government can! And all without forcing individuals who are not in need of assistance to lose control over large portions of their incomes for a significant portion of their lives! You know, it’s people like you who–
Ow, my head exploded.
God knows how they did it. They must have suffered from all kinds of injustices that our wonderful government has eliminated since then.
FDR was such a crook I can’t believe American people kept on reelecting him. I guess they got what they deserved.
That’s what I hear all the time: that people are incapable of helping each other without being forced. Funny thing is, sometimes it comes from the individuals who actually do some volunteer work. How they fail to see the contradiction is a mystery to me.
So by that rationale, children should be taken from their parents if it is believed they cannot raise them well, people should be forced to eat certain foods only if they will not watch their health, people should be guaranteed government jobs at livable wages if they cannot/will not find free market work, even if there is no work the government has for them? Hey, maybe the government could start a war and then those people could die to solve the labour/work problem.
Oh wait. That’s already been done by people with your rationale.
If people can’t invest well, they should learn how to. Not be forced into bad government investment plans. That’s completely ridiculous.
This is very sad. Perhaps when you lose your freedoms you’ll feel differently. It’s a shame that liberalism and prosperity lead to a rejection of what it took to bring prosperity, but that seems to be the historical trend. People don’t appreciate their freedoms until they are in a tyranny, and have to wage a revolution.
Government is not a group. It is a club. Not anyone can join, not anyone can lead it, and not anyone can collect a wage and pension from it. It is a political club, like any other clique.
Do you know how many people have been murdered by governments in the last century? It’s beyond comprehension. Would wars, let alone world wars, or nuclear bombings even be possible without a state? I highly doubt it. There is no economic incentive to destroy life and property. Only a political one.
Right now, my parents are getting the shaft on their “free health care” while my taxes are sent to support Canadian Troops under NATO oppressing Afghanis and helping the Americans to further destroy their country. Is that just? Of course not. But then the group can accomplish so much, even so much wasteful or counterproductive, and I, a petty individual can only try to satisfy my own profit motive such that I can care for my parents.
Again, government is a club. If they fail, I have no recourse, because the people who are my ombudsmen are employed by the state. When the judges and advocates work for the state, they are not going to side against the state often, if at all.
I don’t own a part of the government. I don’t even have a non-voting share. When I was born, I was shortly thereafter given a tax ID, and rather than owning my government, my government claims to own me. My education, a share of my wages, a permanent annual tax on my property.
I don’t know if any of this is getting through to you. Maybe you will finish school and have a comfortable, safe and prosperous life under the state, and never have to consider how such a deal is available to everyone, smart or dumb, ugly or beautiful, hard working or lazy.
Also, re:drug wars, you don’t see alcohol or tobacco wars do you? Of course not. Drug wars are encouraged by the state, because it justifies law making, the prison industrial complex and the police state.
If you believe people have no right to decide what they can put into their body, then you might want to consider that as an argument against abortion or pregnancy. Maybe the government should also decide who can breed and who must abort. It’s the same principle.
Natalie, I think that there’s a real argument to be made on behalf of the idea that a developed community which allows someone to starve to death or die of exposure is a failed community. Some might coherently claim that as members of communities, if we fail to voluntarily provide certain kinds of assistance to those in grave need, it might be legitimate to forcefully extract from us a contribution towards the provision of these services. In communities where the needy were taken care of, there would be no need for coercion according to this argument. But in communities where people actually were starving to death or dying of exposure (these places do exist), some people might be more comfortable with institutionalized coercion. While I’m not completely comfortable with that argument, I do think that it has a good measure of plausibility, and I can at least see where it’s coming from. And it would, I think, capture the objections to a completely voluntaristic order that your opponents seem to be making.
But the important thing to notice about that argument is that it wouldn’t justify a social security program, or really any federal welfare program. And that’s really the bottom line here. Even if you do think there may be a role for organized coercion on behalf of the poor, it seems like that coercion would be justified on a community level, and not on a national level. And it’s almost impossible to imagine how one would justify coercing people who are not in need to participate in certain programs designed them to protect them from need that they are not in. So ultimately, I think we agree.
Danny, this is where I lose it with self-proclaimed left-libertarians. “Institutionalized coercion”?
Well, it sure is a good thing you’re “not completely comfortable with that argument”.
Maybe some communities should fail. Maybe the community doesn’t exceed the voluntary participation of it’s members. This is dangerous stuff where we flirt with left notions of “society” and “community”. It even relates to our last discussion on education.
Communities do not have to be permanent organizations. They can form and bust under duress, crisis or disinterest. That’s spontaneous order. That’s chaos. A failed community is no different than a failed business. instead of a bailout, we have coercion being used to resuscitate a failed community. It doesn’t change that the community has failed, but it now has institutionalized state structures, committees, taxation collection and disbursement etc. We’re right back to tyranny, setting aside liberty in a community crisis.
That’s very unsettling for me. Have I mis-characterized your position?
Well many thinkers on the left have disputed the perceived libertarian suggestion that coercion on behalf of those in need is never justified with the following sort of example (adapted from Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”):
You are standing by a lake next to a man and his motor boat. An unmonitored child has swum out to the middle of the lake, and has begun to panic, fearing that she will be unable to escape. In her distress, she quickly tires, and appears to be near drowning; she will almost certainly die if she is not helped. You cannot swim or use a motor boat, and the man standing with you also can’t swim, but can use his motor boat. He turns to you and, laughing, says “Oh man, this is going to be hilarious!” As you stare at him in horror, you remember that you have a gun in your pocket.
Now, the question is this: Would you be justified in using the threat of force to coerce the boat owner to go save the child? You may believe that the answer is no, but many people would say yes. And I’m not entirely sure that I can find a way to demonstrate that they are clearly correct or incorrect. And if they are right, then what they seem to have established is that in cases characterized by extreme and urgent need, there may be an enforceable duty to help.
Of course, it’s another step to move from a state-of-nature legitimation of coercion to an institutionalization of that coercion. But institutionalization can take different forms, and depending on how different communities were organized, we might imagine one of the following: Perhaps the generally accepted delineation of rights would evolve to hold these kinds of coercive actions as legitimate, so that if one established severe need and showed that force was necessary to solve it, the action would be legally blameless. Or perhaps a more collectivized community could create an organization which would serve as the “official” determiner of need, and the members of the community would be forced to pay dues to it, as part of the conditions for their continued membership. As I have in mind a radically decentralized society, there’s obviously only a limited extent to which I could anticipate exactly how this enforceable duty would be recognized, if it were recognized at all. And I would fully expect that the degree to which it was recognized would vary from place to place, reflecting differences in the norms accepted by different groups of people. But it does not seem to me that it’s obviously wrong to coerce in the motorboat case, and so I would expect some range of disagreement on cases operating from the same basic principle.
This assumes objective ethics i think. I would make the argument the ethics and morality are merely means that lead to the ends of a productive, functioning society. In these extreme examples society breaks down and you have a chance to act directly to save a child’s life. I doubt a court would find you at fault for acting to save the child.
Well whether or not ethics are objective, I do think that what I said presupposes a realist component to ethics. And I think that’s a supposition that Liberty student accepts, as must all true libertarians. I don’t intend to try to dispute your position, which appears to be rule utilitarian in nature, but I do think that we approach ethical discourse from fundamentally different ways, and so it will be difficult to discuss this issue without talking past each other. For example, I would make the argument that what’s wrong with capriciously killing someone is not that society couldn’t function properly if people just went around killing each other for no reason, though that might be true. Rather, I would think that what’s wrong with killing someone like that would be the fact that the victim was a person, and deserved to be treated better. While it’s true that consequences matter, and that one way of thinking about how people ought to be treated would be to inquire as to what kind of society we would foster by treating people in different ways, I don’t think that rule utilitarianism is interchangeable with the kind of moral theory that I espouse. So where social consequences can’t capture the whole story, we may end up disagreeing about moral principles with no clear way to resolve our differences.
FWIW, rule utilitarianism is itself an objective ethical system, or at least the principle on which it is based on purports to be…
-Jon
Thanks for the responses, Jon and Donny. For the record, I’m extremely poorly read when it comes to ethics so I really had no business engaging in this discussion in the first place. I need to take a break from my economics reading list and start working through my ethics reading list I guess. Your responses were both enlightening.
No worries! For a really interesting formulation of the kind of view you were advancing, you might be interested in John Harsanyi’s essay, “Does Reason Tell Us What Moral Code to Follow and, Indeed, to Follow Any Moral Code at All?” For an alternative way of looking at things, you might be interested in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, or David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice. All three are among the most influential things I’ve ever read.
No. Or rather, I couldn’t justify it to myself. Believing in the NAP (to me) isn’t a conditional thing. I cannot pick and choose when coercion is ok. That is the slippery slope to tyranny. In fact, that is precisely how statism is sold to people.
You obviously have not read many of my posts. I don’t care what a lot or many people would say. Most of them are idiots. That they would disagree with me, is actually reinforcement that I’m on the right track.
Enforceable by whom? This is libertarianism 101, if someone says they have a right to life (or rescue) as the child does in the example, then that is a BS right, because there is no way I can fulfill it absolutely.
Coercion is always wrong. The minute we start making exceptions, save a life, feed the starving, house the homeless, we’re right back to where we started. We might not like that the girl in the lake drowns, but based on the principle (if you can call it that) being put forward, I should probably have to prioritize every person in the world who is in distress, then based upon my capacity to help given physical constraints like time, skills, distance choose accordingly.
Maybe she made a mistake being out there. I’m not sure how that differs from a person who is homeless and starving from gambling all of their wealth away, and I have a gun and you have food, and you’re cackling like a villain, “cool, let’s watch this guy going into his death throes…”
[To avoid misunderstanding, my counter-argument below is written as a devil’s advocate argument; I don’t think your views are quite as unreasonable as it may sound below]
I suppose the problem here is that many people would respond to your argument with the claim that your “philosophy” is implausible bullshit which clings to overly rigid principles that fail to capture the way that almost anyone thinks about morality. You can “believe” in the non-aggression principle until the cows come home, but that’s really not relevant. The non-aggression principle needs to be based on something ethically foundational, and most formulations of the principle are based on something like “the respect to which people are due.” It’s not unreasonable to think that the boat-owner in my example was exhibiting a fundamental disrespect for the child in the lake, and so cannot plausibly demand that respect from anyone else. As far as a lot of people are concerned, that’s virtually the same principle which justifies the use of force against someone who is attacking someone else, even if they never lay a finger on you (and even if they’ve beaten their victim to the point of being unable to ask for your help).
Now, I recognize that all of that is controversial, but none of it inevitably leads to serfdom. There’s a very big difference between forcing someone to incur minimal costs in order to save others from needless death or extreme suffering, and an egalitarian welfare state. The tyranny to which you object is justified on egalitarian grounds, and cannot be justified by reference to respect for individuals. So I don’t think your fears are warranted.
I take back all of the above if you believe that the non-aggression principle is justified on the basis of social efficiency, and not because it is an inherent principle of justice. If that’s the case, let me know and I can address your point that way.