Social Security

 

Social Security

After corporate personhood and the peripherals that came in its wake in the first decades of the Twentieth Century had worked their magic, we ended up with the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. While the constitutional violations and usurpations of the Roosevelt era are an overwhelming problem unto themselves, there is an even larger problem, at least as far as those of us who wish to revive free self-government are concerned. FDR’s third mistake is that some of the most revered aspects of the New Deal have so greatly eroded the morals and culture of the people that we have been rendered virtually incapable of self-government. The most devastating of these morally degrading programs is the so-called untouchable third rail of American politics- Social Security.

Social Security, the most holy of all holy cows, must now be soberly examined and questioned. This is certainly not to frighten those dependent on this program because we must first make a solemn commitment that we will not fundamentally alter the system without ensuring a painless transition to those already dependent on it (and who paid into it for years). Even if we decide to totally end Social Security, human compassion demands that we not pull the rug out from under those already dependent on it. If there is a dismantling, it will be a compassionate, phased dismantling. Consequently, no one should try to prevent this discussion out of fear for their own personal security or the security of the helpless, dependent and elderly.

Nonetheless, we simply must have the discussion because Social Security has been, without most people realizing it, the main driving force behind the massive social decline of this nation. Moreover, a close scrutiny of Social Security will open our eyes to the insidious anti-community, anti-family effects of the entire federal socialistic structure and how that "liberal" structure is inevitably totalitarian and doomed to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions

It will surprise many to realize that the most important problems created by Social Security have to do not with the financial stability of the system, although that is a problem we will look at, but rather with the morality and education of our young.

Consider the world before Social Security. The fact that there was no Social Security or Medicare to fall back on made people's thinking about old age far different from today’s thinking. People worked hard and saved their money for their declining years, much like today. But those individual savings wouldn't have been enough to ensure peace of mind, as they aren't enough today. Throughout the ages, the life savings of the working and middle classes have been eaten up by any number of causes, such as economic depressions, hyperinflation, natural disasters, and catastrophic illness. Consequently, people have always felt a need for more security than can be provided by personal savings. Before Social Security, that need was met by strong communities and even stronger families.

In the old way (which held sway before the 1930’s back through time to the mists of pre-history), before Social Security, there were a number of conclusions that almost everyone came to about how to deal with old age. In fact, people didn't so much reach these conclusions as inherit them because they were the same common-sense ways that had been practiced by their parents and grandparents.

One of the conclusions was to have large families. Large families were common back in those days. Of course, there were religious reasons, but they concurred with the wisdom of the people. It was thought that, out of a large family, one or two of the children would make good and help the others get set up in life as well as provide for the parents in their old age, if needed. The change in thinking about the size of families will be touched on again in this chapter as it is the prime reason the system is going broke.

Another unspoken conclusion was that of character formation. Before Social Security, the parents had a vested interest in the character of their children. There were no government entitlements, and the family was the provider of last resort. People took a lot more care about the character of their children because they had a lot more to lose if their children had poor character. If a child was allowed to grow up being selfish, a bully, or in other ways immoral, the parents could expect little help even if the child became rich. On the other hand, if the children were allowed to grow up lazy or not capable of making their way in the world that too would also jeopardize the security and happiness of the parent's old age.

To be sure, very few families thought these things out in a conscious way. It's just the way things were done. Additionally, the community exerted a lot of pressure to keep things that way. The community was made up of many families operating under the same conclusions. If a child went “bad”, it was a reflection on the whole family, and the parents were expected to fix the problem. In that way, the lines of accountability and responsibility were maintained throughout the community. These lines carried great authority as well because the community/family, not the federal government, was the provider of last resort.

In the old days, parents put a lot of effort into forming the character of their children, ensuring that they were both competent and moral. This wasn't just because they loved their children but because they saw that their future security might depend on the level of their children's character. It may sound like they were very selfish and calculating. They weren't. It's just that human beings will always be human, and human nature, like electricity, will always follow the path of least resistance.

If the only way a person can feel secure about growing old is to invest time and energy into the community and into the character of their children, that is what a person will do. On the other hand, if the only thing a person has to do to feel comfortable about growing old is to maintain a relationship with the federal government, then that is all the average person will do.

It's not that parents, since the advent of Social Security, don't love their children. Rather the point is that raising children can be difficult. From sleepless nights, to changing diapers, all the diseases and the teenage years, raising children is very draining, even to the worst and most uncaring of parents. To the best of parents, it's a full-time vocation.

At every stage of the process, at every crisis, minor or major, there is a temptation on the part of the parent to say "so what." It's easy to slip into a mode of just doing enough to keep the chaos at bay, or to keep social services from the door, but not going deep enough to solve the character problems that are beginning to appear. Even though we can see that the child will be a weaker adult because of correctable character flaws, many of us fail to address the problems. It is easier on the parent that way and many seem to think, "The problem doesn't really threaten me while the little snot is a child, and at 18, they're out'a here. What they do after that is their business, and none of mine."

Thus, Social Security attacks the family by greatly reducing the vested interest parents have in the character of their children. In this way, Social Security acts like a corrosive social poison, changing society at the molecular level of the nuclear family, profoundly affecting the relationship between parents and their children.

Of course, not every family has taken the bait. There are many families still focused on character development, but Social Security has encouraged the tendency to ignore character development. This has created a kind of social wind of peer pressure which is very difficult for parents who do want to raise strong and good children to stand against. Undoubtedly, some parents succeed, but it is undeniable that many families are failing.

There are a couple of phenomena that can be pointed to as evidence that Social Security is having this effect on our culture. One is what has been called the "generation gap," the split between the cultures of the young and the old. It was first noted as a real problem in the 1960’s and has gotten worse ever since. It came about when the first generation who had been raised under the culture of Social Security; those born in the 1920’s and 30’s were raising their own children. The first generation raised with Social Security in its future wasn't overly concerned when its young, for the first time, developed a distinct and hostile culture. There has always been some friction between young and old but nothing in the past was like the ongoing youth rebellion that started in the 1960’s.

Another piece of evidence is the work and popularity of Dr. Spock. In the 1950’s and 60’s he advocated that we should basically let children raise themselves, not inflict our discipline on them, and they would be happier and healthier. These concepts first became popular among the first generation of parents growing up with Social Security in their future. These “permissive parenting” ideas had been around for many years, but they first started getting traction within the matrix of a Social Security culture.

Eroding parental priorities is the most powerful and insidious aspect of Social Security. By toppling the ancient regime of the family, Social Security changes the entire framework within which we conduct our culture. It changes the thinking of every person, loosening his relationships with everyone else except for their relationship with the federal government. Consequently, Social Security, in working as an insidious poison on the foundational cell of the nuclear family, weakens the whole living body of society.

Social Security is an addictive, corrosive social poison

What’s more, since there are now so many dependent on Social Security, it can accurately be considered a social addiction. When thinking about how Social Security affects our nation and why it must be stopped, it will be accurate, and therefore helpful, to think of it as an addictive, corrosive, social poison.

We can now see how the erosion of family and community thinking caused by Social Security has worked hand in glove with the socialistic thinking that erected the whole federal socialist structure. Once the individual is no longer dependent on or strongly connected with family and community, there isn't much of a reason to defend the prerogatives of local community nor to seek community-based solutions to the problems that arise.

When a federal "solution" is proposed, we are quick to agree to it because it conforms to our prejudice that local community is irrelevant and probably incompetent. Besides, giving it to the federal government to fix allows us to go on with our private lives not having to take the time and energy required to actually solve civic problems.

Take, for example, the problems of teen gangs and teen pregnancy. The community way of dealing with these problems, the old-fashioned way, would be with meetings, activism, and social pressure. The community as a whole would put pressure on the kids and the families to change their behavior. If simple persuasion didn't work, they could resort to the tools of boycott, ostracism, and stigmatizing of the offending parties. The families (parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents) would respond to this community pressure because to ignore it might threaten their prestige in the community, their livelihood, and their entire material security. The kids, in their turn, would respond to familial pressure because the family, and not the federal government, was the provider of last resort. Family, and not government, was where you went for help when your life was on the rocks.

That's not how it works today. Community pressure can't be brought to bear because no one is dependent on the community. Consequently, that approach is rarely tried. Instead, when some sort of social problem appears, we immediately throw up our hands, abandoning a community approach, and call for a new federal program.

Is medical care needed for the poor and elderly? Instead of organizing local, low-cost clinics, we call for a federal program. Is environmental pollution a problem? Instead of boycotting the offending corporations (or threatening to pull their charters), we call for a federal program. Is education a problem? Instead of dealing with our failing school systems with unrelenting passion born of the fact that the morality and competence of our children figures so large in our future lives, we passively look to the federal government for programs like No Child Left Behind. Throughout this whole process, the fact that we are operating in the matrix of a Social Security based culture causes our attempts at solutions to exacerbate, and not solve, the underlying problems.

Moreover, this is where we can see the inevitably totalitarian nature of socialism in general. Solutions to social problems that depend on distant government weaken community and erode personal moral virtues. This creates more social problems that, if dealt with again by distant government programs, further weakens community and further erodes personal moral virtue. This vicious cycle will end with either social collapse or a totalitarian government; the horrific choice of abandoning civilization or adopting draconian police state measures. In either case, we move away from being a free people.

Obviously, this analysis of American moral decline is oversimplified and generalized. There are many other factors, in addition to Social Security and socialism in general, which have contributed to the decline of family and community. Mass culture, the internet, movies, music, television, and, in more recent years social media have worked to break down the insularity of local communities. Mobility, in the form of planes and cars, has greatly increased the geographical range of the average person and, in so doing, exposed us to many different ways of doing things. There are many other factors (the arts, the wars, the easing of travel restrictions between nations, and many unmentioned others) which have impelled a breakdown of community spirit while at the same time encouraging a powerful cosmopolitanism.

What's more, and it might shock some to see this admitted, a lot of this cosmopolitan spirit has been good. An increase in tolerance and an appreciation of the contributions made by all cultures is a fresh and hopefully abiding advance made by this era of Americans. This increase in cosmopolitan appreciation does not, however, have to come at the expense of losing our precious community spirit.

Social Security (and the welfare state that has accompanied it) has been the unnoticed, unheralded, and yet leading cause of the breakdown in community. The insidious, corrosive aspect of Social Security (the Social Security matrix) so changes the basic assumptions of the individual that it is appropriate to refer to pre and post Social Security thinking.

In the post Social Security world, there isn't an immediate breakdown in community and family. Social Security in this sense is like pushing something with a string. It doesn't force parents to be less careful about their children, but it does allow them to behave that way, and to not suffer any negative consequences.

With the existence of Social Security, the individual no longer has much of a reason to exert the effort it will take to ensure a strong and moral community and family. In the long run, that factor alone will cause an erosion of family and community. Add to that modern technology (and the fact that all the modern technology has been seen through the lens of, digested and used by the mind of a post- Social Security society) and the process accelerates. Combine that with a post Social Security peer pressure, which denies any kind of objective moral truth, and community consensus becomes impossible. Finally, throw in some sort of federal socialistic scheme every time there is a problem caused by breakdown of family or community (taking more power from community and encouraging and enabling an even steeper moral decline which further increases the negative synergy) and the pace of the breakdown accelerates to a confusing blur. As asserted, social breakdown or totalitarian government looms as the only two realistic alternative futures.

Another of the internal contradictions of centralized socialism is the fact that Social Security is going broke. Although the estimates of when the next crisis in Social Security financing will occur vary from ten to twenty-five years, everyone agrees that there will be a crisis.

The inevitability of the crisis stems from two factors. First, the percentage of the population receiving Social Security benefits is increasing every year and will continue to increase at a dramatic rate into the foreseeable future. This is due to the huge numbers of people in the baby boom generation beginning their retirement years. The second factor is that the percentage of the population paying into the system is declining due to people having smaller families in the last fifty or so years.

The combination of these two factors will result in a diminishment of already meager benefits and an increase in already high taxes withheld from income. Even with those changes, the day will come when the revenue available won't cover the benefits people need. The system will be economically broke. No one knows what will happen then, but it probably won't be pretty.

This problem arises because Social Security isn’t a pension fund where people pay into a fund and then receive payments from their investment when they are old. The people receiving Social Security benefits today are being paid with money from the income of people working today. So, it's basically just a pyramid (otherwise known as a Ponzi) scheme where today's workers are sending money to the people at the top of the list (retirees) with the hope that no one will break the chain and their benefits will be there when they need them.

The problem is that like any pyramid scheme, Social Security requires that there be many more people at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top. With baby boomer retirement and the small modern nuclear family, the demographics no longer look like a pyramid, but instead, they resemble a top-heavy column with fewer people on the bottom than the top.

When Social Security was first conceived, this would never have been a problem because in those days people had large families. The irony is that, as previously noted, the reason folks in the past had large families was that having a lot of children was a form of old age insurance

This then is another of the internal contradictions of centralized socialism. Social Security won't work unless people have large families, and yet people aren't motivated to have large families because Social Security exists. There needs to be a broad base on the pyramid for this scheme to work but the nature of this particular pyramid destroys any reason for individuals to broaden the base.

Finally, the last major internal contradiction built into the socialistic structure foisted on us by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is also the one that should give us the most hope that these mistakes can be reversed. Virtually every program that endures from the New Deal was established by ignoring the words written in the Constitution. This is an especially awkward problem because these programs allow federal bureaucrats to insert their rules and regulations, which must be followed to the minutest letter, into the most intimate parts of our lives. Yet the authority for doing so rests on a laughably loose and incoherent reading of the basic law of the land.

Thus, we have arrived at a system of lawful lawlessness, or unlawful legalisms. If we were to apply the laws and regulations of the left with the same (living) misuse of language with which they treat the Constitution, we could do anything we want. On the other hand, if they used the words of the Constitution with the same strict adherence that they expect for their “laws”, they wouldn’t have the power that they do today. Returning to a coherent (original) reading of the Constitution would eliminate most of these problems.