I have long observed that Social Security is a program that takes money away from you when you have the vitality to become financially independent and gives it back to you when you are too dead to use it.  Beneath that sardonic comment lies the observation that Social Security is really two programs: the taking and the giving, the tax and the benefit.  The young experience the taking and the old experience the giving.  Therein lies the difficulty in trying to advance any changes to the current system: it pits the young against the old and tries to shame the young into supporting the program because it benefits the old.

 

    The way out of this dilemma is to step back and address each program separately, to keep and expand on what is good and eliminate that which is bad.  I do this from the perspective of freedom, of gaining the full measure of freedom for all citizens of this republic.

 

    First let us consider briefly the Social Security Tax.  This is a payroll tax levied upon both employer and employee.  It is not levied on those who do not work or on those who do not hire.  As such it is at once a disincentive to work and to hire; it is a double charge against employment, a job killer.  However, its effect only works part way up the wage scale.  Any salary past the wage cap, roughly in the 80,000's, sees no more Social Security Tax on employee and employer.  So it is a selective job killer, affecting mostly the working poor and middle income groups, but leaving the top earners unscathed.  It is inexcusable for any politician claiming to represent those groups to defend the Social Security Tax.  I will make the challenge here and ask you, gentle reader, to make it for me to any defender of the Social Security Tax: "If the Social Security Tax is so good, then you should support the same formula for the Federal Income Tax, adjusting the percentage to take in enough revenue to balance the budget."  Obviously, the response I am hoping for is the admission that the Social Security Tax is monstrously unfair and replacing it with the formula for the Federal Income Tax would be an improvement.  If the legislators foolishly go the other route, vote them out of office, recall them or impeach them, but don't go crying to me.

 

    The benefit side is where we get into issues of freedom.  The benefit is a great idea: providing the funds for survival for seniors.  But why stop there?  It is also a great idea for everyone else.  We could all use this assurance of survival, of at least not dying a slow death of starvation.  But why should government provide us all with a survival benefit?  I answer with another question: Why should we provide government with obedience to its laws?  Government does not have some inherent right to rule.  Without it we are free and we must presume surviving. Maybe not prospering, but certainly surviving.  Now when government claims a right to rule, it must gain it through the people each individually giving it that right.  There is nowhere else to claim it from.  Certainly, God is not obligated to keep anyone in power; what He gives is a privilege, not a right.  As Thomas Jefferson said, governments derive their right to rule "from the consent of the governed".  Now this consent must be free consent, freely given, for if not and circumstances change it will be quickly revoked.  The government must therefore preserve the freedoms that each person would have without it.  These freedoms are handily summarized by another President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as "freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear".  Our concern, here, is with freedom from want.  No one can be considered as consenting to an agreement which deprives them of something essential that they had before entering into it.  In anarchy, the people survived, foraged and did not die from starvation, so they are, under rule, entitled to the means of survival.  It is a very simple contract: food for obedience.