Early Retirement Is Selfish and Unpatriotic

[dianahsieh]

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The March 26, 2008 Baltimore Sun has printed a disturbing OpEd by Andrew Yarrow, in which he makes the claim that Americans who retire early are "selfish and unpatriotic". Here are a few excerpts:

Early retirement selfish, unpatriotic

...But there's just something - make that lots of things - wrong, in general, with retiring at 55, 62 or even 65. I would go so far as to call it profoundly selfish and unpatriotic.

Dropping out of the work force while still in one's prime means ending one's contributions to America's strength, mortgaging our children's and grandchildren's future and leeching trillions of taxpayer dollars from the economy.

...Thus, working longer would increase national output and personal wealth. And given our nation's crying need for teachers, social service workers and public servants, millions of "seasoned citizens" could serve our communities while giving meaning and money to people with decades of life and activity left in them.

...For everyone's good, Americans should at least be able to work as long as their shorter-lived, poorer grandparents did. By doing so, they would be unselfishly helping preserve and strengthen our nation's future by alleviating - rather than worsening - our national debt and making hands-on contributions to our children and communities.

There are a few noteworthy unstated premises in his argument.

(1) Your life is not your own; instead service to others is the highest good.

(2) Selfishness is opposed to patriotism; in other words looking out for your own interests is harmful to the USA.

(3) When you stop working, you are "leeching" off of others.

Of course, the current system of Social Security taxes are just a giant Ponzi scheme. The government attempts to promote the fiction that you are paying your own money into the system when you work and you are "getting it back" when you retire. At least Yarrow is correct in stating that retirees are collecting other people's money.

As the Social Security crisis deepens over the next decade or so, I expect we'll here more such collectivist arguments, in an attempt to forestall intergenerational resentment amongst American.

But the solution is not to force people to work longer for a mythical "common good". Instead, it is to phase out and eventually eliminate the collectivist system of Social Security altogether and let people truly fund their own retirement with their own money. Yes, there will be some painful transition costs. But if we do nothing, we'll pay in the form of vastly more economic pain in 15-20 years, with interest.

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003511.html

[Frederic]

Sometimes I dread checking out this forum to find infuriating stuff like that.

I don't watch TV (except for movies and some TV shows without ads), and I haven't for years.

Ayn Rand said in a live interviews "Universities are one of the most dangerous places in the United States."

They are the ones teaching the collectivist mindset.

One of the best decisions of my life was to NOT go to University and start my own business instead...

[D'kian]

Of course, the current system of Social Security taxes are just a giant Ponzi scheme. The government attempts to promote the fiction that you are paying your own money into the system when you work and you are "getting it back" when you retire. At least Yarrow is correct in stating that retirees are collecting <em>other people's</em> money.

This should have been obvious from the very beginning, when people who had paid little or nothing into the system first got "benefits" out of it.

A Ponzi scheme "works" only so long as more people pay in than cash out. If the population kept growing fast enough then Social Security would appear to be sustainable fro an indefinite time. It wouldn't be, because it produces nothing and has expenses besides, but it would apepar to be. Therefore the only fix the satist-minded can come up with is raising the retirement age to partly make up for the lower population growth. That won't work, either. It may buy a little time, but eventually it has to fail as all Ponzies do.

So next up on the agenda will be another leftist flip-flop. How long have we heard about overpopulation as one of the major problems of the modern world? At least 30 years by my count. Prosperity translates into lower population growth (look at america) as more people live in urban rather than rural settings, and take on industrial or service jobs rather than farming ones, and as farming becomes less labor intensive. The incentives to have more children simply aren't there any more, therefore the population grows more slowly. Not to mention better, cheaper contraceptives, distributed more widely.

But that very trend places the Ponzi schemes in danger. So it won't be long before we start hearing that underpopulation is a big problem, that it is our patriotic duty to produce more sacrificial victims for the Social Security Moloch. Anything but to face reality as it is.

[The Anthem]

Early retirement is unselfish. The time to retire should be unwanted, assuming the person about to retire chose the correct career. I knew if I had a job I loved and had to quit because of my age, I would be rather unhappy. Luckily for me, I'm going to be an author so I can pretty much continue working until I die. I'm writing an essay about Patriotism right now that I will post on my blog. Patriotism has been morphed into a monster where blind slaves to the red, white, and blue are now the patriots, rather than the questioning, skeptical, citizens who belive in America's fundamentals, not every single action they do.

[gags]

But that very trend places the Ponzi schemes in danger. So it won't be long before we start hearing that underpopulation is a big problem, that it is our patriotic duty to produce more sacrificial victims for the Social Security Moloch. Anything but to face reality as it is.

Something along these lines was a frequently cited justification for open borders. The argument was that we need to allow more people into the country to work and fund the welfare state. If people want to come here and be productive that's great, but to want to attract more hosts for the leaches, that's disgusting.

I predict that both McCain and Obama will end up fooling around with the income limit on payroll taxes to further help out the Social Security Ponzi scheme. McCain will probably just raise the limit while Obama will completely uncap it.

[themadkat]

Something along these lines was a frequently cited justification for open borders. The argument was that we need to allow more people into the country to work and fund the welfare state. If people want to come here and be productive that's great, but to want to attract more hosts for the leaches, that's disgusting.

I predict that both McCain and Obama will end up fooling around with the income limit on payroll taxes to further help out the Social Security Ponzi scheme. McCain will probably just raise the limit while Obama will completely uncap it.

They can't uncap the Social Security payroll tax, because the payout when you're old is directly correlated to the amount you pay in. They could never afford to uncap it and then face paying millionaires all that money back. If they changed the system so that the payout was no longer proportional to what you pay in, they would have to admit that it is straight out welfare for the old instead of continuing to pretend that it is government-sponsored retirement savings.

[D'kian]

Something along these lines was a frequently cited justification for open borders. The argument was that we need to allow more people into the country to work and fund the welfare state. If people want to come here and be productive that's great, but to want to attract more hosts for the leaches, that's disgusting.

The argument may be based on bad assumptions, but the consequences for the immigrants would still be good. Consider many of them are escaping even worse leaches in their own countries.

Just as an easy example, the national sales tax in Mexico is 15%. There's no such national tax in america, and I doubt the highest state sales tax is even as much as 10%. Payroll and income taxes ought to be lower in the US, too, but I'm not entirely certain. I say they ahve to be because in Mexico only a minority of income earners pay any taxes at all.