The false security of Social Security

I have argued frequently that the key to understanding the political
challenge facing conservatives is that all of the various “issues” that
dominate our politics are at root challenges to our moral
self-confidence. The very heart of socialism — and the heart of
liberalism, for it is the same thing — is the
arrogant view that ordinary people are not morally competent to govern
themselves or their community. This slander against the character of the
American people is sugarcoated in a spurious compassion by liberals, but
it is still poisonous to our national resolve to stay free. We won’t
find the courage to win the agenda of liberty until we stand once again
on the solid ground of confidence that we are a people good enough to be
trusted with our liberty and to wield it rightly.

The moral nature of the battle between socialism and American
principle can be seen quite clearly in the case of Social Security,
particularly in its origins. Conservative reform proposals are correct
to condemn the economic foolishness of the current system, which
systematically refuses to acknowledge that our long-term economic
destiny is determined not by government planning, but by the creative
genius of a free economy. Investment of retirement monies in the equity
markets is not imprudent gambling; in due measure, it is the right use
of the talents of today to lay the foundation for the prosperity of
tomorrow. But arguments about the relative return of stock
market investment and other, less dynamic forms of savings miss the
essence of the Social Security issue. The question is not merely how to
arrange our long term economic preparations today so that the future
will be secure in terms of dollars. We must also be sure that we do so
in a way that helps us remain a people capable of using those dollars as
the material foundation of a national life of dignified liberty. Social
Security reform is a moral question, yet another version of the only
question we really face today — do we still have the moral confidence
to retain our freedom?

During the Great Depression, the material challenges were not the
real threat to American liberty; the cause for concern was that they
could be the occasion of a moral collapse capable of destroying us as a
free people. It is ironic, then, that the fear of material poverty
during the 1930s did in fact lead America to embrace a much greater
threat to our liberty — the socialist premise of the Social Security
system. The advent of Social Security illustrates the danger that
moments of low moral self-confidence present, which then can be
exploited by liberals to our permanent national harm.

The 1934 report of the Committee on Economic Security became the
basis for the FDR Social Security proposal. The argument of that report
was simple. It may be paraphrased thus:

We are suffering because we have gone from an agrarian to a
modern economy, from an economy of family-based production to a
money-based economy in which dignity is calculated on income. So the
family has failed, and can no longer take care of the elderly and
children. But don’t worry, because the government will ride to the
rescue and provide American citizens with a guarantee of income and
security that families and the economy can no longer provide.

They called this promise “compassionate,” of course. But really
it wasn’t about compassion at all. As a people, we had gone through an
awfully traumatic experience, and we were afraid. Many Americans were
afraid of the future, and afraid that we could no longer walk a path of
freedom with confidence. In opportunistic exploitation of that fear, the
socialists of the 1930s cloaked us from harm in the “protective” armor
of socialism, in the form of a Social Security system that is founded on
the premise of our inability to take care of ourselves.

We have been clanking around in that armor for the last 60 years,
ludicrously bound to hand over a large percentage of our wages in return
for the psychological comfort of a meager but guaranteed
subsistence. Government has grown enormously over this period, and most
of its activities have taken a similar form of institutionalized
skepticism about the ability of this people to manage its affairs. This
systemic premise of fear of the future has justified the forced transfer
of great quantities of what would have been our discretionary income
into the hands of the government, and it has justified a system of tax
and regulation targeted directly against our freedom.

Meanwhile, a wondrous thing was happening. Far from justifying the
premises of the socialism of the 1930s, the enterprise of the free
American people in the latter half of this century has produced results
that founders of the Social Security system couldn’t have dreamt of.
They thought our economy would still be measured in billions, and it is
now measured in the trillions. They couldn’t even conceive of the
success we have enjoyed.

But the prosperity of the past 60 years will ultimately be in vain if
we do not take from it the obvious lessons. We have been treated like
children whose parents keep them indoors with tales of the evils lurking
outside. We can look back, now, over most of a century in which we were
told that our safety lay in the government, and we can see that it was
not true. We have sustained our own prosperity, and the government has
simply made it harder, materially and psychologically, for us to do so.
It is time that we once again resumed openly the responsibility for the
job we have actually been doing all along.

Socialist economic planners, and politicians who profit from the
current system in votes and influence, like to make us think that the
issue of Social Security reform is very complicated. But it is not. If
we intend to choose the dignity of freedom over the apparent comfort of
socialism, we must simply apply the principle that those who earn the
money ought to supervise how to invest it for their retirement. A free
and responsible people — a morally self-governing people — should not
subject itself to the indignity of handing over its earnings into a
collective pool, controlled by government bureaucrats and politicians
who will supposedly handle the money more responsibly
than the citizens who earned it by the sweat of their brow. The Social
Security scheme epitomizes our national temptation — promoted by
liberals at every turn — to decide that we cannot be trusted to make
good decisions ourselves.

Our national approach to the challenge of long term financial
preparations must be to put it back on the basis of liberty, on the
presumption of good and mature judgment in the citizenry, and supported
by a doctrine of property that does not imply that our money is on loan
from the government, but is truly ours to use as we judge best. Promises
made must be kept, and those who have “contributed” to the current
system must receive what is due them. But looking forward we must put in
place a proprietary social security system, in which the people who earn
the money invest it as they think best, and keep it in their name and
under their control. We must replace “social security” with the true
security of real liberty.

This is not hard to understand, and we should be losing our patience
by now with politicians who tell us that it is. One wonderful thing
about Ronald Reagan was that, because he thought in terms of
principle, he knew that many issues that the opponents of liberty
present as complicated matters for experts are really simple. With
Social Security, as with most of the policy questions our nation faces,
the question isn’t what we should do, because we know what we should do.
The question is whether we will find the moral and political will, the
confidence, to do it.

We stand on the threshold of the new millennium facing a very simple
decision. Will we continue to clank around in the armor of socialism,
put on us in exploitation of our fears? Or are we going to throw off the
constraining armor of that socialism and face the new millennium with
the confidence of our freedom?