March 9, 2010 06:40 AM
Editor's note: Koil Rowland has been in the practice of writing letters to his friends on significant historical and political issues for several years. The Missouri Record is pleased to print these letters with the author's permission.
We read and hear a good deal these days about the problems connected with federally funded entitlements. The entitlements in trouble are of various kinds, but I want in this letter to write first about the one of them which I think is of paramount importance to many if not most Americans: our system of federally funded Social Security.
I wrote a good many years ago that the federal government’s Social Security system is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, immoral in its essence and doomed to eventual failure. I repeat all of that now. But not many people join me in my low opinion of Social Security--even now, when its acute financial problems are becoming more and more evident.
Almost from the time Franklin Roosevelt brought a system of federally-funded Social Security into American life way back in 1935, the system has been virtually impervious to adverse criticism. But now, because of outcomes resultant from the Social Security system’s structure and operations, adverse criticism of it is becoming common.
That the Social Security system would eventually fall out of favor with Americans was an easy thing to see. I predicted a dozen years ago in my piece titled "Social Security" that such a thing would happen. There are many reasons it did, but the most important of them has to do with the money in the system, or to be more accurate the lack of money in it.
People of all philosophical and political persuasions now seem pretty well agreed that the federal government’s Social Security Administration needs money--a lot of it, and in a hurry. Let me remind you of some of the proposals for raising that money which are being made. I’ll put the proposals I want to mention in the form of some of the questions being asked as solutions to the shortage of money are sought.
Shall we decrease Social Security benefits? If so, by how much? Shall we deny those benefits to certain classes of people now receiving them? If so, which ones? Shall we delay the payment of the benefits till the recipients of them attain higher ages than the ages at which we begin paying the benefits now? What should be the higher ages at which payments are started? And so forth, and so on.
Those proposals for dealing with the Social Security system’s money crisis have to do only with adjustments, tinkering, fine tuning. They all take for granted Social Security’s desirability, and they all leave open for consideration only tactical matters, as it were.
If as a society we begin with the settled notions that a certain level of financial security is the right of every American and that the federal government is the proper agency for providing it, what remains to consider are matters of means only. The end being sought is known, and its desirability is all but universally agreed on.
So much for what I want to write today about Social Security. What about Medicare? And Medicaid? And all those other entitlements to which we as a people have become accustomed and which we as a people have learned to understand as being rights? How shall we cut the Gordian knots their existence causes? Or can we? I think we can, but only if we still have self-discipline enough to deny ourselves the sweet narcotic in which we’ve been reveling for quite some time now: the belief that we’re entitled to something for nothing, and never mind who has to pay for it.
But who will have to pay for it? Our children? Their children too? We seem not to care about any of that. We furrow our brows and put on long faces and try to convince ourselves and each other that we care about it. But I think we really don’t. I think if we really did, we’d be making strenuous efforts to kick the something-for-nothing habit to which we’ve grown comfortably accustomed. And not only don’t I see us making strenuous efforts to do that, I don’t see us making any real efforts at all to do it.
I don’t remember ( if I ever knew) who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But whoever said it was right. If I have an entitlement, somebody or some group of bodies has an obligation to provide me with what I’m entitled to. But maybe I don’t have the entitlement at all.
My hero Russell Kirk taught me half a century and more ago that we don’t all belong to each other. Each of us belongs to himself. But it doesn’t follow that in our society everybody is all alone and completely on his own as he tries to solve whatever problems he’s facing. Americans are a wonderfully generous people, and we’ve always been and still are exceptionally good at helping each other. But we do that best when we do it voluntarily.
Nobody is entitled to anything that belongs to somebody else. And attempts to transfer what belongs to some of us to others of us by the force of law are basically immoral and doomed to eventual failure.
Kindness can’t be legislated. Generosity can’t be coerced. Charity can’t be created by political acts. And the people among us in positions of political power who haven’t known those basic facts of life are now beginning to learn them.
Koil Rowland is a writer in Jefferson City, Missouri. His columns are adapted from letters written to friends.
Nobody is entitled to anything that belongs to somebody else. And attempts to transfer what belongs to some of us to others of us by the force of law are basically immoral and doomed to eventual failure.
