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I don't care about "shared risk". Obviously, that's a feature of the program's mechanisms and I'm aware of that. We differ on the desirability of that feature. I think it's basically theft and you think it's just peachy. It's obviously not "shared risk" because your "low wage earner" risks...

"Social Security is a compact between generations" is a rationalization of the mediocrities who are employed by the SSA who could get neither the same salary nor the same benefits from a private sector employer. If you're going to boil the arguments down to "cui bono", don't act as if the SSA...

Not so. When government is a monopoly provider (or even the price-setter in a specific market like Medicare), there are fewer innovations available to consumers. Where do innovations happen? At the boundaries between current regulation and emerging consumer needs, provided that private entities...

What's your "base case" to compare the outcomes with SS to the outcomes without? You can't just point to the decrease in poverty among the elderly and say that therefore the program "works", since alternatives to the program could have worked even better. One such alternative would have been...

No, I wouldn't expect an insurance company to be selling the same annuity in 2012 that it sold in 1970, but at least if I were buying an annuity, I would have a choice of multiple providers or the choice of investing my own way. I mentioned Greenspan because he headed the commission that...

In other words, it's sustainable so long as we keep changing the rules to make it sustainable. It's not sustainable per se under one specific set of rules. Yeah, OK, that's about the level of logic I expect from someone defending the program, so, per usual, I'm not surprised. Remember that...

The risk adjusted return trend is down, down, down, and already negative for some earning classes and birth years. Eventually, it will be negative for all of them except the lowest earners and SS will be revealed as yet another welfare program only benefiting the least capable and taking capital...

The big problem is that no one pays attention to the opportunity cost of something like Social Security. Almost any investment program followed for the 50-odd years someone is in the workforce until they begin to collect SS would result in a higher post-retirement income. Instead, it's portrayed...

National debt and socialism are two separate things. The problem is what the debt is being spent on, which are not broad investments to provide public goods, but targeted "investments" to pay off cronies. That's not even "socialism", it's crony capitalism or clientelism. If it were socialism...

Can we distinguish between legitimate "public goods" and "socialism" for the purposes of discussion? There are a lot of people who want the government to function in its proper role of providing public goods, of which there is a specific definition (military and police being one of the most...

The desire for socialism is a symptom of an already-broken spirit. Therefore, the less an individual desires socialism, the less of a broken spirit that person is. It's all in Nietzsche, at least the psychological and philosophical aspects of it. You won't find a detailed analysis of...

As far as I know, the US champions "democratic republicanism", although, in the final analysis, we don't dictate what any country's constitution will be, that is their decision. So, no, we are not a democracy, nor is democracy a viable long-term political system. US states are often called...

What's wrong with reducing everything to money? Money is just an abstraction which reflects a person's value to society. Would you rather everything be reduced to something else? What else is there that provides an objective standard everyone can agree on? I'm glad everything gets reduced...

Where you gonna get the jeans if you have no labor to exchange for currency to buy them? You're assuming that parties have to trade simply because both parties have different goods available for trade. That's not true because the party with the more "valuable" good can always wait for another...

But what if there is a tipping point beyond which capital does not make labor more productive, it makes it obsolete? We've simply never had machines that could replicate thinking of the sort necessary in the relatively low-level white collar work that we are seeing happen now, so referencing...

I never understand this whole line of thinking that if only (fill in large percentage of the population here) were gone, things would be "in balance". Think back to the time in history when there were 75% fewer humans than there are now. Were things "in balance"? No, they weren't. It's not...

Check out a book called "The Lights in the Tunnel" by Martin Ford, who has a pretty detailed take on this question. My guess is that there will end up being some sort of minimum annual income provided to anyone who cannot find work due to machine displacement (at least in the developed world)...

People like Hershey make it plausible that humans share a common ancestor with the cockroach.

Now that I know how to trade without a "guru", seeing people hang on Hershey's every word is a good reminder of just how many confused traders there are out there. At least the "guru" I learned from was profitable and paid his taxes on time.

dom993 adds more value with one post than Hershey has added in his entire gamut of posts.