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[Ultra-left German politician of the 19th century.]
I am confident that everyone realizes the disaster humankind faces, by comparison to which the impending global depression is a mere blimp on the radar screen: people grow older. It is happening even as you read this. Over eight years ago the BBC led the way in recognizing that people grow older:
…[A]geing is increasingly becoming one of the most salient social, economic and demographic phenomena of our times. (BBC News 11 September 2002)
As one would predict, for decades liberals have favored people growing older, and see what it got us (millions of old people). As should be immediately obvious to any rational person, the problem with the retired is that they cost money and do not work:
Spending on the [US] government's three main entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--is projected to rise significantly in coming decades. If left unaddressed, these increases put the government's budget and the American economy at risk. (emphasis added, American Enterprise Institute, http://www.aei.org/outlook/28443)
The word "entitlement" is notably appropriate in this context. It is clear that all over the civilized world there are people who selfishly believe that they have an "entitlement" to grow old (as I near 70, I am myself a shameless offender). More serious still, millions of people are in the grips of the delusion that they have a right to grow old and stop working, even if they are healthy (cynically called a "healthy reitrement"). The source of this delusion can be traced to nineteenth century chancellor of Prussia and ultra-leftist Otto von Bismarck (like Karl Marx, J S Bach, and Adolph Hitler, a German), who introduced a state pension (please note, state pension, as in nanny state, welfare state and police state).
This was a disastrous precedent, even in the land of Free Enterprise where one would expect the entitlement to work unto death would be protected. To the contrary, in 1935 Franklin D Roosevelt, the American Lenin, forced into law the Social Security Act, which offered parasitic idleness to everyone over 65 (at least those who paid their employment taxes for the appropriate period). The only mitigating element in this Nazi/communist retirement law was that both male and female life expectancy were below 65 (60 and 64, respectively), as was the case in the United Kingdom.
Offering retirement when most people would be dead is fiscally sound, but offering it as a substitute for work is communism. On the largesse of the bountiful state pension a man in the United States and the United Kingdom now can expect to live in total idleness for ten years and women for fifteen! And some of these people are healthy! Those who argue that these indolent oldsters paid taxes for these pensions fail to appreciate the impact on capitalist values of government endorsement of idleness. As former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson put it so accurately and eloquently, "social security is a milk cow with 310 million tits". (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20014698-503544.html)
It is estimated that at the moment in the United States and the United Kingdom that state pension handouts keep forty percent of those over 65 out of poverty. This shows the seriousness of the problem. Public pensions are a vicious cycle: as most people grow older, they automatically receive pensions, and as a result of receiving them they can to continue to age to no productive purpose.
It is fortunate that the US National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility (though notably not President Obama) and the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne realize the disaster and are on the case. Mr. Osborne has recommended an increase in retirement age to 66. This is no more than a pathetic gesture. The appropriate policy is to end the free ride of the millions of dottering welfare cheats. Vice-(understudy?) prime minister Nick Clegg put the matter well back in June when he said that there is nothing progressive about the young carrying the debt burden of the old. That is a process that could go on forever unless something bold is done.
The problem is that pensions encourage people to live longer (as do the free drug prescriptions in the UK). The solution is staring us in the face: a market society should make the elderly pay for themselves (as the people on the New York Upper East Side and in the London boroughs of Chelsea and Kensington can, which is why their life expectancies are so high).
Stop state-sponsored idleness. Joe Glazer, the US "labor troubadour" wrote a song with the refrain, "too old to work, and too young to die". Solve the idle aged problem by ending the state pension and the "entitlement" to grow old. Use the money for something useful, reducing the highest tax rates. If politicians lack the courage to take this obvious step, an interim measure is to raise the retirement age to 90. Then the song will be shorter, "too old to work, die".
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