Oh, No-Social Security!
ricardo, david
and public financing--is what ulti- mately won the Cold War. On the other hand, viewed from the standpoint of individuals--simply as a retirement finance system--Social Security offers...
...Only in the novels of Ayn Rand does one find risk-taking capitalistsmJohn Galt, Howard Roark, Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart--represented as heroes and champions.And these books, most especially Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, actually do continue to outsell the competition...
...The truth is that Wall Street is near silent on this issue---scared to death, in fact...
...But the fight is worth winning.To do that, reformers need the political equivalent of air power, to crack Social Security's defenses...
...SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...Winning will depend much more on communicating an inspiring vision and seizing the moral high ground than on scoring actuarial debate points about precisely whether the trust funds will or won't go cash-flow negative in 2016...
...and public financing--is what ultimately won the Cold War...
...There's also the little problem~for the money guys and politicians alike~of newly minted investors clamoring for "refunds" every time the market heads south...
...At least in fiction and in motion pictures, the businessman is most commonly cast as a villain...
...Part of that is the fear of seeming selfinterested...
...The dimmest-witted insurance company has no trouble offering lifetime savings and annuity plans with twice the guaranteed returns...
...And doing that by denying poor people access to the same capitalist tools they themselves enjoy...
...Win that debate, and the wonks can work out the details...
...AYN-RANDED YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH OBJECTIVISTS...
...Get out of the policy trenches...
...Indeed, the groups that could benefit most from reform-low-income workers, minorities and women--are being readied for battle, by leaders who never met a marketbased idea they didn't hate (except their own fat 401(k)s...
...BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS C apitalists may own the press --but without necessarily getting a good one...
...For younger, better-paid workers, they're actually now negative...
...captains of industry) but it is bruising to the self-esteem of the entrepreneur...
...But the real nightmare would be actually having to deliver simple, low-cost investment plans to 140 million people, many of them with poor and with zero financial skills-the opposite of cherry picking among the high-net-worth crowd...
...There are bigger stakes involved here: higher economic growth for the nation as a whole and the prospect of real personal wealth for every American.Anyone opposed to that needs to be painted as what they are: cynical partisans intent on sustaining dependence and poverty in those whose longterm interests they purport to protect...
...The AFL-CIO is running a website charging that Wall Street would get $240 billion in fees from"privatization" over the next decade...
...Hearts-and-minds battles can't be won with pocketbook arguments (though those certainly help...
...True, the Bushies have tried to stress wealth-creation and ownership...
...In novels such as Sinclair Lewis's Babbit, or even Mario Puzo's The Godfather, he is represented either as a utilitarian philistine or as an illustration of Balzac's dictum about the relationship between great fortunes and great crimes...
...Start an air war over Social Security...
...Even a modest (in number terms) proposal could kickstart the final chapter in the demise of the nanny state...
...The striving Russian immigrant girl (who took her nom de plume from her battered Remington Rand typewriter and is no relation to the corporation of the same name) has been harnessed for this purChristopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair...
...Conservatives routinely underestimate how deeply emotional~nearly religious~Social Security still is for millions of voters...
...The guy working the towel behind the carwash could use some of his FICA tax money to buy into the same assets as the executive speeding off in the Lexus...
...In the movies, the instant the camera pans up the towering and glittering skyscraper, you just know that there is a corporate villain lurking on the top floor.This appeal to popuhsm may represent a shrewd investment on the part of the giant corporations who make such films (there are, by definition, more "little guys" in the ticket-lines than there are The new economy awaits a novelist who does not cherish the deathful prose of the late Mickey Spillane...
...Take universal wealth-building to the people...
...A reform proposal like Bush's could make membership in the investor class as universal as Social Security numbers...
...In addition, Bush's proposal would actually give property rights to Social Security accounts, where there are none now...
...On the other hand, viewed from the standpoint of individuals--simply as a retirement finance system--Social Security offers laughably low (and declining) rates of return...
...So it's almost surprising that nobody before now has thought of a book about the direct applications of Rand to commerce...
...But that bigger picture isn't coming across as the debate bogs down in mind-numbing details...
...George W. Bush put his toe in the water with a modest proposal that individual taxpayers be allowed to direct just two percent of national payroll into personal accounts...
...Contrary to the left's fantasies, Wall Street is no more interested in this business than the banking industry is in offering low-cost "lifeline" checking to the homeless...
...Papa Bush had a name for it: "the vision thing...
...Move over, LBJ, make room forW, the next, big-hearted Texas visionary...
...9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27...
...And even those would be lousy investments...
...Good for growth, obviously...
...But that's thin cover in Social Security's politicalValley of Death, with its cannonades of scare tactics, paranoid accusations and demagoguery...
...Congress is free to change benefit formulas, and often has...
...But the clincher is a potential to change the nation's whole psychology...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
