Ayn-Randed
Hitchens, Christopher
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The dimmest-witted insurance company has no trouble offering lifetime savings and annuity plans with twice the guaranteed returns...
...Win that debate, and the wonks can work out the details...
...But the fight is worth winning.To do that, reformers need the political equivalent of air power, to crack Social Security's defenses...
...Even a modest (in number terms) proposal could kickstart the final chapter in the demise of the nanny state...
...Congress is free to change benefit formulas, and often has...
...But that's thin cover in Social Security's politicalValley of Death, with its cannonades of scare tactics, paranoid accusations and demagoguery...
...Move over, LBJ, make room forW, the next, big-hearted Texas visionary...
...And doing that by denying poor people access to the same capitalist tools they themselves enjoy...
...But that bigger picture isn't coming across as the debate bogs down in mind-numbing details...
...And even those would be lousy investments...
...Papa Bush had a name for it: "the vision thing...
...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...
...For younger, better-paid workers, they're actually now negative...
...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...
...At least in fiction and in motion pictures, the businessman is most commonly cast as a villain...
...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...
...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...
...A reform proposal like Bush's could make membership in the investor class as universal as Social Security numbers...
...and public financing--is what ultimately won the Cold War...
...Start an air war over Social Security...
...The AFL-CIO is running a website charging that Wall Street would get $240 billion in fees from"privatization" over the next decade...
...AYN-RANDED YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH OBJECTIVISTS...
...So it's almost surprising that nobody before now has thought of a book about the direct applications of Rand to commerce...
...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...
...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...
...In addition, Bush's proposal would actually give property rights to Social Security accounts, where there are none now...
...Take universal wealth-building to the people...
...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...
...captains of industry) but it is bruising to the self-esteem of the entrepreneur...
...But the clincher is a potential to change the nation's whole psychology...
...Conservatives routinely underestimate how deeply emotional~nearly religious~Social Security still is for millions of voters...
...Get out of the policy trenches...
...True, the Bushies have tried to stress wealth-creation and ownership...
...BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS C apitalists may own the press --but without necessarily getting a good one...
...9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27...
...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...
...SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...Hearts-and-minds battles can't be won with pocketbook arguments (though those certainly help...
...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...
...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...
...Good for growth, obviously...
...Part of that is the fear of seeming selfinterested...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
