One good reason to vote for Bush

Of course it would be nice if Social Security privatization had a spokesman other than Bush; the man probably couldn't make a convincing case for celebrating Mother's Day, let alone privatizing retirement benefits. Perhaps it isn't very smart for him to talk about using the budget surplus for a big tax cut in the same breath that he talks about using it to finance Social Security benefits during the transition. But Gore's handling of this issue has been truly pernicious. What he proposes is the equivalent of doing nothing about a tumor that is more likely than not to turn cancerous. Worse, he has sought to demonize the very idea of privatization and to discredit it as a crackpot right-wing notion, conveniently forgetting to mention that it has been championed by quite a few eminent Democrats -- including Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and Gore's own running mate, Joe Lieberman. That is, the old incarnation of Lieberman, before he was picked as Gore's running mate and dropped his politically incorrect beliefs.

At some point, discussions of Social Security inevitably get bogged down in competing numbers, formulas and economic projections. Each side brandishes its own calculations and accuses the other either of panic-mongering or of excessive optimism. But perhaps, in the end, this debate is about philosophy, not economics.

The reason Gore so adamantly opposes any steps toward privatization, I suspect, is not just that he's pandering to the senior citizens (well, that too), but that he viscerally dislikes reforms that would minimize the state's control over a major sphere of American life. On some fundamental level, he really does believe that government knows best.

The rhetoric of many other privatization opponents shows an even more ideological hostility to markets (one even comes across such comical clichés as "the shark-infested waters of Wall Street") and individualism. In a New York Times op-ed column in May, Princeton economist and Gore advisor Alan Blinder wrote that "universal social insurance is one of those precious ties that bind our society together," forcing the affluent to share their wealth with the less fortunate, and that "privatization, whether partial or total, would weaken that tie."

Never mind that privatization critics like Blinder are unabashedly condescending to the poor, presuming that they won't be able to invest wisely. And never mind that in many ways, the current Social Security system actually robs the poor to pay the rich. Yes, lower-income workers get a higher dividend on their contributions, but they also pay a higher portion of their income into the system because earnings above $76,600 a year are exempt from the payroll tax, as are other forms of income such as capital gains and interest from savings or investments. The poor are also likely to get less out of the system because, like it or not, they generally do not live as long as the well-to-do. (In a privatized system, any retirement savings you don't live to collect would go to your heirs. In the current government-run system, the surviving spouse gets only 50 percent of the benefits and adult children get zilch.) While they live, the elderly poor are, not surprisingly, far more dependent than the affluent on Social Security benefits, since they are far less likely to have savings, stocks, and private pensions. So, if Social Security goes bust, the poor will suffer much more.

Unlike some of my libertarian friends, I believe we have an obligation to provide a safety net for the less fortunate, and that the government is often the most effective vehicle for doing so. But why not do it honestly? If we're going to help those who can't help themselves for various reasons, let's pay taxes explicitly allocated to such programs. If we're setting money aside to take care of ourselves, then let's have a real savings system in which that money belongs to us. Social Security is based on the illusion -- or, to put it more bluntly, the lie -- that the payroll taxes we pay aren't really taxes but contributions toward our retirement.

Besides, while mutual care may be a noble principle, so is freedom of choice and the ability to control the fruits of our labor. Bush may not sound very persuasive or passionate when he talks about empowering ordinary people, but personal savings accounts would be a real form of empowerment.

A couple of years ago, in a diatribe against those who would hand over our retirement trust fund to those Wall Street sharks, psychologist Theodore Roszak -- an erstwhile prophet of the 1960s Age of Aquarius -- angrily charged that the "privatizers" hate Social Security because it "stands as evidence that self-interest and the profit motive cannot be relied on to provide for the public good."

But maybe it's the other way round. Maybe the anti-privatizers hate privatization because its success would stand as evidence that self-interest and the profit motive (with some regulatory protections) can do more for the public good better than idealistic but ill-conceived bureaucratic schemes.

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