It's hard to figure out whether or not Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry wants to get rid of Social Security or not. In his book, the thoughtful Texan wrote, no doubt after deep reflection and intense scholarship, that Social Security was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.
Interesting choice of words. Many of us are waiting for Perry (or one of his fellow Republican candidates) to mutter something equally as harsh about, well, real Ponzi schemes, you know, the kind cooked up not by government but by the crooks on Wall Street who managed the neat trick of ruining the nation's economy through swindle, deceit, fabrication, and theft.
We haven't heard much about those folks during the Republican debates. Perhaps the candidates are okay with scams cooked up by the private sector in the name of turning huge profits to be distributed to as few people as possible.
But the notion of a government-funded retirement plan for a group that once was the poorest age demographic in America? That's clearly a scam.
Perry, a true profile in courage, has backtracked from his own rhetoric in recent days, noting that "a program that's been there 70 or 80 years, obviously we're not going to take that away."
Perhaps Perry has decided that some Ponzi schemes are better than others, especially when so many voters in Florida
are dependent on that particular scheme.
Give Perry credit for knowing his history: Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935, which makes the program 76 years old. Like many 76-year-olds (or so I'm told), the program is a little creaky. It's not as robust as it was back in the day. But it is very much alive, and it isn't going anywhere any time soon.
For that, we have lots of people to thank, including the Irish-American machine politicians of the 1930s who not only supported Social Security but helped set the precedent by implementing old-age pensions in their individual states even before the New Deal.
Al Smith, for one, led the campaign for publicly supported pensions for widows nearly 100 years ago. More recently, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan railed against the federal government's use of Social Security money to fund government operations.
Even more recently, Moynihan supported a plan to allow Americans to allocate a portion of their Social Security funds into private investment accounts, an idea that seemed cutting edge in 1998 but which today seems far too risky. We've seen how Wall Street plays fast and loose with other people's money so imagine what it would have done to Social Security during the false boom of 2003-2008.
Social Security remains, for some people anyway, one of those suspiciously European ideas that has no place in good old individualistic America. One Congressional opponent of Social Security back in the 1930s complained that it would take "the mystery out of life." The real mystery was how that guy ever won election in the first place.
The U.S. has been exporting muscular, low-regulation, free-for-all capitalism for decades, but rarely with such vigor, charm and success as during Ronald Reagan's presidency. For a while, the Reagan version of free markets seemed triumphant. Communism rightly and truly collapsed, and even European-style socialism, which was exhausted and corrupt in its own way, gave way to Tony Blair's Third Way.
Nations relaxed regulations, lowered tax rates on corporations, and set loose the dog-eat-dogs of unmediated capitalism. The result: Ireland.
Now, it's also true that the euro crisis includes a nation like Greece, where the problem appears to be not a failure of capitalism but a lack of private-sector enterprise and an over-reliance on the state as an employer of first resort.
But it should be clear that at this moment in U.S. history, when so many have been suffering for so long because of corporate avarice and incompetence, Americans ought to be talking about the benefits not only of Social Security but all of the government-run programs that try to minimize the sorrowful mysteries of life. Never mind that the well-fed and well-compensated preach from the Book of Self Reliance.
That Republicans are even discussing the merits of Social Security as a concept suggests that they have learned all the wrong lessons from the past as well as the present.
Crackpots complain that the U.S. is heading down the road to socialism because the government thinks it might be a good idea to make sure that factories don't pollute the waters we drink, that employers treat workers with a modicum of fairness, and that wealthy people perhaps might consider chipping in a bit more in taxes.
Here's the problem for Rick Perry and others: we've tried unregulated capitalism. Read any history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unregulated capitalism gave us spoiled food, factory fires, child labor, and poverty-stricken old people.
If anybody wants to campaign on that record, be my guest.
