SOCIAL_INS: Re: OWNERSHIP: gadzooks

[Mbindnerdc@aol.com]

All debts and stock shares (even if backed by collateral assets) are demands on 
future revenue - as no one except an exploitive lender (like some subprime 
mortgage outfits) makes loans with the intention that the borrower default and 
surrender the attached assets.

This is why I advocate tax credits to encourage larger families.  Absent these, 
we will be caught in the aging crisis and it matters little what paper assets 
we hold (ESOPs, 401(k)s, Treasuries, cash).  You can't eat a financial 
instrument, someone has to actually grow the food (although I advocate a 
sustainable habitat so that retirees can grow their own hydroponically).  While 
you could wear a financial instrument, they would tend to tatter quickly.  
While you could also burn them for heat - they tend to burn quickly that way - 
although if there are not enough energy workers that may be what they are best 
for.

Of course, the folks at Cato implicitly get around this problem with their 
social security privatization scheme, which would have individuals holding 
index funds.  Such funds would provide a world-wide labor force to subsidize US 
savers, both in production and in profit generation - and would involve the 
kind of globalization that COG was created to oppose.  If such globalization 
would occur, although my guess is that overseas workers will behave like 
American workers, continental workers and British workers before them.  As they 
produce a consumer surplus the manufacturers will recognize their market power 
and begin to cater to their spending.  As they become more comfortable in their 
basic needs they will unionize to meet their advanced needs - bettering 
themselves without revolution.  Of course, in either the Marxist case or the 
consumer revolution case, it is likely that their labor will be too expensive 
to solve the aging crisis in the developed world.  

The other possible solution to our aging crisis is automation, although there 
are some jobs - like health care and food service, for which automation will 
not likely be preferred.  Unless robots cook our food, wash our dishes, wait on 
our tables, clean our bed pans and provide nursing care (although to some 
extent they do the latter remotely) - I am not sure such a development would be 
accepted by the public.  If automation at that level occurred no one would work 
anywhere, a marxian abundance would be created and we would likely die off as a 
species for lack of motivation.

Mike Bindner 

In a message dated Tue, 10 Sep 2002 4:35:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, John 
Médaille <john@medaille.com> writes:

>At 04:04 PM 9/10/2002 -0400, Mbindnerdc@aol.com wrote:
>>I agree with what you say regarding the tax cuts to the wealthy.  I 
>>disagree that the trust fund is empty.  It is backed by the power to tax 
>>incomes - and the only way to increase taxes on incomes without slowing 
>>the economy is to raise taxes on the wealthy.
>
>But this is just a semantic problem; we both agree that there are no funds 
>in the fund, merely the power to tax to replace the funds frittered away. 
>But they would have that power whether or not there was a fund. Like a good 
>Keynesian, you note that only taxes on the wealthy will be effective. But 
>our fearless leader seems to be doing the opposite.
>
>>   Probably the only ways to make social security solvent - or to put it 
>> more bluntly - to make the economy solvent in the "aging crisis" are to 
>> increase the number of workers through births (immigrants will soon buy 
>> into our small family ways) and to increase the amount of wages subject 
>> to FICA (if not eliminating the cap).
>>
>>Whether the President admits it or not, his privatization scheme will 
>>increase the debt which will call forth the need for greater income 
>>taxes.  In his heart of hearts, I think he probably expects some future 
>>progressive president to do what Clinton did, and restore taxes on high 
>>incomes.
>
>Well, high debts seem to be in our future (and our past) no matter what. 
>And that's even before we pay for the upcoming war.
>
>
>John C. Médaille
>
>"A dead thing can go with the stream...
>but only a living thing can go against it."
>         -G. K. Chesterton
>http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
>john@medaille.com
>
>