Comments Elsewhere

Brandon Berg:

If you do, you’ve failed. You had your chance, and you blew it. Then you had another chance, and you blew that one, too. And almost certainly several more. It may take magic powers to save adequately for retirement on minimum wage, but it doesn’t take magic powers to get a job that pays more.

Whether this is true or false, it’s irrelevant.

There is some population, greater than zero, of people who, whether for reasons that are culpable or reasons that are blameless or a mixture of the two, will make wages at or not very much above minimum wage their whole lives. Whether or not this makes them “failures,” whether or not it makes them bad people or foolish people or contemptible people or pitiful people, they are going to get old and they are going to reach a point in their lives where it will be very hard for them to continue working, and if they have neither accumulated savings nor a pension (gov’t issued or private), then they are going to suffer a lot in their old age.

But that doesn’t mean that they deserve to suffer, or to suffer that badly, whatever you may think of how they have lived their lives. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that a free society could — indeed ought to — include things like mutual aid for health, retirement, etc. needs in old age, charity for people facing extreme poverty, and so on. The only requirement is that people can’t legitimately be forced to turn over money for it. That’s what’s wrong with government “welfare” programs, not whatever vices or failings you might think the proposed recipients might have.

Moralistic contempt for poor people forms no essential part of the libertarian argument against the moral legitimacy of Social Security or other government “welfare” programs. In fact free market economics suggest that an end to government interventionism will help out the people with the worst economic prospects the most, since government intervention and ossified structural poverty systematically hurt poor people and aid the rich. The idea that libertarian theory is the body of economic thought of, by, and for Ebenezeer Scrooge has just got to die.