[lotsofpulp]

Seems like there are even worse limitations when pooling together everyone's assets and putting a lien on future taxpayer's funds.

The best retirement plan is to raise a family and have successful children that you can depend on (and vice versa).

[jerf]

Whether or not it's worse... ehh... a lot of room for personal judgment in there.

What it definitely does is take a lot of little problems (at least at government scale) and aggregate it into one whopping big problem bigger than all the little problems combined (because basically we're paying interest on the deferral of those small problems), thus trading a whole bunch of small problems that at least sometimes someone could have fixed or mitigated, into one huge problem that is too large for even the government to fix and for which the individuals involved have no optionality.

It would be nice if there was some way to figure out how to stop governments from "solving" problems that way, as for some of those problems we're already arguably at the end of the road, and we're certainly staring down the barrel of a lot more of them that are no longer so much "decades" in our future as "years" in our future.

[bluGill]

I know someone who after he retired fell for a scam and lost all his savings. I know someone who because of a genetic defect has decided not to have kids (he will die at around 55 but the last 10 years he will be disabled enough that he can't work)

There is no good answer that covers all cases.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, there are rarely solutions that can cover all edge cases. But looking at it in terms of maintaining a society, it works well...and that's all we had before the 1950s.

[toomuchtodo]

It did not work well, and those factors contributed to the creation of social security.

The only solution is beefing up social security while ensuring transparency and long term (centuries) stability.

But people have to vote and care for this to work.